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Hi Everyone,
I've finished a party invite in Illustrator and it is perfect except for the printed text. Everything looks fine on my screen, but on my test prints from Walgreens some of the text has a slight blur (League Gothic font)and the other looks slightly pixelated (A & S Motherlode font). I have outlined the text and I think on this last print I turned off the anti-aliasing.

Printer? Font? Settings in Illustrator? If anyone has any suggestions about what needs to be adjusted, I'd love to hear them!

Thanks,
Kim

Can you post an example?

What resolution did you send to the printer when you exported the file and sent it off? Pixelation often comes from setting your resolution too low.

I've attached a copy of my invite (Hopefully, correctly! ).

I know I originally set everything up at 300 dpi. Walgreens will only take a .jpg, so I exported it for the web and I don't remember making any changes to the resolution there.

Thanks so much!
Kim

If you exported it for the web, you may have lowered the resolution. Do you have Photoshop Elements or Photoshop? You can check the actual size of the JPEG file there. I'm curious to see what it is in pixels. It's a cute design!

I did this design in Illustrator, but I have PSE 9. When I opened it up in PSE, it is 1275 x 1875 pixels.

I have googled like crazy and tinkered around for hours trying to figure this out, but it seems these fonts are determined to complicate my life.

I'm doing this one free for a friend at work. I'd love to do invites to sell eventually, but I clearly have to get my printing issues resolved first!

Thanks for your help!

Hm. The size should be fine, then. Right off the top of my head, I'm not sure what happened, unless you clicked an option somewhere that tweaked the text.

There are several Illustrator gurus on the site. I'll play around with those fonts in the next couple of days, but also put a note in the mentor forum to see if any of them can troubleshoot through the issue.

Do you have another printer that you can print to, or one at home, to rule out printer error? You could also try making a different document using the same fonts, and see if it does the same thing.

Totally off topic...Kimber I noticed you have 10,000 posts. Wow!!
Maria

I did one other invite a couple of months ago in Illustrator using a standard Windows font and I had the same kind of problem with the text. In that case, the thin text had just this hint of a weird offset of blur at the edges. Whatever the problem is I seem to be doing or not doing something consistently.

I did try making another document last night and when I zoomed in I could tell that text was going to be pixelated as well. Just tried printing on a color laserjet and, while the effect isn't as noticeable as it is on the photo paper, I had the same results. This is the same file I was working with yesterday that I sent to Walgreen's to have printed, so I'm pretty sure the problem is in my file and is not a printer issue.

I feel like an Invitation and Announcements flunkie! That class is beyond amazing though! It is definitely the student, not the class!

Thanks again for all of your help and congrats on 10,000 posts! That's quite an accomplishment, so I'll throw in an extra thanks because I get the feeling that lots of those posts have been you helping folks like me.



PS: I'm working on a PC with Windows 8 and I have PSE 9 and Illustrator CS6.

You aren't a flunkie. If you want to email me the original AI file, I can take a look. I'm not sure I can sort this out but I am happy to try. I'll PM you my email.

Edit: I can't PM you for some reason. It's terebene at gmail dot com.

Terebene,
Thank you so much! I just sent it to you!

Kim

Kendra (Terebene) is awesome! I did a little hunting, too. This is from Adobe's help content:

Set Anti-aliasing Options for Type

When you save artwork in a bitmap format—such as JPEG, GIF, or PNG—Illustrator rasterizes all objects at 72 pixels per inch and applies anti-aliasing to them. However, if your artwork contains type, the default anti-aliasing settings may not produce the desired results. Illustrator provides several options specifically for rasterizing type. To take advantage of these options, you must rasterize type objects before you save the artwork.

1. Select the type object, and do one of the following:

*To permanently rasterize the type, choose Object > Rasterize.

*To create the appearance of rasterization without changing the object’s underlying structure, choose Effect > Rasterize.

2. Choose an anti-aliasing option:

*None
Applies no anti-aliasing and maintains the hard edges of type when it is rasterized.

*Art Optimized (Supersampling)
Default option that rasterizes all objects, including text objects by the specified resolution and applies anti-aliasing to them. Default resolution is 300 pixels per inch.

*Type Optimized (Hinted)
Applies anti-aliasing that is best suited to type. Anti-aliasing reduces the appearance of jagged edges in the rasterized image and gives type a smoother on?screen appearance. However, it can also make small text difficult to read.

Sorry I'm not more help. I've been focusing more on graphics in Illustrator than text. I usually create my graphics in Illustrator, then move them into Photoshop to finish with text and photos.

I think I read that and tried it at one point, but who knows what else I had done to that file by then that I inadvertently saved. I think it's definitely worth ditching the text and starting fresh with your suggestion. The 2 main things I got from Google were this and creating outlines.

I'm also going to reset Illustrator to all of its default settings in case I have accidentally set something that may be causing this weirdness.

Terebene (bless her!) and I have nearly figured out that the problem is during the export to jpg. The font looks great in the original AI file at any magnification, but after exporting to jpg if you go past 100% things start to get jagged looking.

I can definitely see the benefits of designing graphics in Illustrator and then switching to Photoshop for finishing. I've just had more experience with Illustrator, so that's just what I gravitated towards.

All this fuss for a little 4x6 invite! Mostly though I just want to figure out what I'm doing wrong so I don't meet with this frustration next time. I want the feeling of making an awesome invite and picking up a test print that makes me squeal with delight instead of bang my head on the counter!

Thanks again gals!

Well, after all of the work, I would love to be able to say that I knew for sure what the solution was, but this morning I picked up 2 absolutely PERFECT prints of my invite. That was the I was supposed to be feeling!

I can say that this invite was exported from PSE as a jpg instead of Illustrator. I also made sure that everything was setup RGB and I'm pretty sure that wasn't the case with my first file.

I think the only think I had done was to create outlines of the text in Illustrator and I literally copied each element from a layer in AI to a layer in PSE before I exported it. I also noticed during saving that PSE let me set the image quality to 12 ...I think it only went to 10 in AI.

Ever the science geek, I'm planning experiments. Maybe lots, so get ready Walgreens!! I need to know that I can reproduce these awesome results!!

PSE, RGB, that extra bit of image quality boost, wonky AI.... I'm going to figure it out and hopefully it will help someone else having the same problem.

to KBear and Terebene for all of their help!!

Kim

Hooray!!!

I'm so glad it worked!! Yay! And I am very curious about the results of your experiments. Let us know! (science geek, too...)