"Cropping" in illustrator?

[eolake]

[If this is not the right place for this, do correct me. I am looking in vain for the technical forums.]

I am looking for a way in Illustrator 11 to make a frame so everything outside it is invisible.

I can do it with a "clipping path", but I am insanely irritated that Illustrator then moves everything to the same layer, I don't want that.

[discs79]

create the image you wish to crop (or mask) this can be a placed image, or grouped objects drawn in illustrator. Then create the Crop or mask shape, place it over the image your cropping or masking, make sure the mask is on top. hit

object - clipping mask - make.

[Ctrl] + 7 - PC or [Apple] + 7

Hope this helps

Steven

[KChen]

Hi Eolake,

Your thread seems more appropriate in this section. Hope you will get more reply here.

kchen

[Atomick]

Well, being a vector app, making a mask (aka Clipping Path in Photoshop parlance) requires, as you discovered, all shapes involved to be on the same layer. Not very flexible.

I've found the most straightforward solution to be the easiest to manage: a gigantic white frame around everything, on a top-most LOCKED layer.

Make a rectangle for the outer edge (I go for the same size of the artboard, occassionally bigger), and make another for the frame's cutout (actually, a matte is a better analogy than a frame), select both, use the pathfinder to do a subtraction of the smaller rect from the larger one.

This way you can even suppress it from printing by double-clicking on the layer and un-checking the printable option...you can turn it off and on at will...and you can scale it to fit as you work.

HTH,
-Atomick