For longer than I can remember, I have been flustered with the Flatten Transparency feature in Adobe Illustrator CS3 and CS4. Very often I use the excellent Layer Targeting feature introduced into recent versions of Adobe Illustrator, however I found that when using the Flatten Transparency feature, it seemed to ignore the attributes of the Targeting, which forced me to find lengthy workarounds to solve this. Turns out there was an approach to solving this that I had overlooked…
Continue reading 'Flattening Transparency Properly When Using Layer Appearances in Adobe Illustrator'
by George Coghill -
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Recently I was dealing with a problem in GarageBand, where the application would lock up when I was attempting the change the tempo of a song. For many months I struggled with this until it got to the point where I decided to do some in-depth troubleshooting. How does this relate to illustration you may ask? Turns out the problem was font related, and affected the performance of the software. Since this could affect any piece of software on your Mac, and therefore productivity, I thought it worth passing along as this could easily affect your graphics software as well.
Continue reading 'Mac OS X 10.5: Essential System Fonts'
by George Coghill -
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It’s happened to all of us digital creatives. The dreaded day when you just cannot get one of your Adobe applications to launch. Usually there’s a deadline looming (of course). You’ve restarted your computer (three times) and still you cannot get Photoshop to launch. You’ve tried a few tips from some Google searches, but still nothing. Your geek cred is showing it’s limitations. And your deadline isn’t getting any further away.
What if I told you this could be avoided, virtually forever? And also, that you can get back to work with all your settings just the way you like them?
Continue reading 'Adobe Apps: Backup Your Prefs'
by George Coghill -
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A non-cartooning post here, but when I run into issues with the blog and find solutions for the errors, I like to pass them along.
I recently had a bizarre problem with this blog: the Sidebar was appearing way at the bottom of the home page, at the end of the last post entry. I saw some potential fixes for this on the wondeful web, and all seemed to point at an unclosed < div > tag.
My first mistake was looking at the most recent post (which had an oversized image that I fixed). turns out the error cropped up a couple posts earlier and I just hadn’t been to the home page in a while to notice.
The fix was indeed < div > tag related. Here’s how I fixed it after a bunch of troubleshooting and scouring the code — or rather how it was introduced into the post in the first place and how to avoid it…
Continue reading 'WordPress Sidebar At Bottom? Div Tags Via Copy/Paste In Visual Editor'
by George Coghill -
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This post is a bit off-topic, but seeing as how I found a fix for an issue that seems to be affecting a lot of WordPress users, and I find many a solution to my WordPress issues on other blogs, I thought I would post.
If you are finding that activating certain plugins on your self-hosted WordPress installation is breaking the Visual Editor, this may be the fix you are looking for.
Continue reading 'Fix For WordPress Visual Editor Conflict With Certain Plugins'
by George Coghill -
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I am sure this is a technical issue that will be worked out (I have a ticket in with Adobe support as of 15 minutes ago). But man is this frustrating. Illustrator CS3 is almost unusable on my desktop. And the rest of the Creative Suite isn’t so snappy either.
Continue reading 'Illustrator CS3 performance woes: 35% CPU usage on my G4'
by George Coghill -
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Recently I came across an embedded font error when trying to place a PDF created in InDesign into a Quark Xpress 4.1 layout (a place I do contract work for is still on Quark 4.1 – the computer I work on was originally registered to Fred Flintstone).
Granted, this is probably not a very common occurrence, not only because there seems to be a tidal wave of movement towards Adobe InDesign, but also due to the archaic nature of the version of Quark Xpress being used. This could affect later versions of Quark as well, and regardless it’s a good reminder of looking in non-obvious places for solutions. Continue reading 'Embedded Font Problems In PDF? Check Your Slug.'
by George Coghill -
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