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All right now I'd like to show you how to go about saving a document, how to save your
illustration from Illustrator. There's not a whole heck of a lot of reason
to save this illustration, this new one, because it's completely blank.
You could save that illustration, if you wanted to and it's not a bad idea to save before
you start working on a document, because after all, the earlier you save, the
earlier you're protected. However, I'm going to go ahead and save a different
document, something that's a little more interesting that I still have open.
So I'm going to switch to another one of my open documents. I could do it by choosing
the document from the Window menu, from the bottom of the Window menu, but instead
I'm go to press the keyboard shortcut, Control+Tab on the PC that would be Command+Tilde on the
Mac. The Tilde key is the one that's to the left of the 1 key,
directly above the Tab key on an American keyboard.
And that's going to switch me to this Playful violin .ai file that I modified a couple of
exercises ago. Now, if you don't have this file open and
you're trying to work along with me, don't worry you can save anything you want to.
It doesn't matter what you save. And so you can go ahead and save that new illustration
if you like. I'm just trying to keep things entertaining
on screen here. Now I'm going to go to the File menu and if
I've already saved the document, and I just want to update it then I could
choose the Save command. If I want to save it under a different name
or to a different location, then I would choose Save as, and I'm going to go
ahead and choose Save As, or I could press Control+Shift+S.
Again this is one of those standard keyboard shortcuts across all the Adobe applications,
Control+Shift+S is for Save As. And that's to bring up the Save As dialog
box, and of course I would name the illustration at this point, and I'll
just call it My modifications or something along those lines. If I were really creating
a project I would hopefully come up with something more meaningful than
that since everything I do is going to qualify as My modifications.
Now you have the option of saving a specific file type. By default, it's going to be an
ai document, an Adobe Illustrator document of course. You could switch to PDF,
although there's really no reason to do that because you're going to embed a
PDF document inside this ai file in just a moment.
You could, if this were the olden days, you could go ahead and Save out an EPS document.
Back in the day when we were placing these sorts of graphics into
QuarkXPress and into PageMaker, we had to go with EPS, that is
Encapsulated PostScript documents, so that the printer would understand the graphic when
it was time to print it. These days, that's really not necessary. If you're
still using a QuarkXpress 3 or 4 or something along those lines,
then you're going to have to go with Illustrator EPS.
But if you're working with a modern layout application such as more recent versions of
QuarkXpress or any version of Adobe InDesign then you want to stick with
ai, much more flexible in format. Then we have ait, which is your
Illustrator template formats which is great if you want to be able to create template
documents that open as untitled documents. Anyway I'm going to go and save
My graphic as a .ai file and I'm going to click on the Save button.
Then you're going to get yet another dialog box, this time asking you what version of
the Illustrator format you want to save to, and you can save to a lot of different
versions. Every single one of these is slightly different.
So if you're trying to save for backward compatibility, like you're working with somebody who still
has Illustrator CS, then you could save to the CS format, however
note that you get to see this little warning down here that says Saving to a legacy
format may cause somes changes in your text layout and, this is a bigger deal, may disable
some editing features when the document is read back in. So basically some
things, some really flexible, wonderful things that you're doing inside of your
document might be rendered out to dumb paths that are less flexible.
So you need make absolute sure that it's worth saving a backward-compatible file. What I
would recommend you do is save one version in the Illustrator CS3 format
and then save another version in the Illustrator whatever format, the Illustrator
x format. You can go all the way back to Japanese Illustrator 3, really back in the old days,
back in the, oh gosh that could be the late 80s early 90s somewhere
around there. I'm going to stick with Illustrator CS3 so
I don't get any of these warnings. Go ahead and leave the subset font option
the way it is, that just allows Illustrator to control what fonts get saved along
with the document. Not for the sake of editability but for the sake of display and for the sake
of conveying these fonts to other applications when you import
the files. Do you want to create a PDF compatible file?
If you're going to InDesign or you're going to a modern version of QuarkXpress
and you're saving a .ai file then definitely yes,
leave this turned on, it also allows you to open the illustration inside of the free Adobe
Reader application so that other people can see your illustration without
having to own Illustrator. However, if you don't care about that, if
you're never going to be opening the illustration inside any other program
but Illustrator, you can get smaller file sizes
by turning Create PDF Compatible File off and notice then your fonts go away as well.
You're not going to be able save font definitions along with the file. I'm going
to leave that turned on though for the most flexible file possible.
You want to go ahead and embed your ICC profiles. I'm going to tell you more about color settings
in the next chapter, but for now just leave that checkbox turned on
or if it's not turned on, go ahead and turn it on and yes use compression.
This is lossless compression, it doesn't hurt anything, it just ensures that you have a
smaller file. That it. That's all you've got to do. Now
go ahead and click on OK and by the way these should be the default settings.
So if ever you don't really want to pay any attention to this dialog box you should just
be able to click OK in the future and that will go ahead and save that file
to disk. I have done it I've gone ahead and saved my file.
All right, that's it I've managed to successfully save my illustration. I'll be able to open
it up later inside of Illustrator or place it into a QuarkXPress
or InDesign file. In the next exercise I'm going to show you
a top secret tip for closing multiple files at a time.