When Adobe Illustrator finally introduced “Live Corners” in January of this year, I was overjoyed. They’d taken one of the most time-consuming and tedious tasks in transit mapping – generating properly nested sets of rounded corners where route lines changed direction – and turned it into something intuitive, quick and 100-percent accurate every time.

However, it didn’t solve every problem. Joining two separate paths into one (so that Live Corners could be applied to the new corner point) was still a laborious task that involved using the Scissors tool and hoping that it snapped to the paths properly, or a lot of manual pulling and pushing of endpoints until the two points aligned precisely (and it had to be precise, or you’d end up with two points very close to each other, one of which would have to be deleted before Live Corners could be used).

Despite their name, Illustrator’s Pathfinder tools actually do a lousy job with unclosed paths: only one of them –  Outline – works at all, and even then it strips all stroke attributes from the path in the process. So they’re not the answer, either.

However, the October update to Illustrator CC 2014 (version 18.1, if you’re keeping track) introduced the new “Join Tool” that hides away underneath the Pencil tool, as seen in the first picture above: and it’s simply fantastic.

Simply select the two paths you want to join, and then just lazily swipe over the bits of the paths that you want to be eliminated, as shown by the arrow in the second picture. That’s it! Because you’ve selected what you want to tool to affect, it doesn’t do anything to other paths nearby, like the cyan paths in the example shown.

As you can see in the third picture, Illustrator has instantly joined the two paths with a single point, that (in all my experiments at least) is exactly where it should be. It does also add some bezier anchors even though the paths are completely straight, which doesn’t seem to affect the subsequent application of Live Corners (picture 4). If it really bothers you or you like super-clean artwork (like me!), then you can click on the point with the Anchor Point Tool (Shift-C) to get rid of them before any further editing.