n00b flexi question

[Fred Weiss]

In the images attached I have created a new swatch table and added a diamond plate, fire and checkerboard seamless pattern to it, finally saving the new swatch table. The process takes only a few seconds for each pattern.

There are some distinct advantages to recreating your patterns in Flexi over using them in Illustrator:

• Fonts remain editable and can have effects applied to them such as outlines.
• Flexi treats the patterns as fills rather than masked images so there is no extension of the image beyond the vectors.
• Flexi has an advanced pattern control which allows you to scale the pattern fill for the best look.

 

[Oakwood]

Turning illy Swatches to Flexi Patterns

I just had meesed with this a couple of weeks ago...ran into the same problems as you are saying I think...What I ended up doing is creating the patterns Illy Cs4..then opened a new file. created a normal regular old square or rectangle..applied the swatch pattern to that. then saved the file as a illy8 format like Fred said. open flexi create a new color palette name it Custom fills or something like(this is also better to have them saved here as it will cut down on start up time of flexi. Select a pattern click view>color> define pattern. save it to your newly created palette..repeat for each swatch..type in your text in flexi and just apply whatever newly created pattern you want...when you said you created a ton of swatches in illy... I am sure you already know the importance of how accurately your swatches are created in illy to start with. flexi seems very picky about how well they line up at least for me printing on an EDGE. If they are not dead on perfect I will get lines in my print...It is kind of a hillbilly workaround but it is still faster than having to recreate them all from scratch in flexi.

That's what I ended up doing last night, looks like it will be the solution.

 

[Oakwood]

It may be that you are experiencing a delay due to file size. Are you giving it enough time to open it if it is a large file?

Yea the file is pretty small, and it's still not there 8 hours later :scream:

 

[iSign]

Thanks for taking the time to post that explanation Fred.

I've always confessed to not using Flexi for the things I could do in Illustrator, but then I have less chance of stumbling on the things I can't do in illustrator.

Those are a few really good examples of things worth doing in Flexi!