Illustrator® CS4 For Dummies®

Chapter 15. Printing Your Masterpiece

In This Chapter

• Working with printing in mind

• Sizing artwork to fit a page

• Printing black-and-white illustrations

• Printing color illustrations

• Understanding the strange issue of color separations

When designing your artwork, keep in mind how it will look if it will be printed. If you know what medium you're going to print your artwork on, you can save yourself time in the long run. For instance, say you create a stunning logo, full of vibrant colors and subtle hues and reflections. Well, you probably can't use that logo in a black-and-white context. In this chapter, I provide some great ideas to keep in mind while you create your artwork — and you can also refer to this chapter when you arrive at the printing process.

If you just want to print, read the next section. If you want to discover all the stuff behind what goes into printing, check out the upcoming section "What You See Is Roughly What You Get." Or, if you want the nitty-gritty about setting up Illustrator for printing (plus even more details on printing), skip ahead to the section "Setting Up Your Page to Print (You Hope)."

Printing Quickly

If you have a printer hooked up to your computer or network, you can print just about anything that you can create in Illustrator.

Before you print, make sure that your artwork is inside the printable area, which is indicated by a dotted gray line. Anything ...