This section contains details on some of the more common features which can be found within Impact Plugin for Adobe® Illustrator®. If a user is completely new to Impact Plugin for Adobe® Illustrator®, it is advisable that they familiarise themselves with the concepts that are explained below, as this will give them a good foundation of skills, which can then be built upon with everyday use.
Layers
Illustrator layers provide a way to manage all the items that make up your artwork. If you reshuffle the layers, you change the stacking order of the items in your artwork. You can move items between layers and create sub-layers within layers.
By default, the plug-in will create a top-level 'Impact Dieline' layer, containing one or more sub-layers representing each Impact generated layer. It will also create an empty 'Graphics' layer below this, to provide a blank template to start creating your artwork.
The Illustrator Layers Panel/Window showing an Impact Dieline as loaded by the plugin.
The 'Impact Dieline' layer is placed at the top-most position to allow you to clip to and draw over and use it as a template.
All levels of Impact Dieline layers are also locked automatically, thus preventing unwanted editing, so you can be confident that the graphics you produce will line up perfectly with the original design.
Template Layers
Template layers are locked, non-printing layers that can be useful when tracing a raster image or creating artwork from an existing design, such as the Impact Dieline. Being set as Template also means that on export, their content will be made invisible. By default, any Impact layers processed by the plug-in will be converted automatically to Template Layers - Refer to Impact CAD Preferences to configure this.
Artboards and Page Boxes
Artboards
Artboards are a key concept in Illustrator, and they help streamline your design process by giving you an area where you can lay out designs for different devices and screens. Artboards represent the regions that can contain printable or exportable artwork. While creating artboards, you can choose from a wide variety of preset sizes or define your own custom artboard size.
You can have 1 to 1000 artboards per document, depending on the size of your artboards. You can specify the number of artboards for a document when you first create it, and you can add and remove artboards at any time while working in a document. You can create artboards in different sizes, resize them by using the Artboard tool and position them anywhere on the screen — even overlapping one another.
Illustrator also provides options to set the orientation, reorder, and rearrange artboards using the Artboards panel, Properties panel, or the Control panel (when the Artboard tool is selected). You can specify custom names for an artboard. You can also set reference points for artboards in Illustrator.
You can use artboards as crop areas for printing or exporting purposes. Multiple artboards are useful for creating various things such as multiple page PDFs, printed pages with different sizes or different elements, independent elements for websites, video storyboards, or individual items for animation in Adobe Animate or After Effects.
Page Boxes
The exact size of a PDF page is not as straightforward as it seems because there might be up to five different descriptions in a PDF that relates to its size. These are called page boxes.
- Media Box: this is the largest page box in a PDF. The other page boxes can be equal to the Media Box but they should not be bigger. In prepress use, pages are defined slightly oversized so that the bleed, the crop marks, information panels and other useful information are visible as well. This means that PDF documents used in graphic arts usually have a Media Box, which is bigger than the trimmed page size.
- Crop Box: this is the region to which the page contents are to be clipped. Adobe Acrobat uses this size for screen display and printing. For prepress use, the Crop Box is irrelevant.
- Bleed Box: this box determines the region to which the page contents needs to be clipped when output in a production environment. Usually the Bleed Box is 3 to 5 millimetres bigger than the Trim Box. Most prepress systems allow you to define the amount of bleed and ignore the Bleed Box.
- Trim Box: this defines the intended dimensions of the finished page. Unlike the Crop Box, the Trim Box is very important because it defines the actual page size. Most imposition programs and workflows use the Trim Box as the base for positioning pages on a press sheet or labels and packaging on a step and repeat.
- Art Box: the Art Box can define a region within a page that is of special interest. It is rarely used by applications.
Artboards vs Page Boxes
Whilst Illustrator internally supports Artboards it does offer native support for defining PDF Page Boxes as supported by Impact - optionally used to help position and crop unwanted areas of placed artwork when adding graphics to a 2D layer.
Fortunately, setting an Artboard in Illustrator will initialise the various Page Boxes in the exported PDF to these extents. Therefore, if the Artboard is set to the artwork or dieline extents, it's possible to produce an Impact-friendly artwork file