Fortunately, Adobe Illustrator makes drawing arrows very easy.įirst, you have to draw a line with the line or pen tool. Drawing arrowsĪrrows are very common in scientific graphics for obvious reasons: you need the for biochemical pathways, demonstrating steps in a process, and showing relationships. Then select both objects and go to the pathfinder panel and select the "unite" option.
To do this, use the rectangle or ellipse tool to draw objects on top of each other. What you can do instead is build up neat looking objects by merging together more precise rectangles and circles. Sometimes this can work, and perhaps you want more of a "cartoony" look. What many people will do is use the pencil tool to freehand draw the shape they want. Often you will want to create shapes that are not just rectangles or circles. membrane receptors) are sized appropriately. For comparison, this is the size of the figure when on an A4 sized paper. The example image above uses 8 pt Helvetica, and the rest of the objects (e.g. The font size in the main text used by journals is going to be 9-10 pt you don't need to go any larger than this. The neighborhood of font size you should use is 6 pt to 10 pt - anything outside of this range will be too small or too clunky. Straying outside of standard fonts will look unprofessional. Helvetica and Arial and variations are generally the fonts you will want to use.
The second size cue that will help you design your figure is the size of font that you use in the labels. For an already existing document, click the artboard tool in the tool panel (or SHIFT + O) and enter the dimensions at the top ribbon or select the presets (use "letter" for 8.5" x 11").
You can do this by creating a new document (CTRL + N) and entering in the dimensions. Even though your figure is not going to take up the entire page, this will give you an idea of what size to make objects. Most times (unless you are making a graphical abstract or a poster), you want to set up an artboard with the size of printer paper: 8.5" x 11" in the US or A4 elsewhere. Again, check with your journal to see what the dimensions of the columns are.
Run the applications, no need to restart or anything else, and their interface should now have an acceptable size, but a but blurryĪll credit to Rick Rodriguez and the Surface Pro Artist blog.If you are creating a figure for a journal, check the journal guidelines to see if they have specific requirements for figures.
(DWORD) to 1 as mentioned here (no need to install the mentionedĬreate a file in notepad, paste this text inside, save it, and copy it to the same folder as Illustrator's exeĬreate a file in notepad, paste this text inside, save it, and copy it to the same folder as Photoshop's exe HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\SideBySide\PreferExternalManifest
Before editing the registry, I recommend reading that whole article, and the comments.Įnable Windows to prioritise external manifests by creating and setting this registry key But it might be an option for people with different personal preferences. After trying every possible combination of settings, for me they all either scaled Adobe too much or everything else too little, or both, and I ended up undoing all of this and simply turning the resolution down one notch. Be aware, however, that this makes everything, including the appearance of your artwork, slightly grainy as if it was a pixel image that had been scaled up, and that the same Windows scaling applies to Adobe stuff as everything else including web browser etc. It allows you to make AI and PS auto-scale with everything else according to your Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Display settings.
See this question regarding possible risks. Warning: it involves hacking the registry, to enable 'external manifests'.
If you're on CS6 on Windows, there's a hack described here which works on Windows 7 and 8. Sadly that option doesn't exist in pre-CC and it sounds like Adobe have no plans to fix this. John Manly's answer works for Adobe CC as of the 2014 update.