NProud new owner of Illustrator CS6

[inkman996]

Phew that is damn expensive!

I have used illy for years but only for opening files, now that we have upgraded and I am adamant about learning it proficiently so I can ditch Corel for good I need some help. I will probably be asking lots of questions over time. I know there is some great Illy users here that can help.

First question, in Corel you can use the actual font to preview your text as your scanning through the list of available fonts, in Illy I cannot find any preference to allow this, in other words am I forced to choose a font strictly by memory as to what it looks like?

Second question and this one is killing me, how the hell can I quickly crop a bit map?

[ScreenFoo]

My (CS5) laptop is at home right now, but if it's still the same in 6, the equivalent is object-clipping mask-make.  Make sure your clip path is on top of the bitmap, and both are selected.

Can't think of why you can't preview text, but hopefully the above will keep you from dying.   

[JBLUE]

Enroll at the University of You Tube. That is the best way to find out all kinds of crap.

For the font go to TYPE then FONT and that should show you a preview.

[Denis Kolar]

You have to open up the Type pallet to have the font previewed.
If you try to chose the font from a "top" dropdown, it will not have the preview. If you open a Type pallet (Window/Type/Character or simply Com-T) that should give you the preview when you click to choose font.

To crop. Draw an object over the bitmap, select both and press Com-7

[inkman996]

You have to open up the Type pallet to have the font previewed.
If you try to chose the font from a "top" dropdown, it will not have the preview. If you open a Type pallet (Window/Type/Character or simply Com-T) that should give you the preview when you click to choose font.

To crop. Draw an object over the bitmap, select both and press Com-7

DK you rock, the clip mask does work but it leaves the bounding box as large as the original bitmap, no way to get rid of that with a true crop? Not really that big an issue once we get Photoshop for the Mac (big bucks).

The text advice was perfect.

Yep i have watched tons of tuts fro adobe as well as Youtube, and all i can say is wow illy does some fantastic stuff that would make Corel look down right silly but it is still a lot to learn. Clipping masks is still odd to me yet its a fundamental process for illy users, other thiings are down right foreign as well.

[Gabe]

Phew that is damn expensive!

I have used illy for years but only for opening files, now that we have upgraded and I am adamant about learning it proficiently so I can ditch Corel for good I need some help. I will probably be asking lots of questions over time. I know there is some great Illy users here that can help.

First question, in Corel you can use the actual font to preview your text as your scanning through the list of available fonts, in Illy I cannot find any preference to allow this, in other words am I forced to choose a font strictly by memory as to what it looks like?

Second question and this one is killing me, how the hell can I quickly crop a bit map?

Funny thing to say as for me, I have accomplished more in DRAW than illy for screen printing
i wanted to ditch illy but after years of working with it sometimes it comes quite handy
Gabe

[Denis Kolar]

You get big bounding box only if you use Selection tool with white arrow.
If you use Black one, you should see bounding box only around clipping shape.

Call me if you have issues with Illustrator.

[StuJohnston]

There might be a way to edit bitmap files in illustrator, but I would do one of two things. The first would be to just deal with the mask and if it bothered me enough to see the bounding box, I would just lock the thing down by selecting it and hitting cmd+2 (cmd+shift+2 for unlock all) I like to leave everything as whole as possible and the mask allows me to hide or reveal as much of whatever it is without destroying anything like I would if I were to crop in photoshop.

If I decided that I needed to crop a massive amount and therefore cut down on my AI file size, I would use photoshop. I am going to guess that you aren't placing your images in the document. This is a best practices sort of thing, not necessary, but will save headaches in future. Go to file>place… and it will pop up a window for you to choose what it is you want to place. There is a check box in the window that says link, I would recommend checking that so that it not only keeps the file size down, it also allows some flexibility. After placing the linked image, open up the links window from the windows drop down menu. From there, select the image you want to crop and the click on the pencil in that window to "edit original." This should open photoshop. Here's the neat bit, edit the photo to your hearts content and save it, go back to illy and it will pop up a box that says something about a file being updated. Click ok and the photo will change automatically in illy!

My big suggestions on getting to know illustrator are these: Get a months worth of lynda.com, use hot keys as much as possible and get photoshop. I know some don't like the idea of lynda.com, but there are some advantages that it has over youtube. The biggest is that it will get you into doing things the best way rather than some kludge. if you've watched a few screenprinting "how to" videos and cringed, it is much the same for adobe products The search on lynda.com is pretty awesome. They transcribe their videos and you can search the transcriptions. Otherwise you are at the mercy of people on youtube and their ability to accurately title their videos. Many times, I have found what I was looking for as an aside rather than something important to make a whole topic about. A small thing that helped me was that there is an option to change the type of streaming and the non default method has the option to speed up or slow down the videos. I rarely watched anything less than 2x after I discovered this.

You know, there should be coupons floating around for a month or two free for lynda.com. I can't recommend it enough because you will find answers to questions you didn't know to ask.

Since I am caffeinated, here is a list of my fave hot keys:
cmd+y show outlines (This turns everything low res essentially and only shows the wireframes. I like it because it will show shapes that I don't have filled or outlined)
cmd+z undo (of course. But I am nearly as big of fan of the redo, cmd+shift+z for when I want to see before and after)
option click and drag (This makes life pretty easy when I just want to duplicate something a few times)
shift+o show artboards (One of the reasons I find this convenient is that I do seps this way sometimes. shift+o then option click and drag the artboard as many times as there are colors and then hide all but one color layer per artboard, et voila! Everything is registered in the same spot! other times I use it to make different versions of the same artwork)

[inkman996]

No no guys I actually meant the size of the exported bitmap, in my case jpegs. I have to edit tons of bitmaps every day for customers or sending off to digitizes etc, and many many times I need to crop them and export as jpegs. The clipping mask,works great but when exported it leaves a big white area around the graphic, satisfactory for most graphics but sometimes it might be just a small area I want to export. I did do something that worked using the shaping,tools,,some,how it broke up the clipping mask and bitmap,and,was able to delete the unwanted areas. But seriously a moot point now since we will purchase photoshop next for Mac.

On a cooler note I am signing up for a illustrator class at a local college, a beginners to intermediate course and not all that expensive. Lynda.com would have been my next choice and still might subscribe.

Hey Stu fortunately I am pretty capable with photoshop and its tools and ofcourse shortcut keys, I found right away a lot of them are the same in illy.

[Sbrem]

Yep, DK nailed it nicely. The Command (Control) -7 is the shortcut for making a Clipping Mask (in the Object menu). And, don't worry about the bounding box still there, it won't print (or shouldn't anyway)

Steve