[OS X TeX] Preparation of illustrations for press

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 25 mars 08 à 23:04, Ross Moore a écrit :

> When you open an EPS created in another application,
> then Illustrator tries to recognise every single piece
> of the graphic (dot, line, circle, disc, polygon, etc.)
> and wrap it up as a separate *object*, so that it can be
> selected and modified.
>
> This is what bloats the file-size.
>
> With many scientific documents, resulting from data-capture
> or mathematical simulations, you don't want any of this.
>
> Instead you should start a new Illustrator document, and "Place"
> the scientific part as a single object, preferably within a layer
> initially by itself. Now add extra objects or masks, to create
> a more professional-looking appearance for those parts of the
> graphic that are for presentation, rather than science.

What I often use Illustrator for is idiosyncratic in this respect:  
namely, take advantage of its ability to separate a graphics into its  
different elements, so as to be able to transform some of these  
individually afterwards. For example, make some lines thicker,  
transform others into dashes, fill some closed elements with  
background, change fonts.

Originally I found that tricky, as for some reason Illustrator  
considers apparently disconnected elements as a single object and  
doesn't allow dissociating them. When I finally became aware of direct  
selection, the problem disappeared.

Appended is an example (obviously not exhibiting the size problem): a  
Mathematica-produced graphic, and the same after processing in  
Illustrator to rotate, add symmetric elements, etc. All the same could  
probably have been achieved using Mathematica commands, but I'm not a  
very competent Mathematica programmer and I found it easier to use  
Illustrator for this. That said, the interactive graphic editing  
facilities of Mathematica 6 possibly makes this straightforward: I  
haven't experimented with these yet.

>> - I've experienced situations when an Adobe application does  
>> something, and suddenly my Mac becomes unresponsive for several  
>> seconds or minutes. When finally I manage to open Activity Monitor  
>> I realize most of the CPU is taken by an Adobe process. That other  
>> applications don't usually provoke the same phenomenon makes me  
>> think Adobe applications are not optimized for the Mac. That they  
>> take most of the CPU just for themselves shouldn't happen.
>
> This is perhaps the Updater checking on the web?

Not in those cases. I don't remember precisely, but I think it was  
when applying some transformations, effects or filters. Apparently a  
process is launched then, which may take something like 95% of the CPU  
and 1 or 2 GB of virtual RAM.

Bruno

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