how to make an illustrator file with transparent bg, w/o rasterizing

[hyphenate]

Here's my question:

* I have done up a logo in Illustrator.
* We import it into Word on the back page of our documents.
* We had to do a special treatment to get it to have a transparent background. (Create a rectangle that encompasses the logo, assign it a color that does not appear in teh logo, export it as a TIFF, which RASTERIZES it, and set the transparent color when manipulatingn the picture in Word).
* Then we generate PDF's of these that can be e-mailed.

The problem is that this one little RASTERIZED image causes the PDF size to escalate from approx 30K to 500+K.

How do I set an illustrator file to have a transparent background... and still allow it to remain a vector file?

thanks,

David/hyphenate
dbartholomew@raviant.com

 

[mothman]

If you are using Illustrator 9.0, it has a transparency option under WINDOWS-------SHOW TRANSPARENCY

It works just like PHOTOSHOPS OPACITY CONTROLER....It even has MODES like PSHOP so you can put i in dodge mode or screen mode ect....

 

[nichole]

I haven't worked with Word a lot, so I'm not sure what file formats it can import, but you can save a file in Illustrator as an EPS, and when imported to Quark you can set the background to "none." This retains its "vectorness" and has a transparent background. Hopefully Word will treat it the same?

Good luck. - nichole

 

[askIllustrator]

if the .pdfs are less than one page, just use illustrator for the whole thing. Also you can export a transparent .gif at about 200-250% of the intended print size, then size it down in Word.