Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

General Printing Considerations

Illustrator has an incredibly sophisticated print engine built within,

which we’ll tour in the next exercise. But some Illustrator users may

fi nd that they rarely see the inside of the Print dialog box, simply

because they’re usually handing off their work to the experts at a

commercial print house. Your responsibility in such instances is to

make sure your artwork is ready to relinquish. The video that ac-

companies this lesson (see Video Lesson 12: “Commercial Print-

ing,” on the previous page) walks you through the steps required

to make that hand-off go smoothly.

When you watch the video, you’ll hear me discuss a variety of con-

cepts and concerns that anyone who’s hung around a print shop

will fi nd familiar. What follows is a list of things to keep in mind

so that you get results worthy of all the hard work you’ve put into

creating your artwork during the fi rst eleven lessons of this book.

• Converting type to outlines: Although you may have created your

text using standard fonts that come along with Creative Suite

5, there’s always a chance that your printer of choice doesn’t

have your exact fonts, which could lead to disaster. To ensure

against this, you can convert your text to paths by choosing

Type→Create Outlines. This command converts your font-

based text to path outlines, thus guaranteeing it can print on

any system without unex