Illustrator

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Excerpted from Adapted from Illustrator CS5 Bible (Wiley Publishing)

By Ted Alspach

In what follows I walk you through a project that uses all sorts of Illustrator functions and explain how and why I used Illustrator’s capabilities throughout the process.

Everyone uses Illustrator a little differently, and even as I wrote this, I realized that I could have done a few things differently in order to be more efficient. Each project that you work on in Illustrator results in a different set of tools and processes, and even if you do very similar things again and again, you find your workflows evolving over time.

Project Background
The goal of this project is to create the box for a brand-new edition of a game I published more than a year ago: Ultimate Werewolf. This would be the second box I created at this size with this particular printer, so I already have experience in terms of the production parameters.

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Excerpted from Real World Adobe Illustrator CS5 (Peachpit Press)

By Mordy Golding

Certain Illustrator features, such as Pathfinder, are incredibly useful and, as a result, are used many times a day. Features such as 3D are also extremely cool, but they aren’t used as often. Every once in a while, a feature comes along in Illustrator that is cool and fun to use but that is also practical enough that you use it on a regular basis. Live Trace is such a feature.

The concept is simple enough: Take a raster-based image, and convert it into a vector-based image. You would want to do this to get around the limitations of a raster-based file. For example, if you want to scale artwork up in size or if you want to edit the artwork easily and use spot colors, you want to work with a vector-based file.

Separate applications (such as Adobe Streamline) and Illustrator plug-ins (such as Free Soft’s Silhouette) have the ability to convert raster content into vectors, but Live Trace is a step far above and beyond what those tools are capable of doing. One of the main reasons for this is because of how Live Trace works.

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Full press release below.

Adapted from Adobe Acrobat 9 PDF Bible
By Ted Padova

Adobe Illustrator, as with other Adobe programs, is built on core PDF technology. In fact, the native Adobe Illustrator file format is PDF, and as such it is one of the best applications supporting direct export to PDF.

Illustrator has evolved to a sophisticated integration with PDF and supports the following: transparency, editing capability, layers, blending modes, text, and filters. Further integration with the program in non-PDF workflows embraces exports for Web design, where its current iteration supports one-step optimization for formats such as GIF, JPEG, PNG, SWF, and SVG.

To export PDF files from Adobe Illustrator, you use the File > Save command. The format options available to you include the native Adobe Illustrator format (.AI), Adobe PDF (*.PDF), Illustrator EPS (*EPS), Illustrator Template (*AIT), SVG (*SVG), and SVG Compressed (*SVGZ). In Illustrator, choose File > Save from a new document window. A Save dialog box opens that enables you to name the file, choose the destination, and select one of the formats just noted.

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There are obvious benefits to spending the extra time and effort grouping your layers into folders and naming them appropriately.

For one you will appreciate the organization if you have to work further on the file after considerable amount time went by. Second, your coworkers or your css programmer will appreciate a neat file as well.

There are some less obvious and immediate advantages to such tidy practices. Design is not done on paper or on screen. Design is something you do in your mind. You continuously evaluate your work and make further design decisions while you work. Design is an internal dialogue and the result is your design work.

Since CS3 Illustrator has received powerful color manipulation tools that are relatively little known. Select the menu Edit/ Edit Colors/ Recolor Artwork to discover a plethora of features.

In the Edit tab you can change the brightness, hue and many other aspects of several selected objects at once. It also allows you to create color harmonies with a color wheel besides other cool features.

In the Assign tab you can recolor your entire job with a new set of colors using the color groups functions.

That's right, DON'T upgrade to Adobe Illustrator CS4 when it's released later this month. Oh, that is UNLESS you want the two most requested features in Illustrator's long and storied history.

Multiple Artboard documents and transparency in gradients have finally found their way into Adobe's latest upgrade. A whole host of other feature enhancements to smart guides, text on path, the user interface, and more, complement the two big new features in this latest upgrade.

If you're a heavy Illustrator user, this Illustrator CS4 review is definitely something you'll want to check out.

Let's suppose you receive a pdf document that you need to further work on in Illustrator, but when you open it all fonts get replaced by the default font, because you don't have those fonts used in the pdf. The font information is there in the pdf, so theoretically if you could convert all the text to outlines you would be able to work with the document.

To do that you have to open a new Illustrator document. Place the the pdf. Select the menu Object / Flatten transparency. Make sure to check the Convert all text to outlines option and go. You got the whole pdf in curves.