Illustrator® CS4 For Dummies®

Chapter 3. Doing Everyday Things with Illustrator

In This Chapter

• Selecting objects so you can change them

• Moving objects in a document

• Rotating and resizing objects

• Looking at all the really fun stuff, like masks, transparency and blends

• Using Illustrator with the Web

• Taking Illustrator documents into other programs

• Zeroing in on what Illustrator does best

The hard part for new users of Illustrator is figuring out what it does. The program is so vast and has many capabilities that aren't immediately obvious or self-explanatory. Even seasoned Illustrator veterans often discover that they use many convoluted steps to accomplish something they could do with a single hidden command. This chapter is a tell-all exposé of everything that you can do in Illustrator (at least as much as I can in a single chapter). You'd need an entire book to cover such a complex program (erm, um, which is why you're reading this). By the end of this chapter, you'll have a good overview of the features of Illustrator and know where to look to find the things you need to get the job done.

Picking Up Stuff and Moving It Around

Any time you want to do something to an Illustrator object, you must select it first. After you get the whole select-then-do thought lodged in your brain, many of Illustrator's functions come to you much more easily.

Illustrator offers a wide variety of ways to select things, including five tools, ...