If you have any NON-DRAWING TOOL selected, you may open the stroke panel and select line weight and color, end caps, dashes, and so on. You can also set the fill. When you select a drawing tool, those attributes will be used for the resulting object. If you have drawn a path with a heavy line weight, then made a line and changed the stroke width to something skinnier, your next new line will be as you set the skinny one. On the same note, if you have several lines of differing stroke weights drawn on the page and you move one of them, the drawing tools will pick up the attributes of the last-selected object. Tricky stuff, but useful, too. Say you’re drawing a fat line and you want to have a skinny-line box, just use one of the selection tools to select something with the skinny line you like, then select your drawing tool and draw.

Once you’ve selected the Line Segment Tool, you can do one of two things:
• You can click AND HOLD the mouse down on the artboard, and drag the mouse to a new position. As you drag, you’ll see a rubber band path between the point of origin and the mouse. When you release the mouse, a path will be on the board. Depending on the settings you have in the Strokes panel, those attributes will be evident. If you have no color for a stroke, or a stroke weight of none (just a blank box), then you won’t see the path – but it’s there. Give it color and weight and you’ll be good to go.

• The other thing you can do is just click the mouse on the artboard. That will bring up the Line Segment Tool Options dialog box with its three options: Length, Angle, and a checkbox to fill the line or not. The numbers that may be in the boxes indicate the last measurements used, or a default of 100 pts at a 45° angle, no fill. All that means nothing to you – just put in your own numbers and click the OK button, or Cancel to go back to the desktop. Then you can click and drag lines to your heart’s delight.

These options are very important if you are drawing in a forced perspective such as Isometric drawing. Set a long length for the line, type in the angle and a line will appear on the document. Hold down the Option/Alt key and click/drag copies of it. When you’ve got them where you want them, you can convert them to guidelines by going to View>Guides>Make Guides.

Unfortunately, the Angle option doesn’t “stick.” By that I mean, you can’t start dragging out lines and hold down the Shift key to constrain the line to the angle you’ve set. The Preferences>General>Constraint Angle won’t help you either.

The only real time I use the Line Segment Tool is when I’m drawing something like a bolt head or a nut where I need short, straight lines to mark edges. It’s not a user-friendly drawing tool for anything other than plain vanilla straight paths. Whatever you do, DO NOT make an entire drawing of something like clouds, a house, or bunny with this tool. It looks pretty amateurish, to say the least, and at best will have a bad case of the uglies.