Illustrator :: Preparing File For Print - Flattening Options And PDF Creation
Jan 26, 2014
A client has asked for an advert to be reset for magazine publication. For various reasons I am preparing it in Illustrator CC (mainly that I am more comfortable with Illustrator and it contains some reasonably complex effects and blending options). Anyway the time has come to send it to the printers and I have that heavy feeling that all is not well! The Publisher is asking for a PDF
There are two gradients within the artwork, the entire background is a photograph blending into a Black gradient (the body text sits in white over the black). To get the right effect the black gradient overlay has blending option - Multiply on it and being concerned it may not print propery or have transparency issues I chickened out and justt created one whole background image in PS (photo, gradient and all) and just imported it as a single jpeg back into Illustrator (ensuring I was working in CMYK).
But there is also an outer glow and drop shadow on some white text that sits over the Photograph. Do I need to flatten the image manually before creating the PDF? Or does the creation of the PDF do this for you? When I manually do this it displays correctly providing I tick Preserve Alpha transparency.
I work in Illustrator CC, the publisher has asked for Pass4Press Ver 9, but this preset is for Illustrator CS3. Are there no updates? and indeed does it really matter?
I've been commissioned to make a large print (12ft by 3ft) for a gallery. They want me to use a preferred printer who requires a final output resolution of 300-350dpi. My source file is an Illustrator file (CS5.1) containing MANY (100's) overlapping, transparent polygons). The printer initially told me that it was fine to supply the Illustrator file as two parts, 6ft x 3ft with everything as vectors. They just got back to me and rejected my files, now requesting full resolution TIFFs.
I have tried to flatten the transparency and output to TIFF, but either Illustrator hangs indefinitely halfway in the process or errors out, telling me that the combination of size and resolution is impossible to output. I've even tried to import to photoshop as smart object, etc. It appears that I'm running out of memory/cpu power/illustrator abilities even though I tried this on a quad cpu mac pro with 12GB of memory. At the moment, how to rasterize my vector art at anywhere near acceptable resolution. The image is very dense, and full of subtle changes in color and density due to the transparency. I need to preserve it as much as possible.
Is there a way to save an .eps file from illustrator without flattening transparency? If not then is there a way around this while still saving as an .eps format?
capturing screenshots, that will be for print. The company that I work for has a book being made that requires several figures from screenshots. The book is being printed in B&W. I do not have access to any other screen grab program other than Grab, and was wondering if anyone has any advice for making these grabs the best quality they can be for print. I am obviously concerned with resolution, but also the general quality of the images, bluriness when printed, as well as loss of quality and contrast when converted to B&W
I am just learning paint.net and would like some pointers to prepare a photo of a persons face for tshirt print.
I was thinking of trying to transform a photo into a cartoon style ink drawing (i.e. outline only) but can quite get it (I have tried one or two plugins and the ink/ pencil tools).
Ideally I would like something like this the logo found here but without the fill (and obviously a little more facial detail as its taken from a photo). [URL] .....
Failing that, I could go with the classic Che Guevar style as found on countless tshirts, but not sure if its possible to easily create it. [URL] .......
I have an A4 peice of paper and need to change the scale of my drawing so it fits onto the page. I remember there was a short cut, but have since forgotten it.
It is currently at 1:1 and want to change that to a more appropriate scale.
I've done quite a bit of research in the forums for a similar problem but not quite got any suitable answer. I'm running LR3.6 on WinXP SP3 with 4Gb RAM (3Gb useable). I'm trying to print 140 images setup on 7 pages each 16" x 24" JPEG size files (settings as below). Surely that should be a doodle? 2 hr+ later, I just have the "Preparing Print Job" progress bar doing nothing like it's expecting further input from me. No error messages, nothing, until I quit. Is there anything I should be watching out for? It's the first time I've tried to convert such a large collection to file and it's rather worrisome that I have these problems. case of "user error"
Need to make the dwg file into pdf but I also need to set margins (10mm top,right,bottom and 20mm on the left side), tried with some programs but it only gives me the option to set "global" margins and if i use CAD it trims the drawing. I'm working with A4(210,297).
AI CS6 Layers panel missing labels when you deselect print in the layer options. Is this a bug? I noticed this on a furnished file at work on a MacPro and had a hard time working the file because all of the labels were missing.
I stumbled on the cause when I turned on the Print Layer and all the labels came back. To be sure it was not computer related, I made a file on my AI CS6 version 16.1.0 with the same result. See screen shot.
When I create a pdf using the dwg to pdf driver native to acad2010 it creates a pdf but when I go to print that pdf the processing time that it takes to print is outrageously long since when adobe reader goes to process the pdf to print it it says it is "flattening" the pdf.
How to remedy this problem? At this point the dwg to pdf driver in acad is unusable unless I can figure out how to create a pdf file that does not need to be "flattened" by adobe reader before finally sending off to the printer.
I have quite a few alignments to create and would rather not have to set the layer and conversion options for each. I'd like all to be on the same layer (that is already defined in the drawing) and to change the conversion options both off. I've been looking through the settings table in TS, but haven't found anywhere to change the default layer and conversion option states. Currently, the create alignment from objects defaults are to have alignments on independent layers (Model-Alignment*, where * adds the alignment name as a suffix to the layer name) and both conversion options are on.
Lightroom is getting hung up when "Preparing file for editing" while trying to edit in external programs. Lightroom 4 did it when I tried to edit in Silver Efex Pro. Now I have a new computer and Lightroom 5. Lightroom 5 just started doing it when trying to edit in Silver Efex Pro AND Photoshop CS5.
I'm pretty familiar with preparing files for print in Illustrator and am currently using CS6. However, I'm not at all familiar with preparing files for printing on non-white fabrics (a black t-shirt in this case). I've had a hunt on Google but haven't yet found a simple answer to my question which is this:
The logo is red and black on a white background (shown below). How do I make sure that the white area prints as white and not "no ink" as would happen when printing on white stock?
There will be a small run initially, so will probably use a heat transfer method rather than screen printing at this point.
I have a Samsung Laser printer. THe passive USB hub went bad yesterday, and I re-installed teh printer drivers. Everything prints fine from my on-line E-mail, Microsoft Word, etc. However, when I attempt to print from Adobe Illustrator I get a "Print to file" WINDOW that comes up, I never got this before I don't want to print to file (!!!!). I want to print to the printer.
I was working with Illustrator - InDesign as usual. At the moment of linking my AI file into InDesign, I got this message 8 times in an A4 size frame:
"This is an Adobe® Illustrator® file that was saved without PDF content. To place or open this file in other applications, it should be re-saved from Adobe Illustrator with the "Create PDF Compatible File" options turned on. This option is in the Illustrator Native Format Options dialog box, which appears when saving an Adobe Illustrator file using the Save As command."
Weird... I have never seen this before. I resaved the file, and it keeps happening. I see no such option as "Create PDF Compatible File" when saving just an AI file... I am not trying to make a PDF!
I have done the same procedure linking other AI files into this ID file and it is working as usual. Is just this very one. And it doesn't seem particulary different from what I do everyday...
I finally made a PDF from the AI and placed it into InDesign. But everytime I have to update the AI..
I'm having an odd problem in AI CS6, and I first want to try trashing my preferences file, but I can't find it (sounding dumb). When searching, I ran across references to user/Library/Preferences/Adobe Illustrator CS6 Settings/en_US/ but I can't find that either (sounding even dumber). I see users/ myname/ but no library/preferences. I try users/myname/roaming/Adobe/Adobe Illustrator CS 6 settings /en_us/x64 but nothing there gives me a file folder or a file named preferences (can't feel any dumber). BTW, I am using the file options Show Hidden Files and Show Extensions, and I'm running PC Windows on a 64-bit machine.
I am on a MAC OS X 10.8.5. I am running Illustrator CC 17.0.0 I started a new document and created my work. I could not save as or export. There are times when the SAVE button is also greyed out. (see screenshot). I was fortunate there was a script that saves the files as a PDF under SCRIPTS. It does not matter if I start a new file or open an old one. I do not have file menu choices. I checked for updates and it states I am current.
I have a very simple logo I am working on, and there are a few elements that have a fill, stroke and drop shadow applied. Every time I save the file and have to re-open it, all of the effects are rasterized, and the stroke and fill are split into a "grouped" object.
ALL we do out of Illustrator (CS6) goes to print, as a result we don't EVER want the transparency flattening to be anything less than high resolution.
I tried modifying the "Transparency Flattener Presets" file as suggested here URL...but simply making the "Medium" setting the same as the "High" setting made the Illustrator menu come up with "Custom" by default containing settings for the Medium!! Is there a way to get the default to be high resolution?
I am doing a logo design which comprises text sitting on top of a png image. The original png image has a transparent background.
When I save as .eps, I get the message "The document constrains artwork that requires flattening". So I select the image, Object > Flatten Transparency and it saves fine.
But now it's put a white background behind the image. I need the entire logo to be transparent.
I have included images of how it is inillustrator (with a gradient opacity effect) and how it is when I try export.I have tried multiple formats and had the same problem.
I am trying to turn every layer in my .ai file to a raster image without flattening to one layer.
-The big issue I am dealing with is the agency that just built a paralax site for us refuses to export to PSD. I have tried every possible way to do this but keep getting the file is to big message. To add to it they had it all on 1 layer. I was able to release to sequence, but now am trying to see if rasterizing the objects will work.
I have found the printing options in PDN to be..In all probability, PDN will print just the way I want it to, and I'm just not smart enough to figure out how to do it.
Right now, all I want is to be able to print at something less than full-page. For example, I create a simple drawing, size it in PDN to, say, 2 inches by 2.5 inches. It will print out at 8 inches by 10 inches, with no other choices, at least not that I was smart enough to find.
This is probably the rankest heresy to say this on the Paint.Net forum, but I find the Microsoft Paint print options to be far more useful, with the ability to scale the drawing by percentage, fit to a single page or fit to multiple pages, make my own choice about landscape vs portrait mode, etc. Unfortunately, MS Paint won't run on my computer anymore, probably a corrupted DLL file or something that will require a nuke and repave operation to fix. [This is one of the better things to happen to me, because without it I wouldn't have found and installed Paint.Net! ]
Rick Brewster has said in the "Popular Feature Requests" thread Better printing user interface -- Planned for a pre-4.0 update. Will this just be a change to the UI, or will there be added functionality? I installed the "PrinterPlus" plug-in, and while it mimics the MS Paint print interface to some degree, it does not add any of the MS Paint print options.
What will the "Better printing user interface" actually do, and is there any projected time frame?
I have an AI CS6 file (CMYK) which I can not print in color. When I save as a PDF file and print it using Reader it prints out in color. My other AI files print in color without a problem.
I can only print my photoshop work on A4 when I want it on A3. Its not greyed out it doesnt respond. Strange as it was working no problem then suddenly stopped. I am using a mac OX10.8.4 and a macbook pro. I have reloaded my printers drivers Brother DCP 6690CWP and it still doesnt work.
Using CS5 windows won't print all the graphics of the file, even to a PS printer. Some of the graphics don't print at all and some print in a reverse color.
I'm trying to print color separations as a Postscript file from Illustrator CS5 and the halftone areas keep showing up as grayscale instead of the specified frequency and angle. I've tried usiing multiple PPDs and options but I'm having no luck.
