See how those blue points make it hard to adjust the feather and transform on the highlight and shadow fills?  Hide them by hitting command-h or under the view menu “Hide Edges”

Much easier to see now.

You can also use this tip in conjunction with the previous post on showing and hiding the bounding box to leave you no indication that you have anything selected while still allowing you to adjust your art.

It’s a simple toggle – Command-Shift-B (control-shift-b on windows) or from the View menu choose “Show Bounding Box” about 2/3 of the way down the menu.

• 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.

How?

You can do this a few ways, but the easiest is to use the free app FontNuke on the Mac or CCleaner on Windows.
The functionality is also built into FontExplorer which used to be free, but now costs about as much as its competitors.
You could also do it manually, but why, when there are all the free apps to do it for you safer and easier?

To do it manually:

If you insist…

On the Mac.

Shut down all Adobe apps and do a search for “AdobeFnt”  There ought to be a bunch of them, most with a 2 digit number (eg.: “AdobeFnt56″) after them.  Any of them that have the .lst extension can be safely deleted.  Do not delete AdobeFnt.db or FontNames.db!! Those are not caches.

That takes care of the Adobe caches – now onto the OSX caches – and there’s a few of them.

OSX 10.4 and later has the capability built in to clear them itself – Just restart holding the shift key to boot into “safe mode” which will also clear out all your caches. After that, restart as usual and you should be back in business.

If that fails or you really want to do it yourself, here’s the list of OSX’s font caches:

• com.apple.ATS.System.fcache
• com.apple.ATSServer.FODB_System
• /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS
• /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/501/Classic.fcache
• /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/501/Local.fcache
• /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/501/System.fcache
• /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/501/FondResourceCache
• /Library/Preferences folder: com.apple.ATS.plist
• /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS.System.fcache
• /System/Library/Caches/fontTablesAnnex

Any time you delete the system caches, you must restart your computer.

On Windows

The Adobe caches are located at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\TypeSpt and delete any AdobeFnt*.lst files. Do not delete AdobeFnt.db or FontNames.db!! Those are not caches. As with the Mac, make sure that no Adobe apps are running when you delete them.

The Windows caches are

Windows NT, 2000, XP and Vista C:\WINDOWS\system32\FNTCACHE.DAT

Windows 95, 98, and Me (you pour soul) C:\WINDOWS\ttfCache

Yeap, one file.  Restart if you delete it.

Don’t go yet!

If after trying all of these options it’s still failing, let me know below in the comments (I really do read them) or try the links to the right.  And if it does work for you, let me know and don’t forget to check out the rest of the site.

Quit Illustrator and as you are restarting it:

On the mac – hold option-command-shift or on the PC – hold alt-control-shift

Some versions will bring up a dialog asking if you want to delete your prefs, some versions just delete them.

If this fails to solve your problem you can manually remove the preference folder (yes, folder).  It will be recreated the next time you start Illustrator.

On the Mac, it’s located at HD\Users\your_username\Library\Preferences\Adobe Illustrator CS# Settings\(localization folder)\

On the PC, C:\Documents and Settings\your_username\Application Data\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator CS# Settings\ Or something close to that, based on your version of Windows.

You can throw away the entire folder there, or rename it if you prefer, and Illustrator will create a new one in place of the old one the next time it’s started up.  Renaming it gives you the option of trial and error’ing the old files back in place if there are certain preferences you’d like to keep.

If all this fails, you can bring out the big guns and try the Cleaner Tool, provided by Adobe.  This will require you to uninstall everything from the creative suite and will require a re-install, so make sure you have some spare time (and your install discs) before you go that route.  It will remove all the cache files and additional noise installed by the apps to be sure that none of them have gotten corrupt.

If after trying all of these options it’s still failing, let me know below in the comments (I really do read them)  or try the links to the right.  And if it does work for you, let me know and don’t forget to check out the rest of the site.

A generic rich black will usually do for a drop shadow, though you may want to fine tune it based on the color you’re going over (for example, if your shadow falls on a red, then add more magenta and yellow and take away some cyan from your mix)  The baseline that Illustrator offers is 75c 68m 67y 90k – that’s what you’re looking at in the example above.

So, with your object selected, go to Effect -> Stylize -> Drop Shadow… (note as of cs3 or 4 – there are two “stylize” sections.  Look under the top one.)

First, note the Mode setting.  You want Multiply.  Next, click on the square of color to the right of the word Color.  This is where you define the color of the drop shadow. It’ll open up this second dialog:

Note the right column, showing your cmyk breakdown.  All K here.  Adjust it to be a rich black either by manually entering numbers (75c 68m 67y 90k if you want to match my example) or by grabbing that little white circle in the color picker and dragging it all the way into the bottom left corner.  You’ll see the numbers change as you drag it.

Viola.  Rich black.  Hit okay in the color picker and then again in the Drop Shadow dialog and you should be looking at a rich dark shadow instead of the wimpy grey shade you had before.

I should add – this post is referring to the offset path command, not the offset path effect.  That’s a whole other post that I will get to soon. This is the one that’s located in the Object menu under path.

What it does is to take the bounds of your object and make a new object either inside or outside of your existing object.  It will not work on text unless you’ve created outlines (Type -> Create Outlines).

Example – you have a die line and you want to set up margins. (See the previous post on non-printing layers to see how to incorporate them as well)

Here’s the dieline:

Now, select all the panels you want to make margins for and, from the Object menu, go to Path -> Offset Path…

You’ll see the Offset Path dialog, asking you how far you want the offset to be (in this case, .125 in. inwards, so a negative offset), the way it should treat the corners (in this case Miter, which will leave them square) and in this example, we can ignore the miter limit since we’re working on rectangles.

Viola – margins, which I’ve made cyan so you can barely see them in the screenshot.

Not so difficult an operation to do manually if you were so inclined, but a big time-saver if you do it on every file you make.

That’s about it.  Pretty simple but very useful at times.

The different Join types determine what Illustrator will do at a “corner”

And the Miter Limit  controls when a corner gets mitered (pointy) as opposed to beveled (squared off).  In my experience, it really only comes into play with very acute angles.

Simply put, they are layers that are visible on screen as you’re working with your file but won’t print. I use them mainly to create margins that I can snap to with smart guides (that’s a whole other post…) I also use them as a place to hold elements of my art that I’m working with bits and pieces of.  Things to eyedropper and such…

To designate a layer as non-printing is simple – just double click on the layer in the layers panel and in the dialog that comes up, un-check “print”. That’s it. Now the layer will be visible on screen and snappable, but won’t print. To show you that the layer is set to not print, the name is shown in italics in the layers panel. (unless you hide the layer, and then for some reason, it’s not.)

I recommend deleting the margin layer as part of your pre-flight routine to be sure that your pressman doesn’t try to print them by mistake.

You could also use the “template” layer but that locks the layer by default, which means it doesn’t snap, making it less useful as a template…  You might use that functionality if you wanted to place an image that you were tracing, though I don’t know why you wouldn’t just put the image on a lower level and lock the image itself…

I use this almost daily in conjunction with Offset Path to create quick and easy margins.

(We stopped using it when we realized that the compliance testing places clearly weren’t using it and didn’t care that we had math on our side if they thought the package was bigger. Maybe it will be useful to you though.) It was shown to me by Teri Pettit, an Adobe employee who used to visit the Adobe forums from time to time.

This trick will reveal the area of an irregular object, such as this one:

This is actually tapping into the super-secret debug panel in illustrator so the interface isn’t the greatest. It’s a little cumbersome to dig through all the info shown when you have a complex document, so I always just cut and paste the object I want to know the area of into a new blank document.

Okay, so do that and let’s open that panel – hit command-shift-option-f12.  That should open a panel that looks something like this (it may look different if you have something selected) (oh and if instead, your volume goes up a click, you need to hold the fn key as well to get the function keys to behave as function keys instead of as volume keys)  I have no idea if this works on Windows or how to invoke it.  If it does, I’d imagine the methods would be similar.

So drag the bottom right corner to open that panel up a bit – it won’t show you as it’s resizing, it’s a bit weird to see. You need it to be a bit taller to reveal the line of “buttons” that are in there.

Now, select your object on the artboard and click on the “path” at the bottom of the debug panel.  If nothing happens you may have to click on the “object” button, but normally  a pile of confusing and interesting stuff should fill the panel.  The info we’re looking for today is in the middle, to the right of “area”.

It’s a bigger number than you were expecting, eh?  That’s because it’s shown in points. To convert to inches, divide by 72 twice (I don’t know why twice – I’m not a mathematician, I draw pictures for a living.) Positive numbers are for clockwise objects and negative numbers indicate counterclockwise.

Remember to close this panel when you’re done getting your area!  Don’t do anything silly like delete the selected object. This panel is not meant for you to be playing with – it’s tied to the innards of Illustrator and I don’t know what damage could be done by meddling. As far as I know, it’s harmless other than occasionally causing a crash (we used to use it almost daily), but I make no promises!

That’s Applications -> Adobe Illustrator CS4 (or CS5) -> Presets -> en_US -> Scripts

For CS3, it’s similar – Just Adobe Illustrator CS3 -> Presets -> Scripts

Just drop them all in there (or leave them in their own folder) and restart Illustrator.  You can access these scripts from File -> Scripts -> script name

When moving your images around in an Illustrator document, you’re probably used to looking at the frame that represents them as you move them - kind of like what your OS used to show as you moved windows around, you know, 10 years ago.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  We’re past the oughts and into the teens now. Computers are plenty capable of keeping up with you as you move your confused balloon people around.

In CS4 – From the file menu, open up your document setup and check the box next to ”show images in outline mode”  Oh, this will also have the added bonus of showing a B&W preview of your images when you’re working in preview (keyline) mode (which is what the preference is actually offering to do).

Now – When you move your images around, you will see a preview.

Note that this will not be persistent – every new document will have the default behavior which is to only show the outline.
I’ll cover changing the default new document pages another day.