Can you flatten a clipping mask into a new vector?

I have a relatively complicated repeating vector inside of a clipping mask.

There's a lot of parts that are not seen but take up a lot of disk space.

I was curious if there was a way to flatten/crop/remove anything outside of the clipping mask but still retain it as a vector image.

Is that possible? If so how can I accomplish that?

Solution 1:

You could make a box/shape that is a clone of the clipping mask. Select that object and all the paths you want to clip. Then use the Pathfinder crop tool to remove everything outside the path...

Here is an example result...

Solution 2:

Huh. The answer is stunningly simple, and stunningly non-obvious. So non-obvious that I discovered it completely by accident while trying to follow instructions on more complicated ways to do this that involve releasing the clipping group, and then cropping.

Click on the <Clip Group> object to select it. Select no other objects. Then in the pathfinder window, click on the crop button. This produce a regular <Group> (no longer a clipping group) with all the vectors objects inside the old clipping group clipped to the old <Clip Outline>. Essentially exactly what you would expect if you were to flatten the clip group (were such a thing possible). Probably doesn't work so well for images.

Solution 3:

I had a similar question—using Illustrator CC 2021—but the Pathfinder crop solution, noted above, left me with just a portion of my clipping mask as a new object. I had only selected the Clipping Group as instructed in that post.

For me, it was just as simple, but I utilized the Pathfinder tool divide instead. This gave me the path that was exactly what I wanted; I just had to re-fill a few shapes for it to appear exactly the same.

I'm guessing this is because my Clipping Group had a nested Clipping Group, both were created by pasting shapes into objects using Draw Inside mode.