Lab Software Tips: Adobe Illustrator
This page provides tips for using Adobe
Illustrator in the SCS
Computer Labs. Because of our dynamic lab environment, not all software
packages work exactly the same as they do on an personal computer. With
this in mind, we provide documentation regarding configuration settings,
printing instructions, file saving, and other popular topics. These pages
are not intended as manuals or tutorials - those are installed on lab computers
along with the software.
Adobe Illustrator is specialty software, requested by
one or more faculty members for the purpose of being taught and used in class.
Support from Student Computing Services consultants is limited to opening,
saving, printing, and the information on this page. Questions should be directed
to your instructor. Additional support is provided through use of the electronic
manuals accessible through the application's Help menus and on Adobe's
Illustrator support webpage.
You are welcome to ask the lab consultant
on duty for assistance, but please recognize that s/he has not been trained
on this application and may not be able to adequately answer your question
or solve your problem.
Recent upgrades
allow the lab printers to handle most print jobs and encoding methods without
a problem. This means that fewer print settings need to be checked or changed
before sending jobs from Adobe Applications.
Some problems may still occur with binary-encoded
EPS graphics, however. If you are using binary-encoded EPS graphics and you
are having a printing problem, we recommend you switch your graphic format
to JPEGs, GIFs, TIFFs, or ASCII or JPEG-encoded EPS graphics.
Solutions to this problem are to resave
the EPS files in ASCII format, which can be done in Photoshop, or embed the
linked files into the Illustrator file. To embed linked files, select Links
from the Window menu in Illustrator. In the palette that appears, select
the EPS file(s) and click the black triangle in the upper right hand corner
of the palette, then select Embed Image.
If you prefer to use binary-encoded
graphics, you can still print by saving a copy of your Illustrator file
as an Adobe PDF file and printing it with Adobe Reader. Open the PDF file
in Adobe Acrobat and select Print. In the print window, click the "Advanced..." button and
check the box labeled "Print as Image." Click OK and print the
file. Be advised that although this method should work, it may take significantly
longer for the pages to spool to the printer.
For more information about printing or
obtaining refunds,
please read our Printing Tips. If you have a problem or with
printing, ask for help from the consultant on duty. Do not send your
print job more than once, as doing so may only intensify the problem and
create a longer delay for you and other users of the lab.
Illustrator
uses two primary methods of orienting your document horizontally or vertically
on screen and during printing: the Document Setup and the Page Setup. The
easiest way to set up the orientation is when you first create the document.
In the New Document pop-up window, click one of the squares by Orientation
to choose a horizontal or vertical document. The Page Setup for printing
will automatically be set to the same orientation.
If you want to change your orientation,
first open the Page Setup window from the File menu. Select the new orientation
and click OK. Next, open the Document Setup from the File menu. Make sure
that the box next to Use Page Setup is checked. This tells the program that
you want the artboard and print sizes and orientation to be the same. If
the box is unchecked, it is possible to have a vertical document on the screen,
but only the top half will print because the printer thinks the document
is horizontal.
To verify that your print area and your artboard orientation
are the same, select Show Page Tiling from the View menu. (If the menu option
reads Hide Page Tiling, then Page Tiling is already on.) Page Tiling shows
the area that will print with a dotted gray line around the inside of the
artboard. Anything within this dotted line will be printed.
If you have set up a custom artboard size,
but are printing on letter sized paper, you will want to leave the Use Page
Setup box unchecked because the sizes of the artboard and the paper will
not match. In this scenario, you will want to be especially careful that
the orientation in the same in both the Document Setup and Page Setup windows.