Expert: Amy - 4/7/2004

Question
What is the proper procedure for "flattening artwork".  It seems I could click that command until the cows come home and they still wouldn't compress.  Then when I go to print, I get a little alert at the bottom of the print dialog saying that some of the artwork isn't flattened.

Thanks.

Brian

Answer
My goodness, you've opened a can of worms.

There is so much information about flattening that Adobe has created an entire guide about it.  

It is located here.  I suggest you print it out, take a few minutes and read it. Even if you are not using v.10 (guide uses 10 as example) the theories and a lot of the steps in flattening are version-universal

http://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator/pdfs/ai10_print.pdf

This guide can explain things so much better than I could, but I'll sum it up for you.

Adobe has a bunch of awesome effects.  Most of these effects involve the creation of transparencies. Most other applications in the printing world (printer drivers and Rip software, Quark) don't like Adobe's transparencies at all... so all the vector data that creates these transparencies has to be converted to raster data before printing.  That's called flattening. When you create raster art from vector, you want the highest reasonable resolution you can muster...usually 300 dpi for photographic images in a normal print environment.

Some stuff in your artwork doesn't need to be flattened. The error message you're getting is probably related to one of the objects that can't be flattened.

That's basically it, but you should read that Guide - it's very helpful!

-Amy