Illustrator 10 Questions

M

MacNEO

Dirty Mac Monkey
I recently got a new job. At my past job we used mostly Quark for page layout. Now I am at a sign shop and they tend to do everything in Illustrator. I am finding this a little tough as far as setting type especially. Here are my questions:

1. Is there a tab settings menu for setting up charts and whatnot?

2. Is there a duplicate or step and repeat command?

3. I am having trouble with my rulers, the vertical ruler reads at zero at the bottom of the page, I want it at the top like normal.

I have used Illustrator quite a bit but, have not run into these issues before. I am getting more into design now so I need to be really good in Illustrator. They are still using OS9 instead of OSX if that matters or not. Thanx!
 
At the top left where the rulers meet there is a little box with a cross in it. You can click and drag it to where you what the point x=0 y=0 to be. This is the same for all applications.


alt+click drag will duplicate an item. If you then press cmd+d it will duplicate another using the same offsets.


After you have drawn a text box press cmd+shift+T this will bring up a tab ruler.


All of these are simplified in the manual. Give it a read - you'll be glad you did

HTH
 
1. Draw a text box with the type tool, then hit command-shift T. This will bring up the tab ruler above the text box. This should also be in the type menu.

2. Go to the Effect menu and then Distort and transform and on to select the Transform tool from which you will find what you want. Also it's possible by duplicating your last command by using command-D on the keyboard.

3. If you look at the top left of the rulers click and drag the square thing the 0 axis can go to where ever you let go of it on the page.

Hope this helps.......

and good luck on the new job.
 
Thanks guys, I thought with the rulers you could set them to default 0-0 at the top left corner, instead of bottom left, when you double click the corner target thing. See what I mean?
 
That's something that's always bugged me about working with both Illustrator and Quark -- it's true you can double-click to set them back to the default (0,0) mark, but the default (0,0) mark is different in the programs! Quark's 0 marks default to the upper left corner, which is what you'd expect, but Illustrator's default to the lower left!

I'm assuming this is carried over from the old days of pasting up manually and what-not. Page layouts, now taken care of digitally by Quark, were measured across and down. Illustrations, generally, were measured in length and height, hence Illustrator's habit of making you measure from the bottom up.
 
I see, I never noticed this before. That's kind of annoying. I like the way Quark does it.
 
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