25 Jan 2008 Eric Rasmusen, erasmuse@indiana.edu This file is at http://www.rasmusen.org/a/adobe-illustrator-rasmusen.txt These notes are latest tips and tricks that I have found useful or thought might be useful. I wrote these for my own use and have not tried to make them clear for others, but some other people will find them useful. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SELECTING TOOLS On the palette, hold ALT and click the mouse to get more kinds of tools-- to go from rectangles to ellipses, for example. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ARROWS First select the line segment. EFFECT- STYLIZE-- then add arrowheads at either end of hteline. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SELECTING BITS OF PICTURES I'm not sure this is right. Use the left arrow, the black one, and youwill get a big blue box. PUll on the middle of hte sides to make it small enough for the area you want to select, and move it over to cover that area. THen use the right arrow, the white one. You will be able to move the entire area wherever you like. With a right-click and Transform you can rotate it. The right arrow, the direct-select one, will select entire objects if you clikc on any part of the object. THis even works on a PDF file you did not create yourself, but used distiller to create. THe lasso under teh arrow is a selector tool also-- it is not a rectangle, though. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PUTTING AI FILES INTO POWERPOINT First, save the *.ai file as *.pdf. Then open the pdf file, and select a box of the area you want to insert. Copy and paste it into the powerpoint file. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- WIDTH Under WINDOWS, choose CONTROL PALETTE. The unlabelled box lets you choose point width of lines. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PALETTES Hit TAB to show or hide all palettes-- all the things which format individual objects of various sorts such as lines, text, etc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SUBSCRIPTS AND SUPERSCRIPTS AND FONTS Create some text. The easiest thing is to choose an Open Type font. Myriad Pro is one. To choose it, go to WINDOW and select TYPE. A typefont menu will show up. Pick CHARACTER, and a palette will show up, a box with 3 tabs. You can chosoe the font there, and go to the OPEN FONT tab to easily make a highlighted character a subscript. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- MOVING A CIRCLE SOMEWHERE ELSE. Grab onto the MIDDLE dot. Grabbing onto the side ones pulls the object out in a bulge in that direction ---------------------------------------------------------------------- RESIZING OBJECT, then TRANSFORM, then SCALE. This can be done an a group of selected objects, selected with the square-making dark arrow in the main menu. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- GUIDES These are straigth lines for aligning objects. Turn on the rulers. Then drag the horizontal or vertical one to where I need a guide. If I drag other objets there and have SNAP TO POINT, they will align on the guide. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CURVES Select the Pen tool. Click and hold where the curve is to start. An arrow will appear as the cursor. Holding down the mouse key, move the arrow to show the angle the initial slope should be, and click again. The arrow will vanish and the angle slope line will remain. Move the cursor to where the curve is to end, and click again. The curve will appear. Then move the cursor back to the pen tool and click, to end that curve (otherwise the next curve will start where you just ended.) CTRL-click finishes an object. The longer you make this angle slope line, the more sharply curved will the curve be, perhaps even downward sloping even if the final point is above the initial one. Maybe the Paintbrush tool is better for drawing curves. It automatically smoothes. Or, use the Pen, and instad of going all the way to the end of the curve, stop every little bit of distance, and an angle will be created (an anchor point). Then, use the SMOOTH tool (under the pencil) to smooth out the angles. CTRL-click finishes an object. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ERASER The erase is found by holding ALT and selectng the pencil tool. THe paintbrush tool with a white thick curves is better, though. But then, if the file is saved as a PNG with transparent background, the erasures show up as white. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ZOOMING CTRL++ is for zooming in . ---------------------------------------------------------------------- FILE SAVING Export in PNG format for Powerpoint. That allow a transparent background. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- It takes a long time to load up. To get other tools, ALT-CLICK on the image box. If I want an ellipse, ALT-CLICK on the square. AI has much higher resolution than PAINT or QV or POWERPOINT. Save as AI, for future alteration, and as PDF. THe white arrow is the select tool. go up and click on FILL to put color inside a circle. CTRL-CLICK freezes an object and lets you start to work on a new one. THe PEN is the tool for making curves. After youmake it, CTORL CLICK to freeze it. Then get the SELECT white arrow tool. Use it to pull on anchor points to reshape the curve. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Saving bits of screen shots. Use PRT_SCR key. Then open up Adobe llustrator and a new document,and do CTRL-C to copy in the screenshot. Then export to myfile.jpg. OPen that file up in Ifranview, and crop it to taste. This will make a much better JPG file than putting the screen shot directly into Paintbrush. For an example of the output, see: http://www.rasmusen.org/_religion/deut6.4.jpg ---------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------