[Mike Gondek]

Try Ctrl H(PC) Command (H)Mac. That is the show.hide edges comand whcih woudl hide the seelction on your text or the point/area text selection indiciator.

Otherwise if the actual I-beam bar is gone you may have a technical problem which may be fixed by resetting your illustrator prefereences.

[Mike Gondek]

You need to make seprate files for each layer first to get the final result you need which is a single PDF with multiple pages. It is very easy to make a multiple page PDF once you have a file for each page.

[Mike Gondek]

Adobe recomends 3to5x the file size of free ram for photohsop. I am not sure about how you are allocating RAM in XP, 460mb is nothing. You should have 2gb or more of ram, and only run photohsop as you have been.

There are many other things I could tell you such as to turn on pixel doubling, but your slow refresh is most likely cause your file is going into virtual memory which is 45X slower than ram.

[Mike Gondek]

You can export each layer to a file using File>> scripts>>export layers to files. I know that has been around since atleast CS1.

[Mike Gondek]

Actually a good question, and I am not sure why Adobe does this. When I have had to fix a machine withfont problems in one application and not the other, this was the reason.

If there is a font you woudl like for another application to use, I woudl make a copy on your drive to your own font liabrary and use font book or your font manager to load this for all applications to use.

At one point I removed all the foreign language fonts (cause I have no use for Korean, Japanese, Chinese and wanted to shorten my font menus), and my system started up with all the files on the desktop having no name (Whcih made no sense, since my system was not using Asian fonts to display that). So I would recomend leaving a copy in the exisiting folder of fonts that applicatiosn insitall, unless you really have the time to troubleshoot and are tech savvy enough to get yourself out of a mess.

[Mike Gondek]

Ctrl Click on layer thumbnail to select
Select >> Feather
Layers palette, click on add a mask icon

I am guessing that you are doing a transform of 98%, because your layer occupies to your entire canvas. Alternatively you can image >> canvas size >> add some more canvas even 1 pixel seems to work. Image quality degrades each time time you transform an image, and canvas size is faster (noticeable on high res images).

[Mike Gondek]

Your fonts may already be set correctly, but you need to view items at 100% in Photoshop to see a true 1 to 1 pixel represenation on screen of what the final product will look like.

[Mike Gondek]

There is only a brighten/contrast adjustment layer.

You may be thinking of the fade function, which can be run after a filter by hitting Shift Ctrl F. Otherwise for Unsharp mask there isno adjustmetn layer

[Mike Gondek]

The dodge and burn tools can be very helpful for this.

You cold also create a new layer above your art, set that layer blending mode to multiply, then paint on that layer with a medium gray. You can also set your brush to mode of multiply, to get that random look of dark edges.

[Mike Gondek]

OS X has this whole Unix based file permissions which often gets screwed up, for no good reason. You can use disk utility and click on the repair permissions button.

This may fix you problem, if not you can reinstall Photohsop, as the permisions for that folder should be fixed now.

If you have photoshop running on another machine you can save time by copying the missing file over. I am not in front of a mac now, but you may need to Ctrl Clicking on the application and choosing show package contents, to view the individual parts of the app. You could then compare and try to find any missing files.