Exporting JPEGs from Illustrator

Below is the quickest, easiest way to save Illustrator CS3 artwork to JPEG format. This method will allow you to export just the selected artwork, or the entire file. It makes no difference if the artwork is on or off the Artboard.

1. Select the artwork you want to export.

2. Double-click on the Crop Area tool (or press Shift-O [the letter O, not zero] and then return)

3. Choose Fit Crop Area to selected art for the Preset

4. Click the OK button. You may need to manually adjust the crop boundary if your image contains a mask.

5. Choose File > Export

6. In the Export dialog box, choose JPEG for the Format. Give the file a name and a location to save it to.

7. Click the Export button.

8. Fill in the JPEG Options dialog as desired, and click the OK button.

To remove the crop boundary, select the Crop Area tool, and then hit the Delete key.

Multi-file Place

InDesign CS3's Multi-file Place command makes short work of placing multiple files into your layout. But what if all the files you need aren't in the same folder? Here's how to place images from multiple folders at once with Multi-File Place:

On the Mac, use List view instead of Column view in the Place dialog box. (List view is the one with the "flippy triangles" that allow you to view the contents of multiple folders simultaneously). Then flip open the folders you need, and command-click to select multiple files.

On Windows, you will need to switch to the "Adobe Dialog" by clicking on the Use Adobe Dialog button in the bottom-left corner of the Place dialog box. Then, use the icon in the upper-right corner to switch to Details view. Now you can open multiple folders simultaneously by clicking on the plus signs to the left of the folder names, and then control-click to select multiple files.

Some round, some not

It's easy to round the corners of a selected frame in InDesign via Object > Corner Options, but this command rounds all the corners of the frame. What if you want just some of the corners to be rounded?

The easiest way to do this is to select a frame and double-click on the CornerEffects script found in InDesign's Scripts panel (Window > Automation > Scripts). The script is installed by default in InDesign CS3. It's included with InDesign CS2, but not installed by default. The CS2 scripts can be downloaded here.

When you run the script, a dialog box appears asking you what type of corner effect to apply, the "Offset" (radius), and the Pattern. If you choose first point for the Pattern, the upper-left corner of the frame will be rounded. If you choose second point, the upper right will be rounded, and so on, proceeding counter-clockwise around the frame. You can also choose options such as "first two", "second and third", etc.

Note that this script can also be run on polygons, stars, and other non-rectangular frames, leading to some interesting results.

Why didn't I think of this earlier?

Today I was laying out a page in InDesign, and the text that I was using had been typed by someone who Loved To Capitalize Each And Every Word!

Of course, InDesign's Type > Change Case > Lowercase command makes short work of fixing this without retyping, and I use this command frequently. But today, it finally dawned on me to add a custom keyboard shortcut for this command to make life a lot easier. Here is how to do this, in case you've never created a custom keyboard shortcut:

1. Choose Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts

2. Choose Type Menu for the Product Area

3. Choose Change Case: lowercase

4. Click in the New Shortcut area, and press the keyboard shortcut you want to use (I used option-L).

5. Click the Assign button, and then the OK button.

InDesign's Info Panel to the rescue

I encountered a head-scratcher today. As I helped a client with a layout, we were trying to locate an elusive image on their file server. We were using Adobe Bridge (of course!) to browse the files visually, but we noticed that some of the images with a .JPG extension did not display thumbnail previews.

Photoshop gave me an error when I tried to any one of these images. But the same images could be placed in an InDesign layout. That seemed strange, so I selected a placed image and looked at the Info Panel (Window > Info) in InDesign. Sure enough, the Info panel said that the image Type was PNG, not JPEG. Someone had tried to change the image from PNG format to JPEG format by simply changing the filename extension. This, of course doesn't work. To change image file formats you need to use a conversion utility or open the image in Photoshop and choose File > Save As.

Without this bit of information in the Info Panel, I probably would have wrongly concluded that the files were damaged. Changing the filename extension back to PNG allowed the image to be opened in Photoshop.