Re: inserting Adobe Illustrator graphics, more experience

CyberTaz:

Thanks for your post on this thread:

in article C04ADCBF.E91A%onlygeneraltaz1@xxxxxxxxxxxx, CyberTaz at
onlygeneraltaz1@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 3/25/06 8:40 AM:

Hi Henry -


On 3/25/06 12:42 AM, in article C04A183D.178B2%henryn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,
"henryn" <henryn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

There are a few awkwardnesses:

o One must crop the inserted drawing the first time, but it appears that the
size you set at that point remains valid through subsequent updates, I
guess, as long as the overall image size doesn't get larger. On my machine,
the crop tool isn't as stable as I'd like it to be.

Are you referring to 'cropping', 'resizing', or both?

I mean cropping. Imported graphics arrive in page-size frames, of which
only a bit is one of my sketches. Easy enough (but see below) to pick up
the cropping tool from the Formatting Palette and move the top center of the
frame down and the bottom center up. I usually leave the sides alone
unless the sketch was badly centered in the first place, in which case I
pull in the right and left sides as much as necessary to center the object
with the help of the center align button.


I'm unclear also on what you mean by "unstable".

The tool itself is jittery. Sorry, but that's what it is, jittery or
unstable as I move it. Flickers. Easy to miss the drag handles and, at tht
point, reverts to some other kind of pointer.


AFAIK, either should remain set in Word unless
you change the settings. Changes to the linked file shouldn't determine
anything other than what displays within the boundary set in the doc. Or am
I missing your point altogether?

This point isn't worthwhile chasing as I should do more experimentation to
see what actually happens. I did note that sketch excursions a bit outside
the AI "artboard" --that's the boundary-- are shown in Word, but independent
items way outside the artboard are not. But that's very, very preliminary.

o Word sizes "wide" artwork reasonably, apparently for the page width --and
not the current margin setting. (More experimentation...) I wish there was
a bit more user control for special situations.

I believe John addressed this quite well.

Right. Well, I still wish there was more control.

o The images somehow acquire a slight ivory background color in some
situations. An annoyance, not a fatal flaw. I haven't systematically
looked at which views of the material have this and which don't.

This could be related to what Illy calls the Artboard, similar to
Photoshop's Canvas.

Could be, but there's no fill inside the Artboard. And this is the only
case I've found a tint or cast added behind the graphics -- in every other
use, the background of the graphics is transparent.

As with other images the graphic is contained within a
rectangle which may appear to be transparent in the creating app, but is
still filled with pixels.

Right. In a vector graphic, though, there are no such pixels, unless at
some point a conversion is done.

Most destination apps will interpret those pixels
as white unless the image file includes a clipping path. If I am correct
about Word treating the AI file as a PNG (see below) you may be able to use
the Set Transparent Color tool in Word to get rid of those peripheral
pixels.

OK, thanks, I'll try that next time I see it.

As I remarked, this isn't a fatal flaw -- the discoloration helps frame the
sketches... fortuitously. But I could do without it.

o The Edit-->Links dialog one must use to update individual graphics as one
makes a change in an AI file is non-standard and allows only a fixed column
width for the source file name. So if the source file is buried too deeply
or the name is too long, one may have a problem selecting.

In case you may not have noticed, if you select one of the items in the
list, the full path displays directly below the list, itself, adjacent to
the Source File: label.

I didn't see that. D'oh! That helps.

But I don't understand why a standard file selection box couldn't be used
here so users could adjust the three columns as necessary. It is extra
work to programmers to do a custom, fixed column-width scrolling box here.

Now, I've just discovered a bit more about how the process works.

...Because I screwed up. I saved an Adobe Illustrator file without "Create

PDF" Compatible File" option enabled. When I tried insert that file I got
the following notice inserted into the file as a graphic:

"This is an Adobe ® Illustrator ® file that was saved without PDF content.
To place or open this file in other applications, it should be re-saved from
Adobe Illustrator with the 'Create PDF Compatible File' option turned
on..."

So Word assumes that .ai files contain PDF "stuff" and when you navigate the
Insert-->Picture-->From File to an Illustrator file, that's what it expects
and you want to happen.

Not really. The AI native format w/o PDF compatibility option appears *not*
to be an image file format. Although this is not technically accurate, think
of the 'bare' AI format as being more like postscript. IOW, the exact same
thing happens in InDesign if you attempt to place an AI that hasn't been
saved with the PDF option.

I'm not sure of the distinction or if we really disagree. There are two
general cases: either you save with PDF compatibility or not. If you
don't, contents comprehensible only to AI is saved. If you do, the file
contains at least something other apps can use.

These distinctions get really crazy, since there are all sorts of
this-file-contains-this-format-and-that-format combinations. Maybe it would
be better to talk about vector versus bitmap. (But some files contain
both...)

I've done a small amount of similar work with sketches from AI to InDesign,
but so little I don't recall the results. I don't recall any problems.



This also strongly implies that the image one sees in the Word file is
derived from scalable PostScript that's in the PDF, and not a bitmap preview
image also included in the Insert'ed file as many people believe. The
result is clearly a bitmap, as a quick scaling experiment with the picture
editing tools clearly demonstrates.

I'm not sure where the idea of a 'bitmap preview' comes from, but most
anymore (I believe) are TIFF.

I'm not sure either. It seems to be the impression of a lot of people that
there's an extra representation in each file that's bitmapped, even if
there's also a vector (i.e., PostScript) representation that looks great on
a PS printer.

Illy, however, appears to use PDF for the
preview/thumbnail to deliver a graphic rendering of the AI file content to
the destination application.

Not sure about that, if the PDF compatibility is disabled.

I'll try to find out more about this through
the Adobe Forum if I can.

Good idea. I'd join you there... if I wasn't so pressed for time. Post
back here, or contact me offline, please.


Either way, it seems that it is up to the
destination app to interpret the file as it 'chooses'...

I think there is a kind of negotiation between what the source application
provides and what the target app can interpret. It's even possible for the
the target app to have a range of bad to great choices and pick a suboptimal
one for the user's purpose -- for reasons known only to the software folks.


Photoshop looks at
the AI file as PDF, whereas it is interpreted by Word as PNG (I'm basing
this on the fact that once the file is inserted into a doc you can use the
Set Transparent Color tool which is not active when you select a PICT).

Don't know about that, but I'll take a look next time I'm there.

thanks,

Henry


henryn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx remove 'zzz'



Thanks,

Henry

henryn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx remove 'zzz'

Regards |:>)



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