illustrater printing help (business cards)

[howard]

alright, i know there are illustrator gods on these forums, so this should be to big of a deal. I'm making home made business cards, Design is all laid out on a 2x3 1/2 inch area. Now when I print it out I would like it if it were possible to print a bunch out all lined up on a sheet so I can just cut them, but illustrator wants to print it right smack in the center of the paper. any ideas?

 

[MacDawg]

Hmm, why don't you just copy and paste it to make whatever layout you like within Illustrator, or just save it as a file like <illustrator eps> and then place it in something like Word or InDesign in whatever layout you like with copy paste.

Woof, Woof - Dawg

 

[howard]

i was trying that, but then the sizes got all mess up. I took the 2x3.5, cropped and made it into a jpeg, imported it into an 8 1/2x11 page and did just that but they turned out much larger.

 

[decksnap]

In Illustrator, just build one card and group the entire 2 x 3.5 (Apple+G). Then copy and paste it as many times as it will fit in your layout. To line them up exactly, you need to use the align pallette. (Window>align). You shift+select the different elements you want to align and use the various aligning buttons in the align pallette as needed. (I'm not gonna explain them all).

If you were using another program to lay out multiple versions of your illustrator document, you would need to save the Illustrator file as an eps, not a jpeg. A jpeg might work, but an eps is the proper method.

 

[howard]

awesome, that seemed to work out, funny, i never knew about the align function