Ascii-line art question

Hi,
I have made a series of ascii-drawings as illustrations for a story book.
This is very font sensitive and the font that I am using is "Courier".
An example is shown below.
                                                       ~V~
    ~V~                                          ~V~    )           ~V~
     )                                            ) >-~-<            )
>-~-<                                        >-~-< \ /~       >-~-<
\,,,,\,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,\,,/~,,,,,,,,,,,,,/,,,/~,,,,,,,
I need to make large sized prints of these ascii drawings, for a gallery show.
I am a newbie when it comes to digital art production. Any suggestions?
Would re-typing these pictures in adobe illustrator in Courier font at a large font size work?
Are there any better methods?

There is no good reason to convert the type to outlines. Simply export to PDF with fonts embedded. Converting to outlines bloats the file and can result in blotchy text at smaller magnifications. Text realized via fonts using intelligent scaling via the "hinting" in the fonts. There is no downside to embedding the fonts.
- Dov

Similar Messages

Line art question

Do any of the programs in Adobe Creative Cloud have illustrations (clipart) that I can use for graphics in InDesign???
Also, which of the Creative Cloud programs is the easiest to use for taking apart and recoloring graphics?

"Easy" is a subjective term. It really depends on your experience level. Illustrator is the tool of choice for creating vector graphics.
http://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator/features.html
If you can't find what you need in AI, you will typically find exactly what you want at the following royalty free image houses.
http://www.dreamstime.com/illustrations-clipart-cat172
http://www.istockphoto.com/search/text/line%20art/filetype/illustrations/source/basic#a37f 921
http://www.gettyimages.com/creative/frontdoor/istockvectors
Nancy O.

Pen Tool settings question; Line art; Photoshop CC 2014.

Hello, and thanks for your help.
I am following a tutorial about Line Art.
I have to achieve the highlighted (yellow) settings in this image from the tutorial.
http://i.imgur.com/uXxCgWG.png
Here is how my settings look.
http://i.imgur.com/VmDsh1b.png
Path Operations and Auto Add/Delete are the only ones I can find.
The other two I cannot.
Also, what do you think about these settings from making HQ Line art? Would you recommend other settings? Why?
Thanks.

Maybe this helps:
As you can see both of these are from two different versions of photoshop.
The tools can be found in the left toolbar. the two pens are in the same pen group and the remaining are in the shapes group. Press mouse button on the icon in the left tool bar and wait a few seconds then the flyout will appear. Any icon with a triangle in its corner has a flyout selection of tools.
For a beginner, I would recommend using shapes instead of paths (unless they are required) for learning. As you will be less discouraged when trying to change simple settings like its stroke or fill. Both shapes and paths will give you a vector shape, one is a bit easier to use and the other is a true path instead of a mask. But both will give you a clean edge and are scalable.

Using Reader XI (eleven). Line art in download file has turned black. How do I get line art back?

I am using Reader XI (eleven). I have downloaded my Nikon S9700 camera resource manual (pdf) and now all the line art appears as black images. How do I restore the line art? Document was created in Adobe 5.X. I have downloaded most recent version of camera manual and same condition exists.

Answered my own question: Under Preferences> Accessibility> Document Color Options I had selected "Replace Document Colors". Don't you love it when things work out?

Best Way to Make Line Art From Scratch

Hi and I apologize if a basic question, but I've created a rather complex illustration, and I'm wondering if there's a quicker way to go from y first attached image, to the transparent second. I feel as if I'm spending a lot of monotonous time following a pattern of Minus Front, and Make Compound Path to set the black background up for another round of cutouts. All black in the image is one filled shape encompassing the entire back of the drawing, while everything white is white fill blocking out the black space, or other white objects below.
How can I clean up my act? Or what would be a better strategy from the beginning to achieve transparent line art?
Sincerely thank you for your replies, I'm wasting far too much time here, I know it. Happy to clarify any left out details!

Your basic problem is you are not working methodically and planning as you go. You are drawing a large number of paths willy-nilly until the whole drawing is "done" merely in terms of how it looks on the screen and figuring you'll just deal with the inevitiable decisions of how it is technically organized later. Then you discover you've created an unwieldy and confusing number of objects which you hope to resolve into understandable (therefore predictable) simpler constructs as a last step.
It's far better to have in mind what kind of constructs and general organization you want to end up with and work toward that, completely finishing (trimming, unioning, etc.) each elaborate section accordingly as you go. That way you avoid confusing yourself and creating additional work later when you think you are finished with the line work and want to draw the fills. As you work, always keep in mind what kind of objects you are creating: Each path is either open or closed, filled or unfilled, stroked or unstroked, simple or compound.
Drawings like this may be organized several different ways. None is "right" or "wrong"; but you just create time-wasting frustration when you fail to plan for it:
All line art completely trimmed, without resorting to fills in one area to "hide" unwanted portions of the line work in another area. A separate stack of unstroked filled objects behind the line work to create the coloring. (This method can greatly simplify the issue of trapping.) Some users even prefer to create all the fills on one or more separate Layers (although it's not necessary to do so).
Line art drawn more willy-nilly, with the intention of resorting to LivePaint to do the trimming, filling afterward. Some users live and die by this method. I don't, because all such automated routines invariably create what would otherwise be unnecessary additional anchorPoints, and resulting fills merely "kiss" their adjacent line work, rather than underlay them. That can necessitate more elaborate trapping.
Line work and fills shared by the same paths. Sections of the artwork treated as separate Groups (helmet group, visor group, etc.) An advantage of working this way is that the resulting overlaps allow the relative positions of the pieces to be tweaked later.
Again, it's not that one organizational method is right or wrong; the point is that, like it or not, vector-based drawing is all about creating a stack of independent objects. That is fundamentally different from "painting" in a raster imaging program. By its very nature it imposes a need for intelligent organization of that stack. So you're far better off always at least generally planning for that unavoidable organization, regardless of which scheme you choose. The reckless abandon approach to drawing is antithetical to the nature of vector-based drawing.
For example, consider the leaf designs on the visor. As you've drawn them (evident in your second and third screenshot), they spread into an adjacent area where you intend them to be partially hidden by a white fill in front of them. There's nothing strictly "wrong" with working that way (although I consider it untidy) but it suggests you intend to build your drawing according to the third organizational scheme described above. But that conflicts with your trying to correctly resolve your line work by means of automated routines (outlining strokes, Boolean path operations) later whidh is more appropriate for the first organizational method described above. So using those automated features will in some places cause the unwanted portions to re-appear as the object stack changes (as you can see occurred in your third screenshot). So now you've got stuff that needs to be trimmed away. You've created additional work for yourself.
From where you are, based on your first screenshot, you could try this:
Select All
Object>Path>Outline Strokes
Select All
Pathfinder palette: Merge (unions touching fills of same color and punches overlapping objects of different color in one move)
Do the necessary trimming and correction of unwanted stuff that was previously hidden.
Do any necessary corrections of path direction or winding rule, or compounding to flip fills to voids or vice-versa.
Either create your fill objects behind the line work, or use Live Trace to create them.
Because of the runaway number of paths you have drawn, you may have difficulty doing the above set of steps. If so, try working it in several "sections"; for example, with the black pointer marquee select across half or a third of the drawing, do the steps, then repeat for the next third, and so on.
And don't worry...after you've done this kind of tedious after-the-fact cleanup on a few projects, you'll start to understand the principles of pre-planning the organizational structure of your drawings and start keeping that in mind as you proceed. We've all been there.
JET

Thin white line between line art and live paint fill?

I am using live paint to paint cartoon character illustrations. The artwork is brought into Illustrator CS3 and live traced. Then I convert it to a live paint group and use the paint bucket to fill. Everything looks fine no matter how much I zoom in. If I bring the AI file into Photoshop CS6 I can see a thin white line between the black line art and the fill. This is most noticeable where black meets black. I can also see this sometimes in file previews while browsing through files. If the white line cannot be seen in Illustrator is the file ok? I did just upgrade to CS6 if that would make a difference.
Thank you for any help.

If the white line cannot be seen in Illustrator is the file ok?
Without knowing specifics,nobody knows.
"Okay" for what?
If it looks okay to you in Illustrator, then it's okay for viewing in Illustrator.
If the export of it does not look okay in Photoshop at 1:1 or higher zoom, then it's probably not okay for whatever you're going to do with that raster image.
If it's printed to a low-res composite printer, then it may be okay, because the printer may not be able to resolve the whitish pixels.
If it's printed for commercial (color-separated) reproduction, it may not be okay, depending on the scale at which it will be printed, and on other considerations partially described below.
The autotrace routine does not build traps. Typically, when you color-fill cartoon line art manually, you don't make the shapes that define the fills merely "kiss" the black line work, as would the default treatments of a stupid autotrace. The black line work typically overprints the fills, thereby creating printing traps.
Suppose a portion of your cartoon is a hand-drawn closed circle. The black line work is irregular; it varies in width, having been drawn with a marker or a brush. The circle is colored in with a medium green. There are no sloppy gaps in the original between the green and the black.
You scan it and autotrace it. Unless you apply some deliberate care to make it do otherwise, the autotrace is going to create a compound path, filled with black, and with no stroke; and a green simple path which (hopefully) exactly "kisses" (abuts) the black path. Adobe's on-screen antialiasing of the edge where the two colors abut may or may not cause your monitor to display a faint whitish or grayish sliver between the two colors.
Similarly, Photoshop's rasterization of it, or the rasterization of a raster export filter may do the same, and may actually result in some off-color pixels along the edge. (Your description of the scenario kinda raises the question of why you are auto-tracing something that you're then just going to rasterize in Photoshop anyway. Why do that? Why not just work with the scan in Photoshop?.)
So let's leave Photoshop out of the picture and assume you are autotracing it because you want vector artwork. You zoom way in to see if the whitish sliver enlarges. It doesn't, so you assume it's just an aberation of Illustrator's on-screen antialising. And then someone tells you you're in the clear. But are you? Not so fast.
Let's assume the artwork is destined for commercial (color-separated) printing. Further assume the color of the autotraced black is 100% K, and the color of the autotraced green is 100Y 50C. Three inks involved. None of those three inks are shared between the two objects. So even if the paths do, in fact, perfectly abut, there is no "wiggle room" built in for the minor alignment shifts that almost aways do occur on press.
Bottom line: Even if you do determine that the common antialiasing aberations that frequently occur on-screen in Adobe apps is just that—just an onscreen aberation, that does not necessarily mean your file is suitable for commercial color-separated reproduction.
First, you need to understand that autotracing is not the one-click, instant "conversion" of a raster image to vector artwork that far too many think it to be. Just like everything else, you don't just launch a program like Illustrator, start autotracing things willy-nilly without understanding what's really going on. Just like anyting else, you can use an autotrace feature intelligently or...well...not.
You have options. Illustrator provides an auto-trapping feature. Read up on it in the documentation so you understand what it's all about. Alternatively, you can expand the results of your autotrace, select all the black linework and apply a composite color that includes 100% K and reasonable percentages of C, M, and Y (a so-called "rich black"). Or,depending on the artwork and the desired results, you may consider doing the autotrace as centerlines so you have stroked paths, not just filled paths for the linework. That way, using the flood fill (so called LivePaint) will cause the auto-created fill objects to extend to the paths, not just to the edges of their strokes. Then set the linework to overprint.
At any rate, if you are doing this professionally, you need to read up on the principles and practices of trapping and color separation.
JET

Need help animating line art/paths

Help please...
I am trying to animate a line, to have it tween/morph between a line and a question mark and then back to a line. I've drawn my two shapes in Illustrator as line art (as paths, not as closed shapes), but I'm not seeing the paths as a mask when I paste them into my Solid Layer. The parts of my drawing that have closed shapes come in and form a mask, but not the individual lines/paths, not matter how thick I make them. I can see there is a path in AE if I click on the shape, but it does not come up as a masked area.
Is there a better way to do this, than to animate a mask? Animating masks seems to be the consensus how to do a lot of animation, but I'm stuck trying to get my line appear as part of my mask.
Happy to try another way; I have yet to see a tutorial that does what I'm trying to do, can't be a reveal, since the final shape needs to morph a few times. I am sure this is do-able (and probably not that hard!), but I can't figure it out; in Flash I would just tween between the two shapes, but not seeing how to do that effect in AE.
Thank you!

hi, i took some screengrabs also, so that you can perhaps see what i might be doing wrong...i inlcuded the original shape, from Illustrator, as well as what happens when I paste in AE. for my shape, blends won't work from Illustrator, I need the line to move in a certain way that Illustrator won't do using that feature. thanks very much .

Pagemaker line art loses quality when opened in ID

Hi,
I have a small booklet which I created some years ago in PageMaker 6.5. Each page is 11 x 17 inches black and white. I would like to redo some of the pages and create new ones in InDesign. I have at this point no significant experinece working with In Design.
Initially I was just hopeful to be able to print the old pages from InDesign since the computer with PageMaker is probably on limted time. When I try to open the PageMaker file they do open, but the line art illustrations which were "fine line" art of boat profiles turn into very crude looking art. They look like they were drawn with a crayon. Is there something that is controlling the quality of these illustrations when opened or imported? Is there any way to get back to at least the original quality that I see in PageMaker?
I'd like to have the original pages to at least use as a starting pong.
Thanks,
chuck

Hi
Thank you all for your help. I thought I'd post a short response to what I've since found out and a link that was helpful in doing so. As I said because of my lack of experience both with PageMaker and with InDesign I reslly didn't understand how the original PageMaker files were set up nor did I remember how I originally made them.
Searching, I found this link called "Processing Adobe Pagemaker Files for Conversion to Adobe InDesign". http://www.ideastraining.com/PDFs/ProcessingPgMkrFiles.pdf
It walked me through identifying what I had and how to correct it. It turns out that the page had a number of embedded graphics that had links that were no capable of updating for various reasons. A number of the graphics were also in .gif format which apparently InDesign didn't accommodate. So in trying to open these pages, InDesign dumped the original graphics and only left a crude tiff image which is what I was seeing.
I could try to salvage the sheets, but there are so many small problems that I think it's best to bite the bullet and just redo them. Going through the excercise with the help of the link above, however, 1) educated me in what I really had and 2) helped me to locate the original graphics which were on my computer but I didn't recognize. They were all clearly identified in the Links Manager. I simply didn't realize they had originally been linked. That at least allows me to find the original art then message or convert it as necessary in Photoshop or Illustrator.
I've made a template and now I'm just going to start one page at a time.
I just wanted to post the link above in the hopes it may help someone else.
Again thanks for the quick response and thoughtful replies to my question.
chuck

How do I 1)use airbrush type tool in illustrator CS4 or 2) use PS4 airbrush tool on vector line art?

That's basically my question in a nutty nut. I am drawing illustrations in Illustrator,
can't find an airbrush tool there, so I export to Photoshop to use that airbrush and the
lines pixelate. I want the clean, vector lines of Illustrator with the yummy fuzzy airbrush tool. In short, can I go back and forth from Illustrator to Photoshop without the line art ping ponging between pixel and vector?

See this PDF for one approach. The subject was really more about exploring ways to exploit Isolation Mode, but it does so in the context of a poor-man's "airbrush" effect.
I want the clean, vector lines of Illustrator with the yummy fuzzy airbrush tool.
In reality, then, you're not wanting vector artwork to look like vector artwork. Here's the thing:
Vector artwork, is by its fundamental nature "hard edged." That's one of its advantages and one of its disadvantages. Soft-edged fuzzy effect (and its sister, texture) is one of the mainstays of raster imaging. It's one of the main reasons why there are two primary kinds of computer graphics.
Historically, soft edges and graduations are primarily done with Blends and Graduated Fills. A Blend is really just a semi-automated stack of multiple paths with incrementally changing color. Grad fills are mathematically-defined variations of a path's fill color across the path. Generally speaking, grad fills are limited to a small set of geometric shapes. For most of Illustrator's history that was a very limited set: linear or radial. So when you needed to render tonal graduations in more elaborate shapes, you employed Blends.
More recently, programs have acquired a newer construct, which is an elaboration of grad fills: Mesh Grads. Mesh Grads are also mathematically-derived and remain as such up to print time--that is, they are vector. They offer more control over the shape of the color transitions. But that control is quite tedious, and is not at all like painting with an airbrush.
That's about the extent of it when it comes to maintaining "clean, vector edges". With skill and discernment, the results can look just as realistic as airbrush work, and it can be entirely vector. But the interface for doing it is not an emulation of painitng with an airbrush.
Far more common than a purely vector tool in a vector drawing program that tries to act like an airbrush is the workaround of applying filters or effects to vector paths. Doing that is not purely vector: It's actually rasterization that is re-applied whenever you edit the paths. If you set such an effect as the current default, then you can draw paths with the Brush tool, the Pencil Tool, or really, any of the vector path tools, and that's about as close to emulating an airbrush in a vector program as you'll get. The PDF mentioned above employs that kind of approach. But you should understand, you're really creating raster images when you do that. It's just that, rather than the raster images being "nailed down", they are effectively deleted and re-created on-the-fly if you edit the paths to which the effect is applied.
Illustrator isn't great at this. Other programs--Xara Xtreme in particular--do it much faster and responsively. But again, even though it retains the lossless editability advantage of vector art, the soft-edged effects are not really vector art. The are on-the-fly rasterizations of vector art.
Look up Blends, Grads, and Mesh Grad in Illustrator's Help files.
JET

Unable to add color over line art.

I'm using CS2 and have the following issue. I've scanned some line art (white paper, black ink) into the computer and opened it up in PS. Some of the larger areas of black were spotty, so I went over them using PS black. Many layers above the background, I'm unable to mark anything over the initial line art. I'd like to add dots of white (stars in space) and I want to have a narrow border of green, with black on both sides. No luck with either. I am working in the top layer, and none are locked. Am I missing something glaringly obvious?

What is the mode and color depth of your file?
What exact version of CS (Photoshop )? What OS?
Can you post a screen shot of the Image menu > Mode > ? Ditto for your Layers panel.
Please read this FAQ for advice on how to ask your questions correctly for quicker and better answers:
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/419981?tstart=0
Thanks!

Pixelated Line Art in Photo Gallery

Hi
I am designing a photo gallery that externally loads jpegs
via XML. I have an actionscript that allows the jpegs to randomly
rotate at an angle as they load onto the stage. The jpegs contain
mostly logos that are line art. It works great but the images are
pixelated when they are at an angle since they are logos/line art.
I can't seem to find a solution to solve this pixelation problem. I
tried loading gif files instead but for some reason gifs does not
load correctly.
Any ideas? Thanks!

Hi dzedward
Thanks for your reply. I attempted to create an
emptyMovieClip and applied cacheAsBitmap in context of the
actionScipt that already exist in the file. I tried to follow the
examples in the Flash 8 documentation but failed. The photo gallery
I am editing from can be downloaded here:
http://www.ffiles.com/flash/photo_galleries/xml_gallery_2/
Please help. Thanks

Sending line art to Photoshop?

Illustrator CS4 on Snow Leopard.
I have a truly vexing Illustrator problem. It seems like a simple challenge, though.
I have a large black and white vector illustration. There are no grays, only black and white line art.
I'd like to send only the black line art to Photoshop with the white areas treated as transparency.
Photoshop treats the un-filled areas as transparency, while it treats the white Illustrator fills as solid white.
Ordinarily I would simply outline my strokes and do some pathfinder operations to subtract the white fills from the black.
In this instance, though, there are hundreds of paths: blacks above whites in the stack, whites above blacks, etc. so going through pathfinder commands one path at a time seems almost impossible.
I've also tried re-coloring all blacks as Pantone spots and printing a color rip to PDF. Same problem: Photoshop treats white fills as solid white.
So... is there something I'm missing. Is there an easy way to separate my black lines and bring them to Photoshop?

Outline all the strokes and then use pathfinder Merge. Afterwards select and delete the white objects.

Line art problem outputting to pdf

I have a problem with exporting pages of a magazine going to print as pdf, relating to line art placed on the page as a bitmap tiff (typically at 1200 ppi). At present I have a workaround for an annoying problem that really needs clearing up ...
I'm using CS4 InDesign and Acrobat (files prepared in Photoshop). So, high-res bitmap tiff containing line art sized (that is, just placed - no resizing in Indesign) and placed in Indesign, looks fine on the page. Output to pdf using 'export' and the resulting file, when viewed on screen, has a thin line down the right-hand edge of any and all bitmap files.
To ensure no misunderstanding, the 'bitmap' reference is what Photoshop calls it - a bilevel file with black lines in it, which enables me easily to overlay other files such as a photo (because the file is black/transparent) and assign a colour or tint to the bitmap, or even a drop shadow etc. I've used this workflow for years, from Photoshop through Indesign, but the latter always gives me this line on the right edge, in the pdf. It did this in CS3 Indesign/Acrobat as well (but never in Pagemaker).
My workaround is to lay a white-filled box over the edge of the file, thus masking it. But of course, that also limits me to where I can place the file - not easily on a graded tint background, not on a photo and so on. So I'd like to solve this.
Any ideas? OS is Win XP Pro (all updates applied to this and the CS programs - I don't believe they make a difference to this problem, as it has existed through several iterations of both OS and CS).
Anyone else seen this effect? Or is it just me? And has anyone a potential solution?
Chris

I think by reason of not knowing what else I can do, I'm heading to the same conclusion - put up with it! I'll certainly try sending a line to print and see if it appears, but for on-screen stuff, I think I have to stick with the safe workaround I use and accept the layout limitations. (Or resort to Pagemaker for the pages that I just cannot do otherwise.)
Seems to me, if people have reported this for years, Adobe might have tried sorting it out. On screen or not, it still must be due to *something* in the file and/or Acrobat/Distiller to allow it to appear. If I create a white greyscale tiff with the same resolution etc, and place it on a page, there's no line down the edge on output - just a white page with a white (invisible) box. If I do this with an 'empty' bitmap file, a line appears ... Both files created in Adobe programs, so it's not me as a user ...
Just me whinging! I'm really coming from the angle that if this is indeed a display problem, it can only be a display problem if there is something in the file for the display to react to (badly phrased that!).
Thanks everyone for your support and ideas - I think that's me finished for now; I have files to upload and then sleep.

Line art filter shimmer

hi all - I have applied the line art filter to a short clip and the effect is perfect when it's not playing - but when it plays there is a shimmer in areas of the image. The clips are 640 X 480, 30 fps, progressive. The FCP timeline setting is for Photo JPEG. They are color corrected for brightness and contrast with a smidge of saturation in FCP and then sent to Motion. I have played with all the parameters with no luck and looked for another filter to reduce the shimmer to no avail.
Anybody know of a way to get rid of this shimmer?

Depending on your settings, the Line Art plugin tends to amplify noise by "outlining" all the differences, which change slightly, frame to frame...
Patrick

Anyone have experience using high-res files (eg line art) in Aperture?

As I found at http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1741287&tstart=0 it seems that Aperture will choke on files over a certain size. I'll grant, I tried something that is outside the scope of Aperture---I tried using it to store a workflow starting with a scan rather than a photo. The scan is higher resolution than most digital photos (as line art must be).
Does anyone have any experience with high-resolution photos or scans? I'm talking over a hundred MB, possibly upwards of a gigabyte. These are precisely the sort of files that I want to create lower-res versions for specific applications and have them be linked to the master file.

I tried to use Aperture with my line art scans in the early versions of Aperture, but gave it up because Aperture did not seem to handle the file size.
Instead I use another workflow for my artwork, Bridge, Photoshop, Illustrator and Version Cue in combination with Extensis Portfolio. This is a very pleasing solution for me and I would recommend it to others to try out as well.
For me, Aperture is used for managing and adjusting my photographs.
Regards
Paul K

Ascii-line art question

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