There many ways to save files in Illustrator and in this lesson you'll learn
the difference between the different methods. So if you have an Illustrator file and you just want to
send it to someone else to open it up in Illustrator as well or if you want to
open it up later in Illustrator, you just go to File, Save or Save As and then just
save it as a dot.ai That's the Default native Illustrator format. If you click
the little down arrow there's also PDF available,
EPS which some other vector software can open if they can't open an .ai, if they don't have
Illustrator and there's also SVG, Illustrator template. So, I'm going to Cancel there.
You can also go to File and then Save as Template. It'll automatically save in your
templates folder right here so you can open it up later,
make changes save it as a new file. If you go to File, Save for Web that's going to
rasterize it so it might save it as a GIF, a JPG, a PNG, so if you
zoom in on that after you save it, it can pixelate so it's different from a
vector file or native just Illustrator file.
But you do need to convert it to a raster file if you want to embed it on a web page for example.
You can also go to File, Export
and that will export it as a couple of different types of files. So some of these were not
available in the other menus. For example, you can save it as an AutoCAD drawing which
is more architecture related and engineering related. BMP, which is another
raster version file, bitmap, and they're a couple of other ones that we saw earlier like JPG
and PNG. You can also package your files. So if you go to File and then Package, and this
is if you wanted to include placed images and also fonts that you're using
and you did'nt outline them which is the best practice to outline them. But for some
reason, if you want to send it to someone else to keep working on the text and you
don't want to outline it, you do need to include the font with the file. So you can
package it and it will include the copy links. So if you place in images as links,
it will make a copy and also a copy of fonts in there and then click Package.
So that's the many ways to save files in Illustrator. Again, if you just want to save it as a
default Illustrator file it's dot.ai In the next lesson we'll go over printing in Illustrator.