In making Live Paint, Asente and Schuster discovered something about illustration that seems obvious once it’s said. Most illustrators do not draw lines that meet perfectly. Instead, they leave small gaps between them. During initial tests of the Live Paint bucket, the tool sometimes failed to fill areas an illustrator had intended to fill but didn’t close off. To get around the problem, they added a “gap detection” algorithm. You can set its parameters in the Gap Options dialog box. Either select the Gap Option icon in the Control palette or choose Object > Live Paint > Gap Options. This feature is especially useful when working with hand drawings scanned in using Live Trace.

Live Paint
In the simplest terms, Live Paint solves a long-standing problem with most vector drawing applications. It allows you to draw any shape using any tool and then color it with a paint bucket.

As computer scientist Paul Asente says, “When I show it to people, they say, ‘didn’t it always work that way?’” The answer, of course, is no.

If you’ve ever worked with an older version of Illustrator, or any similar tool, you know it’s cumbersome to draw a few intersecting freehand lines to make a rectangle, and then fill them in. The reason is that Illustrator doesn’t really draw so much as it collages. It places elements continually on top of one another. Though they look like they’re intersecting, the application doesn’t necessarily see it that way.

To color the spaces between objects, Illustrator users have traditionally had to use the Pathfinder tool. But such a solution wasn’t ideal, and the task of making it more intuitive again fell into the lap of Adobe’s Office of Technology. There, Asente, an avid illustrator himself, and Mike Schuster began working on a solution.

The nuts and bolts of how Live Paint works is not for the meek and mathematically challenged. In essence, Schuster and Asente’s solution involves grouping the lines in such a way that Illustrator sees them as living on the same plane, and thus as capable of being filled.

Within the program this process is known as turning objects into “a Live Paint group.” Once Asente and Schuster had worked this out, the prototype was handed to a feature team, which looked for a way to implement it.

The team’s workflow is easy to understand. When the Live Paint bucket hovers over a possible group it can fill in, the user sees an option to make a Live Paint group. If he or she clicks, the group is converted and the color fills. The live part comes in when the user moves a line. Then, the color still bleeds over to fill up the new shape that’s created.

“I follow online Illustrator forums, and it used to be that no month went by in which someone didn’t pose the question of how do I fill in a space this way,” says Asente. “There used to be a long explanation, but now we have a very easy story.”

 

You just placed a high-resolution, pristine image into your Adobe InDesign CS2 document, but it doesn’t look very good. Don’t worry. InDesign offers three display performance options: Fast, Typical, and High Quality. These options control how graphics are displayed on the screen, but they don’t affect the print quality or exported output. Fast draws a raster image or vector graphic as a gray box (default). Use this option when you want to quickly page through spreads that have lots of images or transparency effects. Typical draws a low-resolution proxy image (default) appropriate for identifying and positioning an image or vector graphic and is the fastest way to display an identifiable image. High Quality draws a raster image or vector graphic at High Resolution (default). This option provides the highest quality but the slowest performance.

If you’ve set the display performance of any images separately, you can override the settings so all objects use the same settings. Choose View > Display Performance, and select an option from the submenu. To force objects that you have set individually to appear using the document setting, choose View > Display Performance > Allow Object-Level Display Settings. (A checkmark indicates it is selected.)