Subtitles of the Movie

There are many features in Adobe Illustrator CS3. Likewise, there are many preferences that you can tinker with to change how you work with the application. Of course since there are literally tons and tons of preferences, I'm going to cover the most common ones. What I suggest you do is in your spare time just tinker with it. Turn some on, turn some off, and see what happens. Don't worry, unless you see smoke coming out of your monitor, nothing's going to happen to your computer. So I'm going to go to my Illustrator menu on my Macintosh, and I will find my preferences here. If you're on a Windows PC, you will find the preferences under the Edit menu. So I'm going to go to Illustrator Preferences and what I'm going to do is start off on the bottom here to show you that no matter where I start, the same panel will appear. See that? They're all here under this menu right here at the top. Now the reason I started with the appearance of black is because if you want to see what something does, all you have to do is hover your mouse over an option you may be unfamiliar with and look down here at the description dialog. It's a great way to learn about what these things do for you. So I can put this here and see that it says that the displaying all blacks as rich blacks will show both pure blacks and rich blacks as rich black down here. And so you can turn these options off or on, and once again just read what they do down here. Let's go to next. Or we can even go to previous to go backwards. So here's General. What I can do with General is I can turn tool tips off or on, which I recommend you keep them on if you're still learning the application. This means if you hover your mouse over something, you'll see a little dialog box appear, a little tool tip and it tells you what it does. Let me go ahead and show you what that does right now. I'll hover my mouse over the Pen tool and I'll leave it there, and you see the little tool tip pop up? It tells me the Pen tool as well as the shortcut key. So I'm going to go back to Preferences and back to General. You can also choose to have artwork anti-aliased if you're using something like Photoshop Artwork, that's very handy. And if you're using filters in Illustrator itself, so you get a nice smooth non-jaggy edge to the artwork. You can also double click to isolate or to enter isolation mode. Don't worry though, I talk more about isolation mode in its own lesson, so definitely check that out. You can also have scale strokes and effects. Now this is important to me because I like to do all kinds of special effects, and most of my artwork has a stroke associated with it. So if I scale it up or I scale it down, the strokes as well as the effects will scale with the artwork in proportion. Let's go to Next. Now this part is very important for people who wear glasses like myself. Now I had 20 20 vision, but somewhere down the line as the birthday cakes kept coming, my vision started to fade away a little bit. So I keep my anchor point and handles on large size here. I also have it set to highlight whenever I put my mouse over it. Let me go ahead and show you what I'm talking about here. I'll just quickly draw out a very quick path and I'll deselect it. If I put my mouse over the line here and I then get near a point, it shows up and it highlights for me. Likewise, it will magnify the point when I roll over it. So that's very, very handy. Let me go back to my preferences, and let's go to Next again. I'm going to go to Type now. Type. Now where you see where it says Size and Leading. This means when I type something that's 10 point and I have more than one sentence, the space in between those sentences, known as leading, will have two points inserted for me automatically. So that means if I'm typing with 10 point type, Illustrator is going to make the lines in between those sentences 12 points, which is standard in the printing industry. It gives a nice comfortable, readable view for the eye so it's not strained when it's reading. We can also enable a recent amount of fonts that we like to see, and one of the things I think is very important is the Font Preview. Let me go ahead and show you what that looks like. I'll choose my Type tool, and when I click on Character and I choose a font, I see what it looks like in the menu itself. Very handy indeed. Let's go back to the Preferences. I also like to have the size of the font preview medium, or you can also make it large depending on just how bad that old eyesight's going. What I'm going to do now is go to Next. We can also change the units that we're using, whether we're using the ruler or whether we're drawing something and we want to see things in points, picas, inches, or pixels, or the millimeters or centimeters. And I've actually heard it called centometers which is probably correct. I like that, centometers. Anyway, if you're working on a print file, then you're gonna want to deal with inches. If you're working with the web, then you're gonna want to deal with pixels. And when you're dealing with type, you're going to want to deal with points. But of course, you can mix and match these as you like. Let me go to the Next menu. We can change the color of any guides and grids here, and we can also talk about some of the other options that I do discuss in the separate lesson based on the guides and grid. Here we have some preferences for smart guides, angles, and slices. And here we can play around with hyphenation, and we can also choose to select an additional plug-ins folder, or a scratch disc. A scratch disc is simply a hard drive, or a portion of your hard drive, that you allocate to Illustrator to use when your physical RAM runs out. So if your computer has one point five gigabytes of RAM, or brainpower, and that starts to run low because you have Illustrator open, you have Photoshop open, you have like 4,000 things open on your computer, Illustrator's going to then look to your hard drive space to start doing its calculations. So you can set that up here. As you see, I have a hard drive called Oxcom that I can set up as my secondary scratch disc if my RAM runs out. And here is how I got this to get a little darker here. You see that I have my panels and everything, my tools are really dark because on my user interface I chose my brightness as dark, but I can also put it back to light as you see here, or anywhere in between. And we also have File Handling and Clipboard. If you use version Q to collaborate with other people on your projects, then you're going to want to work with some of these preferences here. And here we have our File Handling and Clipboard options for people who are going to use version Q, so you can collaborate with other people. And here you are able to work with your clipboard on Quit so that your Illustrator files are saved as a certain version. And once again we have our appearance of black. So these are the preferences that you can use to modify how Illustrator performs for you and how the interface looks while you're working in it.