Illustrator CS4 For Dummies- P7

Illustrator CS4 For Dummies- P7: Adobe Illustrator is the gold standard for creating exciting, color-rich artwork for print, the Web, or even mobile devices. Whether you’re stepping up to Illustrator CS4 or tackling Illustrator for the first time, you’ll find Illustrator CS4 For Dummies is the perfect partner. This full-color guide gives you the scoop on the newest tools, tips on color control and path editing, ways to organize graphics, and how to get your work into print or on the Web.
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Illustrator CS4 For Dummies- P7 Chapter 15: Printing Your Masterpiece 281 Figure 15-3: Adjusting page size in Illustrator is an unusually disturbing grayed-out experience. Here, you can drag any of the handles along the edge of the page to adjust the size of the Artboard, or enter in values along the Control Panel (at the top of the work area) in the W and H fields, for width and height, respectively. When you’re done making changes, click any other tool in the Tools panel to be returned to the normal, healthy-looking Illustrator screen.Printing Mechanics After you make sure that your page size settings are correct (typically they’re fine unless — ahem — somebody mucks them up), you’re ready to commit your masterpiece to paper.282 Part IV: Practically Speaking: Type, Print, and Files Printing composite proofs Printing a composite proof is really printing what you see on-screen to a single sheet of paper. You do this kind of printing all the time. If you have a color printer, your result looks really close (hopefully) to what’s on-screen. If you have a black-and-white printer, you get a black-and-white version of what’s on-screen. The other kind of printing is called printing separations, which means generat- ing a separate sheet of paper (or, more likely, film) for each ink to be used when the artwork is printed. I discuss separations in more detail in the sec- tion “All about Way-Scary Separations” later in this chapter. You can print composite proofs by following these steps: 1. Choose File➪Print from the menu. The Print dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 15-4. Figure 15-4: The Print dialog box. Chapter 15: Printing Your Masterpiece 283 2. Select the appropriate printing options (as I detail in the next section “Important printing options”). 3. Click Print. Important printing options The Print dialog box has all sorts of options, but only a few of them are worth noticing. Fortunately, the default settings are usually what you want anyway — for example, one copy of whatever you send to the printer of your choice. However, for situations in which the current setting is not what you want, the following handy options are lurking in the Print dialog box: ✓ Name (Windows)/Printer (Mac): This drop-down menu near the top of the Print dialog box indicates the printer that you intend to use. If you have only one printer, this setting is most likely correct all the time. If you have more than one printer, you can see which one you’re currently using. You can change the printer setting here as well. ✓ Number of Copies (Windows)/Copies (Mac): This option shows the number of copies of your artwork that you want to print, each on a sepa- rate sheet. ✓ Range: This option controls which Artboards (sure, they’re pages, but Illustrator is more sophisticated than that and calls them Artboards) will print. If you plan on printing all artboards, leave the All radio button selected.All about Way-Scary Separations Separations print a separate page for each color of ink that you use in a docu- ment. Printing separations is a good way to double-check your work before you send it to a service bureau to be made into film or plates. If you never do that, skip this section. If you do send your work to a service bureau to be made into film or plates, printing separations can save you a lot of time. For example, suppose you plan to print a job using black ink and the spot color Pantone 185. After print- ing separations, you get pages for cyan, magenta, yellow, and Pantone 185, rather than just pages for black and Pantone 185. You know immediately that some of the colors you used were created as cyan, magenta, yellow, black (CMYK) process colors, not as spot colors. On closer examination of the pages, you see that the black type you used exists on all pages, and you know that the type was specified as Registration, not as Black. Registration and Black look identical on-screen, but Registration is a special color that’s used284 Part IV: Practically Speaking: Type, Print, and Files exclusively by printers (for those little marks that help center the content on the page). Registration is totally unsuitable for artwork. (Ack! No! Don’t print that ink drawing in Registration! You’ll only get a page full of gunk.) I could fill a book with information about looking at separations to find out information about potential problems in your artwork. The book would be painfully long and boring, however, and one I don’t want to write. My advice: Print separations and leave it at that. Perhaps the best place to find out more about separations is your service bureau. The people there can help you examine your separations. In fact, many service bureaus require that you provide laser print separations when you place a print order so they know the file is properly prepared. The concept behind printing separations from Illustrator is straightfor- ward. Because printing in color requires different inks, which are applied to paper sequentially on a printing press, each ink gets its own pr ...