Sep 14
The ‘Rasterize’ effect on text in Illustrator
2005 at 12.56 am posted by Veerle
Who says you only need Photoshop for your designs for the web? Say you have to create a small button to promote a book and you want the font in a tiny pixel font sharp and crispy. On the other hand the illustration needs to be as flexible as possible. So do I choose Illustrator or Photoshop? The answer is simple choose Illustrator and use the Rasterize effect. Select your text path using the Selection Tool and choose ‘none’ as anti-aliasing option. It’s as easy as that!
And yes, your text is still selectable, editable, scalable etc. exactly how you want it. How’s that! :-) Use the Pixel Preview mode (command/control + option/alt + y, available in Illustrator CS and of course CS2) to control the pixel sharpness. You can edit the paths to your own liking until they are as crispy as possible. Thanks Jon for triggering my mind :-)
These buttons to promote Jeremy Keith’s book “DOM Scripting” were created using Illustrator (CS2). Still, text looks crispy sharp using Illustrator don’t you think?
If you like, you can download these icons and use them to support Jeremy.
This book is not aimed to programmers but to us, simple thinking designers :o) A review is on its way as soon as I receive my copy and had a digg into it ;-)
18served
1
Nice idea.
I think I should have a closer look @ Illustrator.
thx, markus
2
great suggestion!
I must admit I find myself spending more and more time with Illustrator. It’s worth the time and effort to learn. I managed to switch to thinking with vectors & shapes instead of pixels and since than it works well for me.
3
Thanks for the tip!! :-) it can be useful…
4
I’ve finally switched to Illustrator from Freehand and I prefer it, and, of course, I can find lots of tips here at Veerle’s place!
5
So it’s kinda the opposite from the ‘smart object’ in Photoshop cs2?
6
Thanks for the tip.
Also, from the looks of the sample chapter from ‘DOM Scripting’ on Friends of Ed… I think I will be getting that book as soon as possible.
7
@AkaXakA, not sure if I understand your question, but if you mean that you maintain editability after applying ‘Rasterize’, then yes you could say so. Although these are different things. In Photoshop you rasterize a layer, in Illustrator you actually apply an effect to an object. Hope I’m making a bit of sense here.
8
nice one veerle .. thanks for the tip!
9
starting classes illustrator next week. can’t wait to see the useful tricks for webdesign…
10
I suppose this only works from CS2 onwards? I just tried it in CS and my text is no longer editable. It appears in the “Links” palette as a bitmap object.
11
@Jermome Dahdah, strange, it should work in CS too. I did another test right now in CS and it works just like in CS2. You can also select that effect afterwards in the Appearance palette and just trash it, then you are back to aliased text just like before, so that’s total flexibility. The text remains editable exactly the same as in CS2. Are you sure you select Effect > Rasterize after you’ve selected your text (with the Pointer tool)? Also, do you use a proper installed font? Maybe try it with another font to see if you get the same result. I guess if the printer set is missing or the font is corrupt you’ll have trouble applying this effect. Other then that I wouldn’t really know…
12
You’ve done it again. Another excellent tip from the Illustrator genious. I thought I knew a lot about Illustrator but you always come up will great new tips.
The different display styles of fonts has always been an annoyance. I’ve often had to ‘outline text’ to get text to display as it would when you ‘save for web’. The problem with this is that you lose the editing capability. Now I can just use the ‘rasterize’ effect with supersampled anti-aliasing.
Keep up the good work!
13
Ehh… my bad. I mixed up “Object > Rasterize” with “Effect > Rasterize”. :) Who’da thunk they’d give two seperate functions the exact same name?
Thanks for the tip, this could be quite useful.
14
I simply cannot wait for this book!
function preorder{};
for pay {now};
get ‘later’;
else pay {later};
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15
I want to learn Illustrator so bad. I hear how useful it is if your creating logos and such.
Does anyone know any good start points for me to learn Illustrator 10?
16
@Jerome Dahdah, glad you got it working.
@luxuryluke, very funny ;-)
@Amirsan, Total Training has very good DVD tutorials, I got a few myself, they are great and worth the price. Not sure if they still have vs 10 though…
17
I tyied u technique to get rasterize effect on text, but my text is not clear it’s blur hoe to get rid of that blur effect ...........
18
> “you want the font in a tiny pixel font sharp and crispy”
You can also use a screenshot of the font rendered using Windows XP with ClearType smoothing !