illustrator glitches

[egypturnash]

DID YOU KNOW: Illustrator CS2 starts slowing way the hell down once you get to about 800 paths in a drawing. This seems to include the virtual paths in blends. Hiding layers does not help; it simply has too damn much to sort through to insert new paths.

My current piece is close to being done. It's got about 1100 paths. It will have a few dozen more. The pencil tool is simply unresponsive now; it glitches in exactly the same way Flash's pencil and brush die on all but the tiniest files. I'm throwing the last bits into a new file to work on without all the undertow. Once I draw the left-hand aunt, the image will be done.

DID YOU KNOW: Sometimes Illustrator will save a file as a PDF instead of an actual Illustrator file. If you are unlucky, this will be a thoroughly fucked-up PDF that's absolutely uneditable. Most of the time, it just loses the color space information.

This happened too, during attempts to deal with the first problem. I believe I first encountered this bug in 10. It persists. It is elusive. It happens to big, heavy files. I have some little tells for it but I can still notice them too late. I wonder if I could set up something to watch my working directories for a PDF being saved to them, and pop up a Growl alert to warn me.

Comments

[nyctopterus.livejournal.com]

I'm still using CS, and I can't say I'd be pleased if Illustrator slowed down at around 800 paths - some of my drawings have over 10,000. I don't see the point in upgrading Illustrator anymore, they haven't added any features I've wanted since v9. The only reason is to keep up is Apple's swiching platforms every couple of years, requiring an upgrade of all apps.

Not that I'll ever be able to afford a intel mac.

Do you thing when it's saving a PDF file (wrongly) the illustrator file is still in there, and it's opening the wrong part?

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I wonder if it's something about my process, about the way I use my machine... I could well be pushing the limits of how much memory I have for AI to run comfortably around there, especially as I usually have a bunch of other programs up by habit. Around 800 paths the pencil tool starts dropping the first half-second or so of input, making fast scribbling impossible.

I'd be happy at whichever version added transparency. 10, I think. I lean on that a lot. And the Appearance palette, from the same revision. But switching to OSX made me ache for the X-ready revision. And if I ever afford an Intel machine, yeah, I'll want that version.

Sometimes it does seem to be in there. I actually had one file come back from this problem. But it's something deeper, as I usually save without the PDF embedded - it just about halves the file size to do this, and I can tell it's doing this save-as-PDF-wrongly because it pops up a 'Saving PDF' progress bar when it does.

[(Anonymous)]

It's possible that AI slows down enough that the pencil tool drops input at that sort of level of complexity - I don't really use the pencil.

Transparency is my must-have feature as well. I recall it in v9, the switch to OS X in v10, and now the switch to Intel in CS3. They kept promising speed increases, which kept me interested too. I'm not fool enough to believe that bollocks any more.

I very rarely save with PDF turned on, because it slows the save time to a crawl; much worse than double the time. It especially bad if there are images embedded (even small ones). They don't open properly in PDF viewers anyway.

Sounds like CS2 has bugs that CS1 doesn't have. I'm going to wait until I get an intel and check out CS3.

[nyctopterus.livejournal.com]

Oops - that was me, obviously.