While working on revision after revision of a file, your document may become littered with stray anchor points, empty text objects, or unpainted objects (those that have neither a fill nor a stroke applied). Having these objects present in a file can be problematic for a variety of reasons. Empty text objects may contain references to fonts, and you, thinking that those fonts aren’t there, may forget to include them when you send source files to prepress. Additionally, stray points in a file can cause files to export with unexpected size boundaries and could lead to corrupt files.

Choose Object > Path > Clean Up, and choose which of these elements you want to automatically remove from a file. Beware that to Illustrator, a stray point is a single anchor point with no path. Some designers use Scatter brush art by using the paintbrush to click just once to place a single instance of a brush. Running the Clean Up command to delete stray points deletes these Scatter brush objects from a file as well. In reality, it’s better to use Symbols rather than Scatter brushes for these designer tasks, something we’ll discuss in Chapter 5, Brushes, Symbols, and Masks.