What many researchers don't realize is that Illustrator is not really the right tool for assembling figures for publication. Illustrator is for creating illustrations, and was developed with graphic artists in mind. If you're an Adobe fan, what you should instead be using is InDesign, which is designed for layout of graphics created elsewhere (e.g., a chart from GraphPad Prism). It has all of the features mentioned in the video to break apart and edit vector and raster images, but has more powerful layout features than Illustrator, which is ideal for creating complex multi-panel figures. It also has the additional advantage of multi-page layouts, which lets you assemble all of the figures for a paper in a single document.
Super helpful, especially the video is comprehensive in the sense that it covers the absolute basics which is missing in most of the videos. Thank you very much.
Thank you so much for this video! That helps great! One question, the figure requirement given by Science website seems different from what you have shown in the video. For example, the figure width I found was 5.5 cm or 12.0 cm, and color format was CMYK. I might be wrong but that's something worth noting I guess.
I have prepared my graphs in graphpad prism and i am making a collage of four graph, but while making them as a panels they dont fit the size or the width as mentioned by the Journal and if I try to reduce the size of the graphs based on the artboard size (width as mentioned by Journal), then the font size is chnaging or reducing, so in that case what can be done, like for preparing a panel of images in illustrator without changing the font size of the image.
The best way to deal with this would be to export the graph from Prism in a vector graphics format so the font could be editable in Illustrator. Alternatively, you could adjust the font size in Prism so that it’s large enough relative to the graph so that when the whole thing is shrunk down for the final figure, the font is still appropriately sized.
Thanks for the nice presentation. could you kindly help me to sort this out. I have prepared my figures in photoshop and now after a journal accept the manuscript they are asking me to prepare figures using illustrator...Can I open those figures into illustrator.
Unfortunately, the figures would have to be remade in Illustrator. Photoshop’s default settings result in image interpolation that is not acceptable for publication, and it’s not possible to repair that by importing into Illustrator.
Hi, very nice and concise video. This is the current guideline by Nature: " For guidance, Nature’s standard figure sizes are 90 mm (single column) and 180 mm (double column) and the full depth of the page is 170 mm." Did they mean height of the page by "full depth?" this is not clear to me.
What many researchers don't realize is that Illustrator is not really the right tool for assembling figures for publication. Illustrator is for creating illustrations, and was developed with graphic artists in mind. If you're an Adobe fan, what you should instead be using is InDesign, which is designed for layout of graphics created elsewhere (e.g., a chart from GraphPad Prism). It has all of the features mentioned in the video to break apart and edit vector and raster images, but has more powerful layout features than Illustrator, which is ideal for creating complex multi-panel figures. It also has the additional advantage of multi-page layouts, which lets you assemble all of the figures for a paper in a single document.
Thank you for this fabulously helpful series - I was feeling very frustrated until I found it!
Super helpful, especially the video is comprehensive in the sense that it covers the absolute basics which is missing in most of the videos. Thank you very much.
Thank you for such great guidance!
Thank you so much! This is exactly what I need!!
this is awesome material!!
Thank you so much for this video! That helps great! One question, the figure requirement given by Science website seems different from what you have shown in the video. For example, the figure width I found was 5.5 cm or 12.0 cm, and color format was CMYK. I might be wrong but that's something worth noting I guess.
I have prepared my graphs in graphpad prism and i am making a collage of four graph, but while making them as a panels they dont fit the size or the width as mentioned by the Journal and if I try to reduce the size of the graphs based on the artboard size (width as mentioned by Journal), then the font size is chnaging or reducing, so in that case what can be done, like for preparing a panel of images in illustrator without changing the font size of the image.
The best way to deal with this would be to export the graph from Prism in a vector graphics format so the font could be editable in Illustrator. Alternatively, you could adjust the font size in Prism so that it’s large enough relative to the graph so that when the whole thing is shrunk down for the final figure, the font is still appropriately sized.
Thank you!!! I was just looking for a guide like this 😃
Thanks for the nice presentation. could you kindly help me to sort this out. I have prepared my figures in photoshop and now after a journal accept the manuscript they are asking me to prepare figures using illustrator...Can I open those figures into illustrator.
Unfortunately, the figures would have to be remade in Illustrator. Photoshop’s default settings result in image interpolation that is not acceptable for publication, and it’s not possible to repair that by importing into Illustrator.
Hi, very nice and concise video. This is the current guideline by Nature:
" For guidance, Nature’s standard figure sizes are 90 mm (single column) and 180 mm (double column) and the full depth of the page is 170 mm." Did they mean height of the page by "full depth?" this is not clear to me.
Thank you for your question! Please reach out to Nature for an answer to this.
Cheers for this it's super helpful!
Thank you for this
Thank you very much!!!!
Thank You!
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