Tutorial: connect two circles with tangents

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Tutorial: connect two circles with tangents “by hand” with Adobe Illustrator 11 (CS ) · Jan Rüter · 2008 · yian.de. Draw a horizontal guide and 2 circles upon.
Tutorial: connect two circles with tangents “by hand” with Adobe Illustrator 11 (CS)

Draw a horizontal guide and 2 circles upon. Activate preview, smart guides and snap to point.

Tutorial: connect two circles with tangents “by hand” with Adobe Illustrator 11 (CS) · Jan Rüter · 2008 · yian.de

Draw a long line with the pentool, its starting point has to be the midpoint of the bigger circle.

Tutorial: connect two circles with tangents “by hand” with Adobe Illustrator 11 (CS) · Jan Rüter · 2008 · yian.de

Rotate the line around the midpoint of the bigger circle until it snaps the midpoint of the smaller one. The line should intersect the guide now.

Tutorial: connect two circles with tangents “by hand” with Adobe Illustrator 11 (CS) · Jan Rüter · 2008 · yian.de

Draw vertical guides through the circles midpoints and the intersection point (of the rotated line with the horizontal guide).

Tutorial: connect two circles with tangents “by hand” with Adobe Illustrator 11 (CS) · Jan Rüter · 2008 · yian.de

Draw a circle around the intersection point to the next vertical guide while holding “alt” and “shift”.

Tutorial: connect two circles with tangents “by hand” with Adobe Illustrator 11 (CS) · Jan Rüter · 2008 · yian.de

Draw the next circle around the intersection point, this time to the last vertical guide.

Tutorial: connect two circles with tangents “by hand” with Adobe Illustrator 11 (CS) · Jan Rüter · 2008 · yian.de

Select all four circles and use the pathfinder with “outline” (it is the second last button), to cut them into sections.

Tutorial: connect two circles with tangents “by hand” with Adobe Illustrator 11 (CS) · Jan Rüter · 2008 · yian.de

Deselect the two segments we need to keep and delete all the rest. Also delete the line through the midpoints.

Tutorial: connect two circles with tangents “by hand” with Adobe Illustrator 11 (CS) · Jan Rüter · 2008 · yian.de

Join the end points on each side. Done: the two circles are connected smoothly by two tangents.

Still to much work? I found a Script from SATO Hiroyuki called Common Tangents.js at http://park12.wakwak.com/~shp/lc/et/en_aics_script.html Its free. But may be one day AI is able to generate tangents itself...

Tutorial: connect two circles with tangents “by hand” with Adobe Illustrator 11 (CS) · Jan Rüter · 2008 · yian.de