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SeSawaya · Mar 12, 2009, 03:05 PM

n00b to Illustrator CS4, I'm doing a CD jacket layout and I THOUGHT I was about done. But the layout requires one of the panels to be upside down on the layout (ECO Wallet from Discmakers™)

So my problem is I did it as my "special thanks"section panel. I wrote the text, then flipped it upside down. this REALLY messes up the letter spacing & is not what it looked like at all. How do I do this?? I thought what I was doing was pretty basic stuff, but like I said, I'm a n00b. It's just text over a image file.

PLEASE>>>> any help would be highly appreciated.

Thorzdad · Mar 12, 2009, 04:02 PM

So, when you say you "flipped it upside down", which tool did you use? I can't think of any reason the text spacing would be messed-up.
What I would do is simply set the text the way I want, then select the text and use the Rotate tool.

SeSawaya · Mar 12, 2009, 04:16 PM

yah, this is strange. I did what you said, wrote it out, selected it, then rotated it under objects-> transform-> Rotate.

Now, when I select the 3 individual items and copy it (command -C) then open preview and paste it, (rotate it twice to the left) then it looks fine. Perfectly fine.

While looking at it in the CS4 doc, (while upside down) it looks messed up. Rotate it and it's fine. So I saved the page as a PDF and opened it in Acrobat. It's still messed up.

When I send this in to be printed, I'm afraid it might stay 'messed up' instead of corrected.

thanks!

Thorzdad · Mar 12, 2009, 04:23 PM

Hmmm...
Now, I'm not at all familiar with CS4, but....Instead of doing Object>Transform>Rotate, can you simply use the Rotate tool from the Tools palette? I know it seems like both ways should do the same thing, but, even with earlier versions of CS, I've found that "Transform" can do odd, unexpected things.

SeSawaya · Mar 12, 2009, 04:24 PM

So this is what it looks like in CS4

This is what it looks like if I copy and paste into Preview.

SeSawaya · Mar 12, 2009, 04:31 PM

Originally Posted by Thorzdad

Hmmm...
Now, I'm not at all familiar with CS4, but....Instead of doing Object>Transform>Rotate, can you simply use the Rotate tool from the Tools palette? I know it seems like both ways should do the same thing, but, even with earlier versions of CS, I've found that "Transform" can do odd, unexpected things.

that seemed to help a bit. It's almost reformatting it to get the right spacing for the orientation that it is (upside down and backwards - kind of) Man what a pain!

Thorzdad · Mar 12, 2009, 04:33 PM

Yeah...I see what you mean.
I'm wondering if this isn't simply a display problem? Does it still looked messed-up when you zoom-in close? What font are you using? Looks fairly standard.
Just for fun, convert all the text to paths before you rotate it. Then, see if it still looks bad when you rotate it.

SeSawaya · Mar 12, 2009, 04:40 PM

well SOME of it is fixed if you zoom in, but not all of it. The bottom text still shows issues.
Font is Myraid Pro, I believe this is standard.

"Just for fun, convert all the text to paths before you rotate it. Then, see if it still looks bad when you rotate it."

Wish I knew HOW to do this. Nothing I find seems to do this action. Paths are foreign to me!!

Thorzdad · Mar 12, 2009, 04:45 PM

Well, in previous versions of CS, to convert type to paths, you'd select the text and go Type > Create Outlines. I know Adobe has dorked around with things in CS4, so I only hope that's the correct path for you.

Thorzdad · Mar 12, 2009, 04:49 PM

These sorts of things are horribly frustrating because they simply shouldn't happen, especially on such a darn simple job. Like you said...it's just text over an image. That's about as basic as it gets.

SeSawaya · Mar 12, 2009, 04:51 PM

yes you remembered well!!

Well that did it. Seems fine now. how crazy random seeming!

thanks a million, this really saved me lots of stress!!

SeSawaya · Mar 12, 2009, 04:51 PM

thank you!

Thorzdad · Mar 12, 2009, 04:58 PM

You're welcome.
Though, it really offends me, as a designer and long-time user of Illustrator, that you had to resort to converting everything to paths. This tells me there's either a fault in Adobe's type engine or in the way it displays the text. That's a lot of text to have to convert to paths.

Did you happen to try and print-out the text? If it prints correctly, then it should probably be fine when you send it away to the printer.

SeSawaya · Mar 12, 2009, 05:00 PM

yah it's CS4, not Illustrator 1.0. I'd expect this from Pages, but isnt the world built on Illustrator???

I have not printed it yet, that should be what I do now.

Andrew Stephens · Mar 12, 2009, 05:07 PM

The problem (obviously) with converting text to paths is that you loose editability of the text. I would have duplicated the layer first, then converted to paths and hidden the text layer, so you could easily change type later if needed.

I would say this is almost certainly a problem with AI's screen rendering of type. It's not like there haven't been issues with that in the past.

Do you have AI set to anti alias text or not. You might try switching. Maybe the anti aliasing is borked on screen when inverted.

SeSawaya · Mar 12, 2009, 05:12 PM

Just printed it and it looks good.

Anti Alias artwork is checked under general preferences. Is this what you mean?

Thorzdad · Mar 12, 2009, 05:19 PM

Yes, that is what he means.
Since the text looked good when upright, I doubt it's a problem with anti-aliasing. I agree...there's something borked with illustrator's type display. And, as you say, we've seen issues with type before...

Oisín · Mar 12, 2009, 06:19 PM

Testing this, very simple example.

Screen grab from within Illustrator:

JPEG image resulting from Save for Web & Devices:

PDF file of the image/text made by running the File -> Scripts -> SaveDocsAsPDF script in Illustrator.

As you can see, Illustrator shows the spacing all bungled up, but both images and PDFs saved look correctly. How did you save your file to PDF from Illustrator, SeSawaya? You say that your PDF retained the bungled-up-ness, but mine looks fine (both in Preview and Acrobat 9.0).

Thorzdad · Mar 12, 2009, 06:27 PM

Wait a minute...can you not simply "Save As...PDF" in CS4?
(Like I said...I'm not familiar with CS4)

Oisín · Mar 12, 2009, 06:37 PM

Originally Posted by Thorzdad

Wait a minute...can you not simply "Save As...PDF" in CS4?
(Like I said...I'm not familiar with CS4)

Yes, you can.

I was actually just a bit confuzzled, there, ’cause I never save to PDF from Illustrator. I’m used to doing it from InDesign, where I normally just use one of the PDF presets, so I kind of panicked for a second, looking through the menu in Illustrator and finding no such thing. My first thought was then to print to PDF, but that didn’t give me any options whatsoever (including what to call the file or where to save it to!), and the OS print dialogue box has PDF printing disabled. So I just used that script. Which was obviously a bad idea, ’cause the resulting PDF file is 1.6 MB!

File now updated to 98 KB version from Save as… instead.

(I’m also still quite new at CS4, so I’m still finding my way around it)

dimmer · Mar 14, 2009, 09:23 PM

Hasn't Carbon had a long standing issue with display problems? Seems like that could account for this.