Artboard 1
It’s a real menu command, not a panel you have to keep open.
Paste to Replace installs itself into the Edit menu, right where the other paste commands live. It gets a keyboard shortcut like anything else in Illustrator — and you can remap it to whatever you want under Keyboard Shortcuts.
The panel is there when you want to change how it behaves. The rest of the time you just press the keys.
What you’re doing instead
Every time a piece of artwork changes.
The long way
- 01Copy the new artwork
- 02Paste it somewhere
- 03Drag it roughly into place
- 04Rotate it by eye until it matches
- 05Scale it until it looks right
- 06Nudge it. Nudge it again
- 07Delete the old one
- 08Repeat for all 39 others
The short way
- 01Copy the new artwork
- 02Select every object it replaces
- 03
Match rotation
It knows which way your artwork is facing.
Most replace tools drop the new object in at zero degrees and leave you to turn it. Paste to Replace reads an orientation axis you set once — a north anchor and a south anchor on the artwork — and recognises every other copy in the file from it.
Symbols following a curve, arrows along a route, labels around a dial: they all come back facing the way they were.
Set the poles with the Direct Selection tool: one anchor at the top, one at the bottom, as close to the object’s centre line as you can. The line between them is read as the object’s orientation.
Additional settings
Decide once how it should behave. Then stop thinking about it.
Position and scaling are worked out relative to the object being replaced — so you never resize the incoming artwork by hand, and you never nudge it into place afterwards.
Scaling
Six ways for the incoming artwork to size itself to what it replaces.
Position
Click the edges of the preview to pin the incoming artwork to them. Pin two, pin one, or centre it.
Two sides — pinned to the top-left corner
One side — sitting on the bottom edge
Centre — dead centre of the original
Replacing more than one thing
Select several objects and choose whether the selection is replaced as a whole or object by object. Copy several objects and they paste back exactly as they were copied, keeping their relative position and scale.
One piece of artwork spans the whole selection, sized to its combined bounds.
Every object in the selection gets its own copy, each sized and placed against its own bounds.
Where it earns its keep
Icon & UI sets
One glyph gets redrawn and forty instances across the file have to follow it.
Packaging & labels
SKU variants dropping into the same dieline position, over and over again.
Maps & technical
Symbols placed at every angle along a route, a path or a dial.
Patterns & textiles
Swap one motif and let every instance in the repeat update with it.
What people say about it
Every review on Adobe Exchange, all five starsLove the shortcut keys option
Thank you for making paste to replace a feature in Illustrator. Helping me out every day. The best thing for me is being able to use it with shortcut keys that I changed to Cmd+Shift+R to match Figma paste to replace option.
Saved me more than a dollar in it's 1st use
Yes this should be built in — but for now it is very useful when making a symbol is not the best way and you need to make changes in the same place etc.
Works like a charm.
After reading the directions above, this plugin works perfectly and intuitively. Adding needed functionality to Illustrator. Thank you to developer for updates and making this.
A dollar a month.
The first month is free, and it will have paid for itself long before it runs out — one keystroke instead of an afternoon, every time. A dollar a month after that brings every new release, and puts your feature requests straight in front of the person who builds it.
Billed by Adobe. Cancel from your Creative Cloud account at any time.