Illustrator 10

[Cory]

as I'm sitting down at the shop this wet saturday morning, waiting for this illustrator 10 job to flatten/save, I figured I have a few hours to write a rant on AI10..

Is it only me that has a horrible time getting these jobs to rip/trap properly?

our shop is running Rampage 8.6 and it seems no matter how much tweaking I do, I never get good looking traps on jobs..strokes that will choke, then spread, spreads on items that don't butt any other color elements.

transparency seems to be the root of all this evil..

I have a client that designs everything in AI10, and loves the new transparency features (also happens to be one of our largest clients, so there quite a few jobs)

at what point do you just throw your hands up and say that's the best I can get and send it out to the press?

Quite frustrating beacuse I like to do quality work, but I can't with AI10.

Click and Pray I guess

oh..finally done saving! :lol:

[Lammy]

transparancy IS the root of all prepress evils (notice proper reaction to left) You must be working on some majorly complex files man. What sort of press is it printing on? Are you doing imposed films or plates? You may be able to cut your trap amount way back as well as use a lighter percent in teh trap mix to make tehm less noticable? Can ya cheat and rasterise some of the artwork that is using transparancy in PhotoShop and place it back in to the AI file? If your strokes have teh same color as teh fill I have found Rampage tends to treat it as a seperate object from the fill and you'll get a thin line between them when it traps. If that's the case outline the art then combine it into one object. or edit the trap and make the fill spread.

[Cory]

lol

they are some whoppers...I will have to upload a screen shot of how this thing rasterized in the end..what a mess..

and to top is all off, the artist places images and sizes them down within AI, so on a 9X12 job, the AI EPS is over 600 megs...shouldn't be too suprised, he did give me a file that saved at over a gig a few months ago.

[Lammy]

OH MY!!!!! sounds like someone needs a talking to

i had a client send me an ad that we had to proof and burn to a CD then ship to the pub. Same deal each 8 x 10 ad had over 500MB of images on it scaled down to less than 10% that size. The kicker was, tehy would send me 10 different copies of it, insisting I used each one, and the ONLY thing that changed was the note for each pub under the actual ad!!! UGHH.

[throttle73]

:twisted: i can relate....just last week i had to print 20 some odd prints on our sherpa for a client. each file was 1.5 gigs when ripped. One of the AI files had the exact same 300 meg image placed and embedded over itself 4 or 5 times. On a side note whats the deal with not being able to save ilustration over itself. I get an error sometimes stated that the image can't besave because it is opened or in use. Sometimes it happens when i have the quark doc that it is placed in open and some times i don't have crap opened. I read that it could related to a Norton file saver conflict but i disabled all that crap to no avail.

[Cory]

are you working off a file server?
I know AI 10 had some problems cleaning up the temp files...but I believe that was all fixed with one of the updates..10.0.3 is the current version

[throttle73]

oops looks like i haven't updated at all. i thought i did. I hope that will fix it

[Lammy]

Quark and certain versions of Illustrator are notorious for "holding onto" files. Even after you've closed them. Basically the App doesn't allow another program to mark the file as free space so you get an error when saving. Not sure if this is only on the server or not. I haven't paid that much attention :wink:

[cari]

Tip: Install the Flattener Preview for AI. It's located in the
Utilities / Flatten Preview / folder inside your AI application folder.

It's an all in one palette.

I dislike Rampage.

Anybody use PCC PageFlow?

Just curious... at my last job, we transferred over... and although it took awhile to iron out the wrinkles, PCC blew away Rampage.