Tag: Graphics

Chapter 9. The Illustrator Control Panel 3:29

  • That bar between the top section and the main area is called the control panel
    • Andy called it the control panel
  • You can let it float or drag it to the top or bottom
  • Provides context-sensitive information and control on the selected object
  • First part of the area remains the same
  • Second part of the area changes per-tool
  • Anything colored orange pops up a panel right there instead of on the right side
  • When you do a select all you can bulk transform all object fills and strokes mapping one color to another
  • Can add and remove controls from the control panel
  • Master this!

Chapter 8. The Illustrator User Interface 5:28

  • All about the user interface
  • Menubar: Pulldown menus
    • Click-and-do
  • Top
    • Bridge management
    • Arrange files differently
    • Workspaces: Pre-set screen configurations of Panels
  • Below-Top: Options Bar, for what you are doing
    • Configuration for the tool that you are using
    • Options bar: Possible things that can be on the bar
  • Left: Tools
    • Hover over a tool to get a popup with the keyboard shortcut for the tool
    • Arrow on lower right corners means that there is more to do
      • Access via
        • Click and hold
        • Option-Click cycles through the options
      • Can rip that off into its own menu to be positioned anywhere
  • Objects are composed of fills and strokes, that is the box and donut
  • Screen modes controls full-screen-ness
  • Panels
    • Pre-configured via Workspace
    • On the right side
  • Bottom: Artboard
    • Select them
    • Shows type tool
    • Customizable by clicking on arrow in the bar for each section

Chapter 7. Controlling Illustrator Through Preferences 11:03

  • Preferences make the program yours
    • More efficient
    • Faster because of hardware
    • Perfect your workflow
    • Change per workflow
  • Random valuable settings follow
  • Preferences key: Command-K
  • General
    • Keyboard increment
      • Arrow key moves by one increment
      • Shift-arrow moves by ten increments
        • Important for symbol placement on keycaps
      • Set to 0.1mm
    • Constraint angle sets the axis on which your tools draw
    • Precise Cursors sets default between gross and fine selection cursor
      • Hold caps-lock to access tool via hold-and-release
    • Scale Stroke and Effects controls whether or not effects resized when you resize the object with drag-and-resize
  • Sync Settings
    • Not on my box
    • Synchronizes between multiple boxes
    • Settings
      • How do we reset all of them?
        • Via here
        • Delete the Adobe Illustrator Prefs file, it will be regenerated on startup
      • Can we define different settings profiles?
        • Seemingly not
        • Could use Git
  • Units
    • Configured with: Millimeters
    • For everything
    • Identify Objects By: XML ID
      • Might make it easier to work with Inkscape/XML tools?
  • Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks
    • Can speed up image manipulation by dividing load between disks
    • Depends on disk speed
  • User Interface
    • Brightness themes
    • Custom: 64%
    • Tabs and not-auto collapse are good

SCALABLE VECTOR GRAPHICS (SVG)

SVG is a markup language for describing two-dimensional graphics applications and images, and a set of related graphics script interfaces.

That is probably one of the “understatements of the century” kind of things. At least, it would appear that way to folks like myself who have never worked with such things (nor had the need to hand-code Postscript as seemingly many others have).
The fact that full access to the document is provided for the HTML container and is entirely accessible both to and from JavaScript makes this a quite amazing computational/visual platform.