Illustrator question

[imlearning]

Hi, I'm new and by the looks of this forum, will be new for the next 15 years. There is so much to know.
Anyway, I need to understand out how to print something designed and saved in Illustrator, emailed to me, and then printed out in Publisher as a business card. Every business card program I use to print with comes out all pixally when I cut and paste from Illustrator. It takes forever to clean it up and make it useable, and by then you have wasted way too much time and money. Is there a trick to making business cards when pulling a design from Illustrator? I just haven't worked enough with it to understand how to print from it or copy and paste.
I hope this is clear enough for someone to help me.

 

[Bigdawg]

Read this about handling color for print:
www.bigdawgdesign.com/prepress.htm

You will need to place the Illustrator eps file in publisher and then print to a postscript printer if you want it to look good with your printer. There are other work-arounds you will need to do if you are planning to send it out from publisher to be printed...

 

[Fred Weiss]

Your problems printing an Illustrator EPS from a Microsoft product like Publisher could be any number of things but I would suspect that they rest with how poorly Microsoft deals with EPS files.

What happens is this:

An Illustrator EPS contains vectors and or raster images which, when correctly read will output extremely high quality printing. But an Illustrator EPS file also contains a low resolution bitmap preview as an aid to placement in applications such as InDesign, Quark Express and the old Adobe Pagemaker programs. Microsoft applications like Word or Publisher love to read and print the low resolution preview instead of the high quality PostScript data in the file.

To see if that is the problem, try printing the EPS file directly from Illustrator to test its quality. If the file prints nicely then you know my first suspicion is correct.

If you still need to use the Microsoft product as part of your workflow, then you will want to experiment with the Export function of Adobe Illustrator to create a file that the Microsoft product will get along with. You can export a bitmap such as JPG or TIF or you can retain the vectors and most of the quality with file formats such as WMF or EMF.

 

[ENTDesign]

Why don't you do the complete design in Illustrator and print directly from it? You can copy and paste multiple out from the original design and you wouldn't have to mess around with exporting. Illustrator has some stupendous design tools.

 

[Techman]

I believe the b'card templates in publisher are the reason so many people use it. The business card template prints a whole sheet of cards in one swipe.

However corel x3 has a great b card template that works perfect. I use it all the time to print full color b cards. Plus it does not carry the baggage publisher has.

 

[deegrafix]

eps file

Try to open in photoshop, save as tiff and import the tiff into publisher. I'm not familiar with publisher but this process works well to move an eps into other programs. If you can't import/open a tiff, photoshop gives several options in "save as". Also, eps files do well when they can be "placed" into an empty canvas in photoshop. Set your dpi and color profiles as well as the final size when creating the new empty file and then size the eps to it before committing to place the eps.

dee