8 replies to this topic

[Daniel Huffman]

Despite my terror of public speaking, I've been convinced to present again at PCD this year in Portland. I'll be demonstrating a series of quick Illustrator tips.

I'm brainstorming what tips to present, and here is where I turn to all of you. What are some of your favorite little Illustrator tricks that more people should know about? Perhaps things that, when you figured them out, you wondered, "Why didn't anyone tell me this before?" I'm looking for materials that will be of interest to most of the PCD population, and will be fairly quick to present (I have three blocks of time, at ~5 to 7 minutes each).

I have a few ideas in mind, myself, but I'd like to hear from other folks, as it can be hard to gauge what things people already know, and what they'd like to hear more on.

And, of course, if you'd like to not spoil the surprise of what you may find in my presentation, you should probably not read any further.

[razornole]

What's PCD?

kru

[DaveB]

What's PCD?

kru

Practical Cartography Day, the preconference day of presentations at the NACIS meeting.

[frax]

Daniel - you could run a search on this forum and see what Illy questions people ask. One that seems to surface now and then is how to do road casings when roads cross (answer: use appearance panel on a group/layer).

[Adam Wilbert]

Since I'll be in attendance for your presentation(s), I hesitate to throw out ideas that I already feel comfortable with. But if you had some tips on proper/methodical/reasoned approaches to generalizing features in Illustrator, I'd be interested in that. There has got to be a better process than what I'm currently doing, which is eyeballing Object>Path>Simplify...

[Michael Schmeling]

But if you had some tips on proper/methodical/reasoned approaches to generalizing features in Illustrator, I'd be interested in that. There has got to be a better process than what I'm currently doing, which is eyeballing Object>Path>Simplify...

You may try the Cartography plugins from ETH, which include some functions for generalizing. Unfortunately only available in German.

[Hans van der Maarel]

There's also a generalisation option in MAPublisher, which uses the Douglas-Peucker algorithm, tolerance can be set in real-world or document units (I find that last option very useful)

[Daniel Huffman]

Daniel - you could run a search on this forum and see what Illy questions people ask. One that seems to surface now and then is how to do road casings when roads cross (answer: use appearance panel on a group/layer).

A fine suggestion. I'll have a look through this weekend. The road casings thing could also be expanded more generally into "appearances on groups/layers vs. on individual paths" -- I wonder, though, if it would be too rudimentary for the audience? So hard to tell, though no matter what I present, it's likely there are at least a few people in the audience who know it already, and a few who don't.

[cartdeco]

Daniel,

This is a bit obscure, and not recommended for most print mapping projects, but adding a text halo is something that I see done badly all too often. The standard approach seems to be to add a white stroke to a font which entirely destroys the font design. When testing layouts for web and mobile apps that use text halos I find using the appearance palette to add a new stroke to the text works well - from there you can adjust opacity, etc. Just drag the stroke below the fill and all is good.

Another thing worth mentioning - and I haven't delved into CS6 yet - is Illustrator's ability work with html5 and export out CSS code. For CS5 this came as an additional update. Useful for working with TileMill.

Hope the talk goes well. Wish I could make it to Portland this year, but sadly won't be able to.

Cheers,

Craig