[OS X TeX] Large Figure in Document? (and slow response of TeXShop)

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 20 nov. 05 à 05:34, Ross Moore a écrit :

> On 20/11/2005, at 2:13 PM, Gary L. Gray wrote:
>
>> On Nov 19, 2005, at 10:01 PM, Jung-Tsung Shen wrote:
>>
>>> Thanks for many helpful suggestions. I actually didn't know about  
>>> the
>>> "Simplify" command. :P
>
> Nor did I. Thanks for the tip.
> Which menu is it under, and in which versions of Illustrator ?
> I cannot find it in  CS (11.0.0).

Same here in Illustrator CS2. Where is it?

> This sounds similar to a problem that I had to face a couple of  
> years ago.
> There, the image contained hundreds-of-thousands of tiny dots  
> (perhaps even
> a million of them) --- a bifurcation (orbit) diagram, for those who  
> know
> what this means.
>
> Under System 9 (or earlier) it took Illustrator a 1/2 hour or more to
> render the image, and even then only after setting a memory-partition
> of 256 Mb.  And there was more than one of these images needed for a
> paper in a Proceedings volume --- Wendy, do you remember these ?
>
> The reason was that Illustrator was making a separate object for every
> single dot. In particular, each integer coordinate was converted into
> a floating-point number, with 8+ digits in each.
> The file-size grew enormously as a result.
> Editing, to add frames and labels, was quite impossible.
>
> Solution:  do not "Open" the file in Illustrator.
>     Instead start a new document and use the "Place.." command
>     from the menu:       File > Place...
>
> Then it would still take a little while (~1/2 min) to render, but
> the image was editable and could be saved into .eps or .pdf .

Make me think of a problem I had with high-resolution Mathematica  
figures, created with instructions such as:

Plot3D[Evaluate[deps[x, y, 5, .25]],
   {x, -10, 50}, {y, -30, 30}, PlotPoints -> {601, 601},
   PlotRange -> All, Mesh -> False]

Each resulting figure, saved to EPS format, was about 25 MB. Opening  
it in Illustrator for further modification took ages, and saving it  
afterwards from Illustrator took about 45 mins (I'm not  
exaggerating!). Even so, it was only possible after upgrading the RAM  
of my PowerBook from 512 MB to 1 GB: before that, the Mac crashed  
before saving anything, and it was only possible to save to EPS or  
PDF format, not to Illustrator format.

I wouldn't recommend this workflow anyway, as inside Illustrator the  
file is almost unusable: if you just attempt to move an element (like  
an axis label), it takes minutes for Illustrator to update the  
display, during which Illustrator is unresponsive.

And yes, in Preview or TeXShop the figures took ages to display. With  
6 such figures on a page, I even couldn't print: the printing job  
crashed before displaying any output (and the printer was attempting  
to process the job for maybe 45 mins before the crash), which had my  
colleagues not very happy about me given the printer is a network one  
serving many Macs and PCs. For printing I had to use Adobe Reader,  
which apparently does a lot of pre-processing (taking, again,  
minutes) before sending the job to the printer: it seems in this way  
the load on the printer resources is much lower.

Eventually, I had to create JPEG versions (about 500 kB each) of the  
figures (I'm using pdfTeX or XeTeX) for working on the paper  
including them, and for creating its online version. It is only for  
printing the very final printout, and for sending the files to the  
publisher, that the EPS figures were useful. And yes, publishers  
generally do want EPS, not PDF!

> If there are math-labels, then I'd usually use WaRMreader Marked- 
> Objects
> for control over these at the LaTeX level. (But sometimes I just do it
> all in Illustrator.)

For years I have been telling I should give WaRMreader and Gary's and  
Francesco's plugin a try, but I still haven't, and I am still using  
Illustrator for everything including math labels. Difficult to move  
to a new tool, when you're experienced with one!

Bruno Voisin------------------------- Info --------------------------
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