If, like me, Adobe's Fireworks is your web design and layout graphics program of choice it can be frustrating when a client asks for a print ready graphic (such as a logo) on an item that started out designed for web only.
Whilst Fireworks can save it's files in print ready formats such as Illustrator .ai, there are a number of problems. Firstly Fireworks only creates files in web ready 72dpi, secondly there is no option to use print ready CMYK colours so you need to convert your Fireworks graphic to a scalable vector graphic that is print ready and that means an Abobe Illustrator .ai file.
To sum up, to make a Fireworks graphic print ready 3 areas need to be addressed:
1. Resolution needs to be scaled up to 300dpi.
2. The file format needs to be changed to Illustrator .ai. Whilst Fireworks can save it's files as .ai Illustrator often refuses to open these and when it does open them the layout is corrupted and Illustrator substitutes other fonts. So we need to remove the fonts.
3. Colour format needs to be converted from web RGB to print CMYK - this can be addressed via the colour properties in Illustrator.
Happily with Fireworks can help you with all of these issues to convert from web to print.
Step 1: First we need to upscale your graphics from 72dpi to 300dpi. To do this create a new document in Fireworks with a resolution of 300dpi, copy and paste in your graphic and Fireworks will ask you if you want to resample to the new documents resolution, click resample. Don't worry you wont lose any quality because your Fireworks graphic is vector lines and text.
Step 2: Illustrator has a problem with opening docs containing text so next we need to remove the fonts by converting your text to paths. Select your text in Firworks and go to menu 'Text/Convert to Paths'.
Now you can use save as to save your Fireworks doc as an Illustrator .ai file.
Don't save the Fireworks .png though, we want those text elements to remain editable just in case they change at a later date, so undo the convert text to paths before saving Firework's original source .png.
Step 3: When you open your Fireworks exported .ai in Illustrator you can now set the document properties to CMYK via the menu File/Document Color Mode.
That's it! You now have the scalable vector graphic in the Illustrator .ai format that all printers ask for.
This article is the personal comment of it's author and it's accuracy is not guaranteed.
