What to do if your Illustrator character palette or tool bar disappears? After panicking, you could try these tips.

Lost Character Palette in Illustrator

I've lost the Character Palette in Illustrator. It is missing and I can't bring it back from the menu.

Sometimes strange things happen with Adobe Illustrator's floating palettes. They can disappear completely and sometimes they can appear, but with an incomplete set of tools. Sometimes the problem is sporadic – the palette disappears each time the program is loaded, but will appear when selected from the Illustrator menu.

But sometimes the Illustrator palettes appear to have gone for good. These issues seem to be cross-platform – they affect Macintosh and Windows users – and all the usual solutions don't appear to work.

Some designers with this problem have tried restarting Illustrator and rebooting their computer, whilst others have gone as far as reinstalling the Adobe Illustrator application. But often these don't work as the problem has to do with a corrupt preference file which may not be replaced with a software reinstall.

The following are links to the Adobe Forums and deal with deleting the correct Illustrator preference files. Some of these deal with the text palette, others with the control palette. Please bear in mind that we don't control these external sites and you try these methods at your own risk. As ever, if you do decide to go ahead, we always recommend that you back up your whole computer before attempting any of the techniques.

• Missing Character Palette
• Deleting Illustrator Preference File
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