Illustrator lecture 2: how to use Adobe Illustrator with vector plots? - PowerPoint Presentation

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Illustrator lecture 2:how to use Adobe Illustrator with vector plots?

WAT-E2090

Water and people

Matlab

Open demo2.m (available in

MyCourses)

Change current folder to your own oneRun until the examples

Save figure as .eps

Select figure with populations in coastal areas

Select File – Save as…

Save it as eps file (e.g.

coastal_pop.eps)

Open adobe illustrator

Programme is available in

listed

computer rooms (see MyCourses)Open coastal_pop.eps

Remove clipping mask, grouping,

Matlab, excel and other

programmes

produce unnecessary masks and grouping to vector files. It is advisable to remove those before starting to work with the figure. Do as follows:Do following commands from menu bar

Select – AllObject – UngroupObject – Clipping mask – releaseObject – Compound path – release

Delete masks

After you have released the masks, you can delete them by selecting the white areas and pressing delete (the A4 page remaining is the art board and you cannot delete that)

Move objects

If

you

want to

move multiple objects, you

might

first

want

to

group

them

together

Select

the

objects to group and select Object – Group (Ctrl + G)If you’re left with unnecessary things like the white background box you can just delete them

Align and distribute tools

Sometimes

you

want to arrange objects differently

than

in

your

original

M

atlab

plot

Align

and

distribute

tools are useful for thatYou can find them under Window – AlignFor example, in Matlab we distributed the bars based on year, but

if you change

your mind and want

to distribute them equally

instead

, it is

very

easy

in Illustrator

Distribute example

First

group

each pair of bars and their

year

label

together

(Ctrl + G)

Select

all

bars

and

year

labelsSelect Horizontal Distribute Space from Align toolbar

For

instance

,

you

can

try

to

vertically

align the center points of the y-axis label and the legend

Experiment with align tools as well

Removing unnecessary objects

After

previous

example we were

left

with

ticks

for

years

.

We

didn’t

group

them so they are in the wrong place.

Are

they

necessary

for

the

figure

?

If

not, remove

Select one of the ticks, then:Select – Same - Appearance

All

the

ticks

and

lines

are now selected. Deselect what you want to keep and delete rest.

Changing colours

To

change

colors

of the bars, select

one

bar

or

the

color

in

legend

,

then

:

Select

– Same – Fill color

This

is

easier

if

you

ungroup

the

bars/legend first

Select the colour of your liking and repeat for other colours

If

you’re

interested

,

colorbrewer2.org

offers

a range of nice color schemes to be used particularly in mapping

Adjust artboard

By clicking the Artboard symbol in the left toolbar, you can adjust it

Export figure

Once you are happy on your figure, you can export it as

png

, for example, to be used in a documentFile – Export…To crop the exported figure to art board, you can tick the Use

artboards option