1. Illustrator lecture 2: how to use Adobe Illustrator with vector plots?
WAT-E2090 Water and people

2. Matlab Open demo2.m (available in MyCourses)
Change current folder to your own one
Run until the examples

3. Save figure as .eps Select figure with populations in coastal areas
Select File – Save as…
Save it as eps file (e.g. coastal_pop.eps)

4. Open adobe illustrator
Programme is available in listed computer rooms (see MyCourses)
Open coastal_pop.eps

5. Remove clipping mask, grouping,
Matlab, excel and other programmes produce unnecessary masks and grouping to vector files. It is advisable to remove those before starting to work with the figure. Do as follows:
Do following commands from menu bar
Select – All
Object – Ungroup
Object – Clipping mask – release
Object – Compound path – release

6. Delete masks
After you have released the masks, you can delete them by selecting the white areas and pressing delete (the A4 page remaining is the art board and you cannot delete that)

7. Move objects
If you want to move multiple objects, you might first want to group them together
Select the objects to group and select Object – Group (Ctrl + G)
If you’re left with unnecessary things like the white background box you can just delete them

8. Align and distribute tools
Sometimes you want to arrange objects differently than in your original Matlab plot
Align and distribute tools are useful for that
You can find them under Window – Align
For example, in Matlab we distributed the bars based on year, but if you change your mind and want to distribute them equally instead, it is very easy in Illustrator

9. Distribute example Experiment with align tools as well
First group each pair of bars and their year label together (Ctrl + G)
Select all bars and year labels
Select Horizontal Distribute Space from Align toolbar
Experiment with align tools as well
For instance, you can try to vertically align the center points of the y-axis label and the legend

10. Removing unnecessary objects
After previous example we were left with ticks for years. We didn’t group them so they are in the wrong place.
Are they necessary for the figure?
If not, remove
Select one of the ticks, then:
Select – Same - Appearance
All the ticks and lines are now selected. Deselect what you want to keep and delete rest.

11. Changing colours
To change colors of the bars, select one bar or the color in legend, then:
Select – Same – Fill color
This is easier if you ungroup the bars/legend first
Select the colour of your liking and repeat for other colours
If you’re interested, colorbrewer2.org offers a range of nice color schemes to be used particularly in mapping

12. Adjust artboard
By clicking the Artboard symbol in the left toolbar, you can adjust it

13. Export figure
Once you are happy on your figure, you can export it as png, for example, to be used in a document
File – Export…
To crop the exported figure to art board, you can tick the Use artboards option