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DesignGeek #58

November 14, 2006 - 2:00am

Raster Resolution Tips in Illustrator

I think most Illustrator users have learned that there's a deceptively innocuous little command in the Effects menu that can ruin high-res output if not attended to: Document Raster Effects Settings. Artists who've been burned once by its default 72 ppi setting will never allow that to happen again.

Yet I think few users realize that the settings in this dialog box govern some other rasters generated by Illustrator, not just the ones from the Effect menu.

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Acrobat 8 Converts Plain PDFs to Forms

I used to go insane in QuarkXPress and InDesign, selecting URLs in the text and setting up hyperlinks to web sites when I wanted the resulting PDF to have live links. Neither layout program makes it easy to do so.

A few years ago I discovered that Adobe Acrobat had a nifty "detect and convert" feature that scanned through the PDF and converted any web URL or e-mail address into a hyperlink on its own. You don't have to create links in the layout program first, just make a PDF out of the document and let Acrobat do the work.

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InDesign's Hidden "Save for Web"

Last week during the InDesign Conference: Master Class in Seattle, one of the seminars I presented was called "Repurposing: Print to Web." If there ever was an exercise in frustration, it was trying to come up with content for this seminar. I spent weeks fretting about it, scouring the web for an answer that wasn't there.

How do you get content that's sitting in a regular InDesign layout file out onto a web site? Other than making a downloadable PDF? Or copying and pasting text from frames to text editors?

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