IllustratorHints
Tips, tricks and tutorials for Illustrator
Embroidered Text Effect
For this to make sense, you might want to refer back to the previous posts on the Appearance Panel.
Once you’ve read over those 3 posts, download this file and have at it. You might like to adjust the stroke some to make the “holes” a bit more realistic.
This is live editable text, made awesome, by the appearance panel.
Cleaning your font cache.
Another maintenance post. Another issue that can show itself in a few ways.
- If you are unable to get Illustrator to boot and see that Illustrator is crashing as it shows “loading fonts”.
- If your font list becomes filled with font names that look like they are combinations of other font names.
- Other weirdness with the behavior of your fonts.
The font caches are temp files that both your computer and Illustrator cooks up to keep track of what fonts are active and where they are located. There is no danger in deleting them, they will be recreated the next time you restart Illustrator in the case of the application level caches or by the finder in the case of the system level caches. Office also creates its own, which behave the same way, but, well, for Office.
Delete Preferences File
It will eventually happen. Something will go wrong and Illustrator will no longer start up, or a tool will act weird and not let you change it’s settings or a modifier key will stop working… There are a number of ways that this issue can manifest itself. Luckily it’s easy to fix.