Gripe with Adobe Illustrator

[MobiusPizza]

I was making an A1 size poster for a presentation. Now there aren't many good poster software that handles a large poster size as A1. People even uses Powerpoint, which I think is just not very good. So I decided to try Illustrator, which has advantage in being vector graphics, so I can rescale my poster.

Now I have had some problems with its stability and crashing once in a while with heavy effects applied. Lack of an auto-save feature makes it sometime quite frustrating. I got into a habit of saving often, when I have long forgotten since the era of Microsoft Office autosave and recovery feature.

Now I have made a good poster. I need to print it with a HP DesignJet graphical plotter. I tried saving it as PDF files, or untouched as AI files. They all open up on the screen nicely in the computer that controls the printer. No problems there. But, when I tried printing, some text boxes would disappear, some would be printed in wrong places, some even went out of the print border.
That's indeed very strange. I thought it was pdf flattening the layers incorrectly, I tried different exported settings. Finally I loaded up Illustrator on the printing PC and printed it direct, it was even worse with more text disappearing, etc. Some text boxes are fine, some aren't. There's absolutely no difference between them in terms of font, typesetting. It was reproducible as well. It's always those few boxes. Relocating the layers doesn't help. Flattening the layers doesn't help, indeed I don't even understand how flattening works in Illustrator. It's not the same layer flattening as in Photoshop.

Ok, so I thought let's export the poster as raster graphics, namely JPG, TIFF, etc; so I an guarantee that what appear on screen will be what it would print out. Guess what, it wouldn't let me do it. "Virtual memory has ran out. Please free up some memory and try again", says VersionCUE.dll. And the message box prompts for "Retry" or "Cancel". I checked my free memory. Gosh I am running a 4GB RAM system, with 10GB of HDD free. No way it's not got enough free memory. At least 3GB are there in form of physical and virtual memory. I clicked "Cancel". Guess what, it crashes the whole program!.

I took advices from the net and disabled Version Cue from File Handling options. Now it gives me a different message: "Insufficient memory to complete the operation". Right, thanks. I went to preferences and go to Swap disk setting, I added a secondary HDD which also has 10GB space. Nope, still saying "Insufficient memory to complete the operation".

Now I can't print out my poster. What good is a DTP program that doesn't allow you to print stuff out well? Bugs with text positions, and can't even export something as simple as raster graphics. JPG of 300 dpi and A1 size would only be around 150MB. Incidentally lowering the dpi to 150 works. But hey I want the maximum quality my printer can support.

I sort of understand why though. Illustrator is a 32bit program, it can't address more than 3.2GB RAM. But hey, a bmp of such size won't take 1GB I don't think.

I hope they make 64-bit versions asap, and make it more reliable. Illustrator is a flexible and powerful program to create graphics I found, wait a minute, only if we can output things reliably and accurately.

 

[MobiusPizza]

Update:

I manage to rasterize the images with 300 dpi. What I did was to open Illustrator AI files with Adobe Photoshop. The photoshop file size becomes 500MB, vs 13MB of the AI file. This is understandable as now it's raster image instead of vector image. The layers are flattened in PS, and you lost all layers information from Illustrator. Why is it so big I don't know.

But the good thing is that I can now save it as a TIF file. The color went all funny. But I discovered I have to convert the color profile from CMYK to RGB. Nevertheless it's now working. The TIF file surprisingly is only 70MB large. 300 dip, 7000 pixels high, 10000 pixels wide.
Photoshop doesn't have JPG options at this file size. The only raster image formats I can found is TIF or PNG. PNG IIRC supports vectoring. It's file size came out to be just 25MB. I wonder why Illustrator couldn't save png outright.

 

[rivan]

Where to begin.

First, congrats on an excellent purchase. AI is an industry standard tool for print design and production.

Next, no software is foolproof. No printer is foolproof.

Here's some bits of knowledge, from someone who's been using Illustrator daily since version 5.5, in no particular order:

- Illustrator is for vector, Photoshop is for raster. Bolded for importance.

- You can accomplish minor raster tasks in AI. You can accomplish minor vector tasks in PS. Neither is the right tool for heavy lifting on both image types. It's like having a fork and a spoon... sometimes you can get the job done with the wrong one, but it's usually never as easy or efficient. Always use the right tool for the job.

- Illustrator's effects (most stuff from the 'Filters' menu and everything in the 'Effects' menus) must be rasterized before print. Their rasterization resolution is defined under the 'Effects" menu, in "Document Raster Effects Settings".

- Complex, high resolution effects can add up quickly to unmanageable sizes and should not be allowed to be rasterized at the printer (as you did when you sent it a PDF, and when you gave it an AI). Illustrator's effects that require transparency (drop shadows, any blend mode other than "Normal", the whole "effects" menu) are generally, if not totally, avoided in professional publishing. Printed results from transparency are sometimes inconsistent from one output device to another, and we simply can't have that.

- If you need extensive effects, do them in photoshop (or your favorite raster image app) when possible and place images (I prefer .EPS files, but TIFs are also acceptable as best practice. You can get away with placing PSDs but I don't recommend it) in AI. Handle your type in AI unless you have effects (which, in good design, only exist on headlines anyway).

- Use the Flattener Preview. In a professional print environment, Illustrator should have NOTHING to flatten. In yours, expedience may overrule the tip above this one and you may decide to leave effects in AI. Use the Flattener Preview to see what it's going to do when you hit "Print..."

- CMYK. Unless you're printing only on your inkjet (and other certain specialty output devices), learn to use CMYK. Not all RGB colors can be reproduced in print. Work with a gamut you know you can reproduce in print, if that's where your stuff is going.

- If you want to take an Illustrator file and feed it directly to your PostScript printer (assuming designjets are all PS... they used to be but it's been a while for me), save it as an .EPS. It should output flawlessly assuming you follow the rest of my directions.

- Version Cue does indeed suck except in very specific working environments, none of which I've ever been in. It's useless for the rest of us - I have no idea why Adobe decided it needed to be on by default.

- Your comment on 'the color went all funny' has everything to do with working in multiple profiles/gamuts and creating unreproducible colors. Again, if you're ONLY printing on your inkjet, you can probably get away working in RGB (just be sure to use RGB everywhere) but I'd still recommend using CMYK color modes and color profiles everywhere possible if there's any chance you'll ever send anything outside your office to print. Getting the color on your screen out of your printer is a big, hairy, technical issue - there are people and companies that exist solely to make that happen. It's usually easy to get "close", but getting it dead on is often a challenge.

- Your 70 mb TIF is that small (probably) because you have large areas that are a single color (like white, black... well, any color really, as long as it's the same) and it compressed well.

- Photoshop does indeed have JPG options for files that large. It's in the "Save As..." menu. Large files will error if you try to use the "Save for Web..." dialog on them, which also has JPG as an option.

- PNG is RGB only and does NOT support vector. The way to go for support of both raster and vector is .EPS (this is actually among several reasons I prefer placing EPS rather than TIf in my workflow).

- AI can export as PNG, but as it's a raster format, the only option is to export.

- Unless you want to use Acrobat to view your AI files or have another reason to leave it on, save them with PDF compatibility off. For files without any raster/transparency effects, they'll usually save down to files well under a megabyte.

Creating and executing print pieces (especially large pieces) are my area of expertise. Feel free to PM if I can help out in any way.

 

[MobiusPizza]

First of all, thanks for the tips.
Actually my copy of Illustrator is 30 day trial

Well when I used photoshop to open the AI file, it's in CMYK space. If I directly save the file as TIF, the colours seems inverted. White appeared as black, and blue became orange. Some colours are gone even.
This was fixed when I converted the profile. Either 1) TIF doesn't support CMYK, or 2) ACD see is not rendering such tif file correctly.

Photoshop didn't have a jpg option in Save As strangely when I opened the file, even after I save the PSD file.

I tried saving as an EPS file from Illustrator, however, there is only an option of doing it in 8bit. 8bit is too small of a color depth for my color poster.

I couldn't get AI to export PNG, in fact, any raster format with dpi set higher than 150. The same insufficient memory message is shown.

I do admit there are quite some bits of raster effects, since I only recently learn to use Illustrator very quickly (didn't have much time to produce the poster within the trial, though I do have several computers )
The habit is probably from photoshop

The main problem for illustrator however, is I don't understand how the simple text boxes (no effects on them) can get all over the place when it's printed.

Anyway for this occasion I will print my poster through the TIF file made from photoshop.

Thanks for the comments, I learnt a lot.

 

[rivan]

Originally posted by: AnnihilatorX
Well when I used photoshop to open the AI file, it's in CMYK space. If I directly save the file as TIF, the colours seems inverted. White appeared as black, and blue became orange. Some colours are gone even.

You're missing a lot of detail there. I'm going to guess and say you:

? Rasterized the (primarily RGB source) AI with PS (as CMYK) and colors are ok.
? You saved as TIF (with what options?)
? You open that TIF with your RIP for the printer (what RIP are you using?) and colors are inverted.

My guess here is that you saved the TIF with extended features that the RIP didn't know how to handle. When saving TIFs, the following options will give you the highest level of compatibility:

? No compression (LZW is also highly supported; ZIP and JPEG have spotty support)
? Interleaved pixel order (though either should be ok these days)
? Since your RIP's probably on a PC, I'll say PC byte order, but it shouldn't matter to a contemporary RIP
? Discard Layers and Save a Copy (layered TIF support is spotty at best, and there's no reason to print from one)

This was fixed when I converted the profile. Either 1) TIF doesn't support CMYK, or 2) ACD see is not rendering such tif file correctly.

What exactly do you mean when you converted the profile? Did you use "Edit-->Convert to Profile..."? Or Simply change the color mode via "Image-->Mode-->..."? There's a huge difference between the two, and if you did the former then it may have simply been a side effect of the conversion.

TIF does indeed support CMYK. What're you using ACDSee for? ACDSee's a great tool for my mother to crop snapshots; I wouldn't use it for much more than that. It may have had memory issues, or issues with any of the settings beyond the 'safest' I mention above.

Photoshop didn't have a jpg option in Save As strangely when I opened the file, even after I save the PSD file.

Weird, unless you were in a funky color mode not supported by JPG, like LAB. JPG supports both CMYK and RGB.

I tried saving as an EPS file from Illustrator, however, there is only an option of doing it in 8bit. 8bit is too small of a color depth for my color poster.

The drop down where you saw 8-bit refers to the Image Preview only and has absolutely no bearing on how that file prints. That preview is only used when the file is placed in another application (or in AI itself) for screen viewing. The full fidelity of the file remains intact when used for print, but uses a preview for faster placement and manipulation when used as a placed image.

I couldn't get AI to export PNG, in fact, any raster format with dpi set higher than 150. The same insufficient memory message is shown.

I do admit there are quite some bits of raster effects, since I only recently learn to use Illustrator very quickly (didn't have much time to produce the poster within the trial, though I do have several computers )

The memory requirements for effects can be quite high when you use lots of effects, specifically when those effects overlap themselves. I could go into detail, but suffice to say that files that land on my desk with effects or transparency never, ever leave my desk with those effects intact. I could also go on and on about how terrible the implementation of transparency is with Illustrator but there's no point.

The habit is probably from photoshop

It's not a bad (technical) thing, when done in PS.

The main problem for illustrator however, is I don't understand how the simple text boxes (no effects on them) can get all over the place when it's printed.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Are you saying extra type was appearing?

Anyway for this occasion I will print my poster through the TIF file made from photoshop.

At 300 dpi, you'll get fine quality. Printing from an EPS from AI will produce better results - but the difference would be subtle.

Thanks for the comments, I learnt a lot.

Sure thing.