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Adobe Illustrator CS4 Tutorials

Pen & Paths / Preferences




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The Preferences are so in-depth that it would take a very, very long time, like a hundred hours, to go over all of them so I'm going to cover the ones that you'll probably want to change more often than not. You can find the Preferences on a Macintosh computer under the title of the application. So you can go to Illustrator, Preferences. On a Windows PC you can go to the Edit Menu and find Preferences there. Of course, I'm on the Mac and this Apple symbol is a dead giveaway. I want to go to Preferences and also show you that no matter which one of these guys I select, I get all of them. So I can just randomly close my eyes and click on one, I get them all anyway by clicking Previous and Next. So it really doesn't matter where you start. So I'm going to just go to the one I know that's first, which is General. Here what we can is we can enter Isolation Mode by double clicking. We can also tell Illustrator that we want to scale any strokes and effects simultaneously. We can anti-alias our artwork and we can also choose to show the tool tips. Now, this is handy to have on when you're first learning the application. But after a while you won't need this so you can turn that off. You can also use Precise Cursors if you want to as well. Let me just show you what that is. First of all, I'll go ahead and cancel this and I'll grab my, let's see here, Pen Tool and as you can see, I have this icon. When I go back to Preferences, General and I choose Precise Cursor, I get a crosshair instead because I want to work with precision and I can really see the center point of where I'm going, as opposed to just having a picture of the icon. So it's up to you. Do you want to see the pen or would you rather see the crosshairs? I can also go back to General and then click on Next to go to the next category. Now, I like this particular preference because I can change the handles and the appearance that I'm dealing with. So I can change the anchors and the handles and I can also show handles when multiple anchors are selected. I can also choose a selection tolerance and a snap-to point. So I'll have to be two pixels away to snap. I'll go ahead and click Next. Here I can choose my size and my letting, my tracking and I can also choose from several other options, such as size of the display when I have preview on. Next will take me to the ability to change whether I'm working with inches, points, Picas, millimeters, centimeters or pixels. Of course, if you're working on a print document, I highly suggest you choose something that's going to be appropriate for print. If you're going to be working the web, you might want to work with pixels. You can even use points, especially if you're dealing with a lot of logos and text and that kind of thing. You can also do the same thing with your strokes, your type and you can also change the display performance of your hand tool so you can have full quality when you move things or for faster updates, you'll just see like a little outline. Let me go ahead and quickly demonstrate that to you. Currently it's on full quality so I'm going to just draw out a couple things and I'm going to grab my Hand Tool and when I move it, I see everybody. And when I go back to General and I put this on Fast, Faster Updates and click OK, alright. Nothing happened there because it wasn't that complex, so let me just see if I have my Falcon Shadow mask still open, which I do. So I can grab that and as you notice here, look at the very top. See how we get this blur? Well, that's because it's not updating until I let go of the mouse. That's really handy when you have a lot of detail and you really need to move it around and have Illustrator just block it out like so. So I guess the earlier example with the circles wasn't complicated enough. We can also, by the way, move over to the next category, change the colors of our guides and our grid. We can also, if you check out the tutorial section on the grid, change how we view the grid as well. So be sure to check out that lesson. You can also enable Smart Guides and change how they work so when you're moving things around, you can see the precise measurements with the Smart Guides. And when you're working for the web and you're cutting up things for the Internet, you can also show the slice numbers and you can change the color of those lines. And you also have some hyphenation options if you're doing any text editing. I currently leave that kind of thing for in design. And we can also choose a plug-in, a folder and choose a startup disk to be a scratch disk or a secondary. Now, what this simply means is let's say you have two gigabytes of RAM and for some reason the artwork is so massive that you run out of RAM. Illustrator needs to think somewhere and to do its calculations. So if your primary drive gets full, you can choose another drive, an external drive. And I have two; one I call Sentinel and one I call Hide. So Illustrator will be able to continue thinking, although a little bit more slowly than it would with real RAM. And I can also change my user interface. As you can see up here, these dark gray colors are because I selected Dark as opposed to Light.

Tutorial Information

Course: Adobe Illustrator CS4
Author: Dwayne Ferguson
SKU: 33974
ISBN: 1-935320-35-1
Release Date: 2009-03-12
Duration: 7.5 hrs / 119 lessons
Work Files: Yes
Captions: Available on CD and Online University
Compatibility: Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux
QuickTime 7, Flash 8

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