Now let's say you want to change the size of your illustration here. I have got a 6X6 illustration. Let's say I want to change the size of this artboard and that's whoever seeing right here by the way. This rectangle that we are seeing on screen is the artboard that represent the area of that Illustrator ones to set its crop marks around and we will learn more about how this corresponds to the printed page way, way later, actually in Lesson 11 of Part 2 we will get into that. That is the least of our concerns at this point.
This just marks, the sort of, virtual page, just think of it that way and outside of the virtual page here, outside your artboard is called the pasteboard and you can just stored things here. You could actually draw things out there. Just keep them around, if you want to. You don't have to spend too much time worrying about how big your artboard is, but if you decide you want to change it at any point in time, just go up to the File menu and choose the Document Setup command. That also has a keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Alt+P or Command+Option+P on the Mac and there is a good reason that it's P it's because you are changing what is in Illustrator after all the Page size what corresponds to the Page size. So P for page.
You will go into the Document Setup command. You can now adjust the size of your artboard in any way that you see fit. If I decide I want to make my artboard for example, 7 inches wide this would be a great time to change it. I will enter 7in into the Width value and press Tab in order to convert it to points. You also have the option of setting some low level attributes associated with your file, some sort of Preference Settings.
For example, if you go to the Type option right here, you can specify that Illustrator always uses Typographer's Quotes, that is to say curly quotes. So that when you enter a regular straight quote symbol, it replaces it with curly quotes or with whatever suffices for quotes in your area of the world.
Alright, I am just going to go ahead and click OK in order to accept the change to my illustration. The artboard now expands by 1 inch wide. If you want to be able to keep track of the measurements inside of your illustration, after all Illustrator is schematic drawing program, perfect for such things as architectural rendering and precise art like that in addition to organic artwork that you may want to create, poster art and that kind of stuff.
I am going to go up to the View menu and choose Show Rulers or you can press Ctrl+R or Command+R on the Mac. Now as we go along you will see that I keep mentioning keyboard shortcuts to you, but by no means are you require to use the keyboard shortcut. The shortcuts are just there to simplify your life if you want to take advantage of them. I will always show you where the regular way of doing something is, if indeed there is a regular way.
Every once in a while inside Illustrator the shortcut is your only method. It doesn't happen too often, but sometimes it does. Now notice that all these ruler increments here are being measured from the bottom left region of this artboard right now. So the zero point is right at the bottom edge of the artboard. The zero point is little in from the left edge in my case. If you want to change where your units are measured from, the zero point as it's called, you can just drag out from that upper left intersection of the two rulers and then drag to the corner of the illustration or other region of the illustration that you want to serve as that (0,0) coordinate.
In my case, I might just go ahead and put it at the exact lower left corner of my illustration, like so. Now all of these little tick marks here, these units of measurements are referring to points. So this location right here is 36 points over from the left hand side of the page. This is 72 points or one inch over. If you don't like those units of measurements you can change them right here from the ruler by right-clicking on a ruler. See that.
Or if you only have a single-button mouse on a Mac, then press the Ctrl key in the lower left-hand corner of your keyboard and click on that ruler. You will bring up a menu of other units that you can choose from and you can change it to something like Picas, or Inches or Millimeters if you like to. I am going to go ahead and change mine to Inches and we will see that both rulers change in kind.
You also have a very wacky keyboard shortcut at your disposal, should you care to take advantage of it. Ctrl+Shift+Alt+U or Ctrl+Shift+Option+U. In other words, all the modifier keys and U will cycle you from one unit of measurement to the next. So you will cycle from Points to Picas to Inches, to Millimeters, to Centimeters to Pixels and then back to Points again. So I want to go ahead and switch back to Points.
Now notice Pixels, in case you are interested, why would you be wanting to work inside pixels when Illustrator doesn't use pixels? And the reason is if you are trying to prepare some artwork that you want to import into Photoshop and then you want to render out to the web or some environment like that. So it's probably the last unit of measurement you want to use inside of Illustrator, but it does have its purposes.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services