illustrator question(s)

[Doug Bernhardt]

Again I apologize for bringing computers to the "Hand Lettering Forum" but I know of no other place with so many well informed subscribers. I am running illustrator CS and using it to draw lettering for many purposes. One of the first is to make film positives for screening and the other is clip art. In both cases I am having problems making the files compatible with Corel which is a hugely popular program here. Corel is just down the road....so how do I accomplish this?

[Mike Jackson]

Doug,
In AI, select all, assign everything black on white with no strokes, then do the make compound command. That should give you a clean black and white image with the interior shapes clear. Save it as Illustrator 3 .AI or maybe version 6. Then open Corel and import the file as an AI file. It should work fine.

In a perfecet world, you'd just save the AI file at it's current version level and open it in Corel. All of this is dependent on your versions of both programs, as early versions of Corel probably can read a CS3 Illustrator file. The rule of thumb after that is to "dumb down" your exported file to the lowest version that preserves the fills and effects, and open it in the highest version of the importing program you have.

There can be caveats in all this. After we created one of our CD collections and imported each AI file into Corel, a customer later discovered that Corel added an extra point on top of every occurance where a curve segment connected with a line segment. If you moved one of the two points, you could see they were connected with a straight line. The very same illustrator file could be imported into the later Corel program perfectly. The problem only shows up in the Corel files saved by Corel. You could have never seen the problem by looking at the file, but some of the G-Code 3-D programs choked up when if they tried to work a file with the points on top of each other.

I think your question definitely fits the scope of this forum.

Mike Jackson

[Doug Bernhardt]

Mike....thanx..... although I have used the strokes as the weight of the "bright lines" and pasted a solid white fill in front of that. It gives the perfect look. I will try "outline strokes" and follow your directions from there ALSO! .....Will let everyone know how it goes.

[Mike Jackson]

Doug,
Corel may maintain the strokes you apply in Illustrator, but I am not sure about the details of that. Most of the people in the sign trade need vector cut lines, vs the final look of a printed file. Yes, if you ad strokes to a shape, I'd convert those elements to paths. In Illustrator, you can either apply a stroke and then convert it to a path, or you can simply use the pathfinder commands to create the offset paths in one operation.

I like Gerber's Omega for outlining because each of the two sets of shapes (original shape and outlined shapes) are individually grouped following an outline task. In Illustrator, you end up with all the outlines, but they are not grouped together. It takes time to go in and select them individually.

Good luck,
M. Jackson