Illustrator CS4 For Dummies- P8

Illustrator CS4 For Dummies- P8: 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- P8 Chapter 18: Ten Production-Enhancing Tips 331 points and lines? You can hide these, too, while keeping the object selected. Choose View➪Hide Edges to make the highlights disappear. You can hide everything you have open on your computer (including your desktop) except for the current Illustrator document by clicking the Full Screen Mode with Menu Bar button in the Tools panel. To hide everything including the Menu bar, click the Full Screen Mode button. (You can toggle through these modes by pressing the F key on your keyboard; this works for both PCs and Macs.) To get a completely unobscured view of your artwork, switch to the Full Screen Mode view and press the Tab key to hide your panels. Real power-users work this way, using keyboard shortcuts to access all the tools and menu items.Taking a Tip from Illustrator Illustrator offers ToolTips as a very helpful feature. Hover your cursor over a tool for a moment, and a little yellow box of text pops up telling you what the tool is. If the tool has a keyboard shortcut, that shortcut appears in parenthe- ses after the name. ToolTips, despite their name, don’t work with tools alone. (And they don’t give you tips — just the names of things. Go figure.) They work just about anywhere in Illustrator that you can position a cursor. Hover over a color swatch, and the ToolTip tells you the name of that color. Hover over a brush, and it tells you the name of the brush. Not sure what a cryptic icon in the Pathfinder panel means? Just let the ToolTip tell you. ToolTips are invaluable whenever you’re using the program because there are just too many things to remember. With ToolTips, you don’t have to! To toggle ToolTips off or on, choose Edit➪Preferences➪General and select (check) or clear (uncheck) the Show ToolTips check box.Changing Your Units Whenever You Want Do you feel that no matter what you do, your units of measure seem to be wrong? Are they always set to points, for example, when you really want inches? (Sometimes centimeters are easier to work with.) Fortunately, Illustrator lets you change your mind on the fly. To see your measurement options, choose View➪Show Rulers and then right-click in Windows (Control-click on a Mac) any location on the rulers at332 Part V: The Part of Tens the top and side of your screen. You get a drop-down menu that shows all the units of measurement that Illustrator understands. Choose the unit you desire; from that moment on, Illustrator uses that unit of measurement. You can reposition rulers by clicking and dragging out from where the rulers meet at the upper-left corner. To reset them, double-click that corner. However, you don’t have to change your unit of measurement to use a dif- ferent one. In any field where you specify an amount (such as the Height and Width options in the Rectangle dialog box), just type in the amount you want, followed by the abbreviation of the unit of measurement that you want to use. If you don’t know the abbreviation, just use the whole name. Illustrator makes the conversions for you. Want to impress your friends with a great power-user tip? You can cycle through the different measurement units by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Shift+U (Ô+Option+Shift+U on a Mac). It helps to have your rulers up when doing this so you can see what the current measurement system is. Reusing Your Brushes, Swatches, and Libraries Has this ever happened to you? You go through the trouble to create custom brushes, beautiful colors, and outstanding appearances; save them in the Styles panel; and later discover that they’re all specific to the document that you created them in. Rats! To prevent that from happening to you again, you can open the swatches, brushes, and styles that you created in one docu- ment in any other document. For example, to get the brushes from another document, choose Window➪ Brush Libraries➪Other Library. In the Open dialog box that appears, choose the document with the brushes that you want to add to the current docu- ment, as if you were going to open it. Click Open. Instead of opening that doc- ument, Illustrator opens the custom brushes in their own panel, ready for you to use. Follow the same steps, choosing Window➪Swatch Libraries➪Other Library or Window➪Style Libraries➪Other Library to add your swatches or styles. Avoiding Russian Dolls Have you ever seen those cute Russian dolls? You know, the hollow doll that you open to find another smaller doll inside? And then you open that one to find an even smaller doll inside? And then you open that doll. . . . Chapter 18: Ten Production-Enhancing Tips 333 Illustrator enables you to create the digital equivalent of those Russian dolls. You place a Photoshop image into Illustrator, rotate the image, add text over the image, and save the whole thing as an Illustrator file. To add more, create a new document in Illustrator, placing the previously created Illustrator graphic (which also contains within it a Photoshop file) into the new docu- ment by using the File➪Place command. You save this Photoshop file within an Illustrator ...