Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

But as is so often the case with Illustrator, Opacity and blend modes

are just the beginning. There are knockout groups, opacity masks,

new uses for gradients and blends, super-rich blacks, and the won-

ders of rasterization.

If that all sounds a tad overwhelming, don’t fret: Believe it or not,

you’ve already worked your way through the toughest Illustrator

offerings. This is where the fun begins.

Yeah, But Will It Print?

When fi rst released, Illustrator was designed to facilitate the power

of Adobe’s PostScript printing language (and satisfy the design

needs of principal John Warnock’s wife, if legend is to be believed).

The pen tool, for example, exploits the three-point model— anchor

point plus two control handles—popularized by PostScript. Type

outlines, clipping masks, compound paths, and many of Illustra-

tor’s other core objects owe their origins to PostScript.

For years, Illustrator remained in lockstep with PostScript, rendering

each and every graphic as a collection of routines that a PostScript

imagesetter could render in a matter of seconds. In fact, Illustra-

tor was well known as the program that could do precisely what

PostScript could do. If it seemed underpowered compared with its

fl ashier competitors, there was a reason: Il-

lustrator’s feature set was aligned with Post-

Script; the others’ were not.

So it’s perhaps only fi tting that Illustrator—

the program that Adobe once trumpeted for

its straight-and-narrow simplicity—is now

called into question for veering from the

PostScript orthodoxy.

Why do I mention this? Because PostScript

has no provision for a translucent object.

When you blend a path with the paths be-

hind it, Illustrator has to either rasterize

that section of the artwork—that is, con-

vert it to pixels—or break it into subpaths

with opaque fi lls. Illustrator doesn’t modify

your AI fi le; the “fl attening,” as it’s called,

occurs on-the-fl y during the print process.

But even so, there’s an outside chance that

your translucent objects might print opaque

or just plain wrong, as in Figure 8-2.

Figure 8-2 .

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Yeah, But Will It Print?