Athenia Design

When you are sending an Illustrator file to the printers it is usually best to convert the fonts to outlines. This means that even if the person you are sending the file does not have the fonts you have used installed they will still be able to print it. When you convert fonts to outlines, the program will look at the fonts as images rather than text thus fixing any upload errors that result when fonts are not embedded in your file.

Here is how to convert fonts to outlines in Adobe Illustrator
Select all text.
Click Type Menu> Type> Create Outlines
Text now has a blue outline.
Save a copy and re-upload.

My husband was doing some work in Photoshop the other day and wanted to accurately measure a point form the centre of the screen. The problem he had was that the ruler is automatically set to measure from the top left hand side of the document where you see the two rulers cross. If you want to measure from a different point, it works exactly the same as Quark. Just click on the point where the two rulers meet and then drag out until you reach the place you want your measurements to start. Then let go and the ruler origin will appear at that point as shown below.

I found this interesting website about a man who carves designs out of real eggs. How Cool is that? Two of his designs are pictured below.

One thing that never fails to frustrate me is when someone sends you a Quark file but does not collect the file for output. Basically the collect for output function finds and collects any pictures and fonts in your document so that when you send the file to someone else they have all the files they need. One thing I have noticed with new Quark users is that because they can see the pictures on screen when they have the Quark document open, they assume that another user will have the pictures. This is not the case, unless you actually send the individual picture files through with your Quark document the pictures cannot be reproduced or printed. The simplest way of doing this is to use the collect for output function from the file menu, to collect all the included pictures together. The same function will also alert you if there are pictures missing from the document which is useful. One thing to be careful about is ticking the collect fonts for output option as you might not be licensed to send the fonts onto another party. I find the easiest thing to do is use common fonts that most printers are already likely to have a license for, so the issue does not occur.

I'm posting this mainly because I have to look it up each time I want to create a screenshot on the Mac. Just hold down Apple, Shift and 3 and if you have your sound turned on you will hear a camera click noise as you take a shot of the screen. My Mac seems to save it as default on the desktop.

It occurred to me the other day how useful I find the library function in Quark. It certainly saves me a lot of time. Basically the feature allows you create a library which you can then open up with any document. The library palette sits to one side as shown below on the right. Any element that you use frequently can simply just be dragged into the library so you don’t have to spend time creating it from scratch next time you want to use. I generally use the function for house filler adverts that appear in the publication most weeks.

If you want to select a lot of text but can't see all of it for example when it runs off the page, this tip is useful. I use it when I import a large amount of text into a Quark document and need to change the point size or font style. Just position the cusor before the text you want to select and hold down Apple, Alt, Shift and the down arrow key. This selects all the text from the point where your cusor is postioned to the end of the document. It's different from using the select all command because that option will select everything in the document, wheras with this command you have more control over the selection and any text before the selection point can remain untouched.

I know this is not strictly design related but decided to post it here mainly because it is Mac related and it took me so long to fix the problem. I use Entourage on my Mac mini as my email program and for the last couple of years it has been working fine with no problems. I started having trouble on Friday when my Mac could not connect to the email server. After a while I discovered that although I could receive emails, I couldn’t send anything. Generally I assume a problem like this is an issue with the Macs preferences being corrupted or it losing some of the network settings, as sometimes happens. After running a cleaning programme to fix any corrupted preferences and checking and re-entering all the network settings, I still had the problem. My husband at this point assured me that there was no problem with my Mac and that the issue was with the exchange server. After contacting the person who maintained the server and finding there were no problems that end, I was out of ideas. Then a rather helpful tech support guy gave me a call. After ten minutes he worked out that the problem was the Mac had switched the default account it was using. By this I mean it was trying to use another account to send emails. The fix, a simple click of a button to set the right email account as default and everything worked. Very simple, when you know how, but frustrating because it took so long to find the problem.

It occurred to me today how useful I find the history palette in Photoshop. The history palette for anyone new to Photoshop, remembers everything you do. If you add a filter, a brush stroke or select something it will remember it. The good thing is if you then decide you want to remove a particular filter because you preferred the document without it, you can. Simply open the history palette and you can click to go back to any previous state and so discarding the recent changes.