Printing Quickly

If you have a printer hooked up to your computer or network, you can print just about anything that you can create in Illustrator.

Before you print, make sure that your artwork is inside the printable area. A dotted gray line indicates the printable area; anything outside the dotted line doesn’t print. If you don’t see a dotted gray line, choose View→Show Page Tiling. To hide the line, choose View→Hide Page Tiling.

To print your artwork, choose File→Print. When the Print dialog box appears, press Enter (Return on a Mac), or click the Print/OK button. You now have a printed version of your Illustrator creation. Pressing Enter (Return on a Mac) without adjusting any settings in the Print dialog box is known in the trade as running with the defaults. Defaults are settings that are made automatically when you install Illustrator — and they work just fine for printing artwork from Illustrator. When your creations don’t print as you expect them to, however, you need to adjust the other settings, which I discuss throughout this chapter.