First Steps: Learning the User Interface


You've just arrived, switched off the ignition, grabbed the suitcase, walked up the porch steps, and swung open the door. Already you can see that the floor plan and decor is rather different than the place from which you came. Go ahead, step inside and flip on the switch.

Multiple Pages, Where Art Thou?

The basic document environments for FreeHand and Illustrator are so similar it hurts. Why this pain? Because the environment in Illustrator is almost identical to FreeHand 3, before the multiple page capability was added. In those days, both programs framed a single page within a very similarly sized (within inches) Pasteboard workspace. FreeHand's page was placed at the lower left and when resized, it grew toward the upper/right (Figure B.4). The page in Illustrator was (and still is) placed in the middle of the Pasteboard and when resized, it grew (grows) from the center out (Figure B.5).

Figure B.4. FreeHand's Pasteboard is a little over 224 inches square. The default first page is near the lower left corner. Pages grow upward and toward the right.


Figure B.5. The Pasteboard in Illustrator is a little over 227 inches square. The single artboard is in the center and grows from the center outward.


Both programs conform to the math and engineering convention of having the zero point of its coordinate grid located at the lower left corner of the page. Because the Artboard (page) in Illustrator is always centered in the Pasteboard, be sure to check the alignment of the ruler origin after changing the page size. Do this the same way you do it in FreeHand: double-click the rulers originthe box where the left and top rulers meet at the upper left of the document window.

As for Illustrator's single-page per document limitation, you will occasionally encounter references to workarounds and/or plug-ins that invariably resort to either page tiling or using Layers to imitate multiple pages.

Of course, FreeHand can also tile pages and show/hide layers, and the FreeHand user will find these workarounds quite unsatisfying substitutes for the real thing. To date, there is no real answer. Illustrator CS2 enhanced the tiling workaround by enabling page tiles to be saved as individual pages in a single PDF file (refer to Chapter 12, Saving and Exporting Files).

Working With Rulers, Grids, and Guides

With Illustrator, you can choose between points, picas, inches, millimeters, centimeters, and pixels, and value read-outs in palettes will change accordingly the next time a selection causes them to update. But other scales in FreeHand, such as decimal inches, are not offered, and you cannot create custom scales such as 1"=10' and have value fields reflect the scale accordingly.

The Grid in Illustrator works similarly to FreeHand's, but it offers the option for displaying it as lines of dots like FreeHand, or as lines. A more significant difference is that the Grid in Illustrator rotates with the Constrain angle preference setting.

Guides are also similar to FreeHand's, except that in FreeHand they extend across the page, whereas in Illustrator they extend to the bounds of the entire Pasteboard. As in FreeHand, Illustrator's unlocked guides can be released (View > Guides > Release Guides) to turn them into ordinary paths, and ordinary paths can be turned into Guides (View > Guides > Make Guides). One handy little difference between Illustrator's Guides and FreeHand's is that in Illustrator they snap to your ruler tick marks if you press Shift, whether you have Snap To Grid on or not.

Various factors in Illustrator, including the lack of an adjustable pick-distance setting, cause snap to feel less sure in Illustrator, and FreeHand users who rely heavily upon snaps find this a shortcoming. SmartGuides (see Chapter 7, 3D and Other Live Effects) goes a long way toward overcoming this problem by providing object snapping behaviors similar to FreeHand's Snap To Object, and also interactive remote object and point alignment while drawing, which Free-Hand lacks.



Where's the Inspector?

FreeHand's Object palette (which many FreeHand users still refer to as the Object Inspector) is like a one-stop shop for info on and settings for the current selection. The closest counterpart to this in Illustrator is the Appearance palette, and it is also probably the most important palette to have always handy.

The Appearance palette, like FreeHand's Object palette, is where you find the stack of strokes, fills, and effects that are applied to the current selection. The Appearance palette also displays some of the specific information about the items in that stack; for example, the weight of a stroke appears within its listing.

Beyond that, however, the similarity begins to break down because of this important difference: Although the Appearance palette in Illustrator is where you can view the stack of strokes, fills, and effects, it is not where you edit them, and in the case of effects, not where you apply them. You can add strokes and fills using the Appearance palette menu, but to adjust their parameters, you still must go to various other palettes. As in FreeHand, you can apply effects to individual strokes or fills, but you select them from the Effects menu, not from the Appearance palette.

For example, consider a simple path with a basic appearance (one stroke, one fill). If this object is selected in FreeHand, the item stack lists the stroke and its weight. Likewise, if an identical object is selected in Illustrator, the stroke and its weight is one of the items listed.

However, in FreeHand, if you then select the stroke listing itself, all of its particular settings and options appear at the bottom of the Object palette. For example, the stroke's type, weight, cap, join, dash, arrowhead, and overprint settings appear, and they are editable right there in the Object palette (Figure B.6).

Figure B.6. In FreeHand, the settings for the selected object's attributes are presented in the bottom of the Object Properties palette as contextual screens that display according to which item in the attributes stack is selected. All four of these screens are displayed at the bottom of the single Object palette.


Not so in Illustrator, although the first step is similar. To modify that stroke's options in Illustrator, you first select its listing in the Appearance palette. But to change its weight, dash, caps, and joins, you must still visit the separate Stroke palette. To apply an arrowhead to it, you call up the Add Arrowheads dialog from the Effects menu; to set it to overprint, you visit another separate palette named Attributes; to turn the stroke into a Brush, you visit the Brush palette; and so on (Figure B.7).

Figure B.7. Although the Appearance palette in Illustrator is similar to the Object palette in that it provides a stack of strokes, fills, and effects and displays some of their settings, and although the detail settings are sensitive to which item is selected in the stack, the actual settings reside in individual separate palettes. Ready access to all of these palettes is necessary in order to make all the settings represented in the previous view of FreeHand's Object palette.


So although the Attributes palette is one that you need to keep upfront and handy as you work, it is not at all the kind of comprehensive centralized object settings palette to which you are accustomed in FreeHand. Hunting around for specific settings is one of the primary causes for disorientation among FreeHand users. You have to get back into the mindset of individual palettes for each type of setting, which was more the nature of Free-Hand's early versions prior to the arrival of the Inspector-based interface. You might logically expect Illustrator CS2's new Control palette to be the centralized counterpart to FreeHand's Object palette. But although it does provide more immediately convenient access to some of the most frequently needed settings, it never presents them all.

By the Numbers

Value fields in FreeHand palettes and dialogs accept and retain numerical values to six decimal places, whereas Illustrator displays four. Under the hood, every measure in Illustrator is converted from its underlying native measure of 72 points per inch. This, combined with the four-decimal display, often leads to what the FreeHand user sees as disconcerting numerical inaccuracies in value fields. For example, if like many users, you've memorized the decimal equivalent of 1/16th as .0625, and then you enter ".0625/2" in a value field, the displayed result will be .0313, not .03125. This does not mean that Illustrator did not make your object .03125 in width. It only rounded the value for the sake of the display in the palette. However (and unfortunately), if you then enter "*2" after the displayed value to double the object's measure, Illustrator recalculates the entire expression, which is now keyed into the field, with a result of .0626 instead of restoring the previous .0625. Does a thousandths of an inch inaccuracy matter? You decide.





Real World Adobe Illustrator CS2
Real World Adobe Illustrator CS2
ISBN: 0321337026
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 147
Authors: Mordy Golding

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