Adobe 65023809 Printing Guide - Page 75

Chapter 4: Adobe Illustrator CS4 Over its product life, Adobe Illustrator has evolved from a sturdy vector-drawing program for creating logos and illustrations to a full-featured creative environment with painterly brushes, soft-edged effects, and 3-dimensional design tools. Illustrator is used predominantly to create artwork that will be placed into another application, such as InDesign, but many artists work exclusively in Illustrator to create final artwork, especially in packaging environments. Illustrator files can be saved as native Illustrator (AI) files, PDF files, or EPS files-even TIFF and Flash (SWF) formats. Each new version brings enhancements that provide design functionality far beyond the original, basic vector-drawing capabilities of Illustrator. As your customers begin to use the more advanced features of Illustrator, it is helpful for you to know how to ensure that their files will print as expected. Illustrator CS4 offers enhancements and new controls that allow you to more easily and efficiently edit customer files when necessary. There are a number of new features and enhancements to existing tools in Illustrator CS4, including: • Multiple Artboards: Illustrator now offers the ability to create documents that contain multiple artboards within a single file. Artboards can be of different dimensions, and can even overlap each other. For example, the letterhead, envelope and business card for a client can be created within one Illustrator file. This can simplify the creation of common components such as swatches and symbols; rather than needing to duplicate such assets across multiple Illustrator files to create multiple pieces of a job, they can be contained within one Illustrator file and used on multiple artboards. • Separations Preview: View individual inks in color, as well as overprint effects. Selectively show and hide individual spot and process colors to preview color separations on screen, so you can quickly and easily identify potential printing problems early in a job. • Bleed Support: You can now define a bleed zone of any width, as in InDesign. Bleed values can be different on each side, and are applied to all artboards in the document. • New Defined Workspaces: Under Window > Workspace (or from the Workspace pulldown menu in the Application bar), you can choose new options that will configure the workspace to resemble FreeHand, InDesign, or Photoshop environments. You can also choose a workspace that targets a particular task, such as Printing and Proofing, Typography, or Web. • No More Filters: There was considerable duplication between the visual operations available under the Filter menu and those available under the Effects menu. Filters created literal, embedded, pixel-based content, or permanently altered affected objects. Effects remain editable throughout the life of the job, and, as such, are much more flexible. To remove the redundancy, the Filter menu entry is now gone. Most options that were available under the Filter menu can now be found under the Effects menu, or the Edit menu. Third-party filters that used to appear under the Filter menu will now be available under the Object > Filter menu when installed. Enhancements to Existing Features • Isolation mode: Work in Isolation mode with more object types, including compound paths, gradient meshes, clipping paths, opacity masks and images. • Type on a Path: Improved composition of type on paths, requiring less manual kerning for smooth text flow. • Alignment to a key object: While it's long been possible to designate one of several objects as a key object for alignments, this feature is now more obvious. Select several objects, then click on one of the objects to earmark it as the key object. The selection edge of the key object becomes bold; any transforms will now be based on the position of that key object. Adobe Creative Suite 4 Printing Guide 73