Adobe Illustrator - Illustrator CS

Author

Illustrator CS - performance tweaks?

MyndPhlyp

2006-05-23, 6:19 pm

This is Illustrator CS (not CS2) on a Win2K, 3GHz, 1GB memory, 256MB video.

Working on lengthy documents is, to put it politely, a bit of a chore.
Changing text, paragraph styles, inserting graphics with text wrap, etc. can
take an extended amount of time just waiting for the display to update.
Checking Task Manager, Illustrator has the processor pegged during the
longer tasks.

I've looked but have yet to find a way to either dumb down the display
characteristics to a lower grade or Registry tweaks that might increase the
response time and found nothing.

Any hints?

JohnLouisville

2006-05-24, 3:17 am

It sounds like to me that Illustrator CS is being used here like
high-end page-layout software like Indesign or QuarkExpress. Have you
linked your graphics instead of embedding them in the document?
Illustrator is an application for drawing vector artwork. Although it
does have extensive text and limited page layout functions, it's not
meant as a substitute for page layout software....esp. "lengthy"
documents. Maybe you should be doing this page layout in Indesign
instead and linking the large, graphics-instensive files.

MyndPhlyp

2006-05-24, 6:18 am

"JohnLouisville" <slimick@XXXXXXXXXX> wrote in message
news:1148439870.778807.215460@y43g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
> It sounds like to me that Illustrator CS is being used here like
> high-end page-layout software like Indesign or QuarkExpress. Have you
> linked your graphics instead of embedding them in the document?
> Illustrator is an application for drawing vector artwork. Although it
> does have extensive text and limited page layout functions, it's not
> meant as a substitute for page layout software....esp. "lengthy"
> documents. Maybe you should be doing this page layout in Indesign
> instead and linking the large, graphics-instensive files.

<...sigh...> Had I QuarkExpress or Indesign, they certainly would have been
a superior alternative to Illustrator but are unfortunately woefully absent
from my collection of software. Even M$ Word would have been a better
alternative but it doesn't acceptably do some of the things I require.
PageMaker (v6.5) is in the arsenal but it doesn't appear to have the
capability to flow text from page to page. CorelDRAW8, also in the arsenal,
has its fair share of shortcomings to match. In retrospect though it would
have been the better of the evils at my disposal.

Lacking the right tool for the job I have to settle on a hammer 'tho I need
a screwdriver.

jbl

2006-05-24, 6:22 pm

On Wed, 24 May 2006 09:35:36 GMT, "MyndPhlyp" <nobody@homeright.now>
wrote:

>
>"JohnLouisville" <slimick@XXXXXXXXXX> wrote in message
>news:1148439870.778807.215460@y43g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
>
><...sigh...> Had I QuarkExpress or Indesign, they certainly would have been
>a superior alternative to Illustrator but are unfortunately woefully absent
>from my collection of software. Even M$ Word would have been a better
>alternative but it doesn't acceptably do some of the things I require.
>PageMaker (v6.5) is in the arsenal but it doesn't appear to have the
>capability to flow text from page to page. CorelDRAW8, also in the arsenal,
>has its fair share of shortcomings to match. In retrospect though it would
>have been the better of the evils at my disposal.
>
>Lacking the right tool for the job I have to settle on a hammer 'tho I need
>a screwdriver.
>

jbl

2006-05-24, 6:22 pm

JohnLouisville

2006-05-24, 6:22 pm

If you're stuck with using Illustrator for page layout try either of
these:

1) Under the "View" menu choose "Outline" This will turn everything
to wireframe-looking black images. The text will remain black. It can
considerably speed things up with documents with highly complex
graphics

2) Use the Layers palette to separate your graphics from the text.
Then, on the Layers menu, click the eyeballs at left to hide images
that you don't need to work with. This might considerably speed things
up.

MyndPhlyp

2006-05-24, 6:22 pm

"JohnLouisville" <slimick@XXXXXXXXXX> wrote in message
news:1148493903.800671.141350@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com...
> If you're stuck with using Illustrator for page layout try either of
> these:
>
> 1) Under the "View" menu choose "Outline" This will turn everything
> to wireframe-looking black images. The text will remain black. It can
> considerably speed things up with documents with highly complex
> graphics

Finally found that one. It helps a bit when scrolling through the document
but does nothing perceptible with respect to response during edits.

>
> 2) Use the Layers palette to separate your graphics from the text.
> Then, on the Layers menu, click the eyeballs at left to hide images
> that you don't need to work with. This might considerably speed things
> up.

This sounds rather promising. Can you still flow text around objects that
reside on a separate layer? (assuming, of course, that the "other" objects'
layer is ordered atop the text layer) This tends to be important in the
final clean-up for widow/orphan tweaking.

(You'll have to excuse my asking rather than simply trying. The machine is a
bit tied up at the moment, if you know what I mean.)

Just to give you an idea of what I'm facing now...

It's a 10-page, 4-column layout with continuous text flow throughout.

With just straight text, making simple text changes such as changing an
individual straight quote to a "smart" quote has a significant delay but not
so bad I can't live with it. (maybe in the order of 1/2-1 second)

Making a paragraph style change takes excessively longer - occasional waits
up to 5-10 minutes even if the change affects only the last paragraph..

Add in graphics and you have time to work on your FreeCell "personal best."
Adjusting the graphic (dimensions, positions or even just the stroke) or
anything in the text block leaves you with a good 30-45 minutes of
background activity regardless of how minor or massive the change may have
been.

(And as you get down to the very fine details, a 30-minute wait for each
adjustment tends to make for a very non-productive day.)

MyndPhlyp

2006-05-24, 6:22 pm

"JohnLouisville" <slimick@XXXXXXXXXX> wrote in message
news:1148493903.800671.141350@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com...
>

Different tact - is there a setting or a Registry hack that disables the
Undo feature?

Since Illustrator allows the user to Undo multiple edits, it stands to
reason there's a cache containing the "before" image. I'm thinking that this
may contribute significantly to the burden. The hypotheses: even a minor
change could result is a reflow of the text, therefore the whole text block
and any objects the text must flow around has to be cached before
implementing the change. Once cached the next steps are to implement the
change and reformat/reflow the entire text block.

Doug Winger

2006-05-24, 6:22 pm

In article <INVcg.182$bt4.134@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net>,
"MyndPhlyp" <nobody@homeright.now> wrote:

> it doesn't acceptably do some of the things I require.
> PageMaker (v6.5) is in the arsenal but it doesn't appear to have the
> capability to flow text from page to page.

It doesn't? Then it's sure been faking it all these years.

- Doug

MyndPhlyp

2006-05-24, 6:22 pm

"Doug Winger" <justdoug@socal.rr.com> wrote in message
news:justdoug-F8DD7C.14322824052006@news-server.socal.rr.com...
> In article <INVcg.182$bt4.134@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net>,
> "MyndPhlyp" <nobody@homeright.now> wrote:
>
>
> It doesn't? Then it's sure been faking it all these years.

I'll have to look once again. It's been "a while" and my recollection could
very well be absent.

JohnLouisville

2006-05-24, 10:19 pm

Yes, PageMaker does have text flow and would definitely
work....but....PageMaker is sort of a bastard stepchild of Adobe...no
new versions are being created as the emphasis is on InDesign. I think
that latest version of PageMaker came out circa 1998 and it might have
a hard time reading /recognizing newer versions of any Photoshop, EPS
or Illustrator files you might be trying to link or embed in your
document.

You could use PageMaker to do the job...but you will have to save any
Illustrator or EPS files which you plan to link/embed in the document
in older/legacy file formats....i.e. saving an Illustrator CS2 files as
a version 8.0 file...Warning: if you have any transparency effects in
the image they'll be lost in saving to this earlier version of
Illustrator.

Regarding your question about removing the multiple undos as a way to
save processing power (I may be wrong) but I think that the ability to
do this has been taken away in CS2....so you're out of luck there.

Bottom line...you're using Illustrator for a job that it is really
not made for (page layout) and you're paying the price. If
Illustrator is your only option, try using my advice about working in
outlines and using different layers for graphics and text and turning
off layers you aren't using......AND...if humanly possible divide
your document into maybe 3 separate Illustrator files...I know you
probably don't want to hear this but I don't know what else to
advise.

MyndPhlyp

2006-05-25, 6:18 pm

"JohnLouisville" <slimick@XXXXXXXXXX> wrote in message
news:1148511634.116512.264190@g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
>
> ...I know you probably don't want to hear this...

ROFL. I've become accustomed to bad news. Life is a series of dissolutions,
regroupings, new strategies, and executions. Two steps forward, one step
back.

It's a real bummer that, although Illustrator is built to handle text flow
across multiple pages and around objects, it simply isn't geared towards
effectively utilizing those features. Rhetorically: What is the point of
adding features that are prohibitive to use? <...sigh...>

While awaiting EarthLink's daily reboot of the news servers I gave PageMaker
v6.5 a revisit. Fortunately all the artwork is either bitmaps of one sort or
another, or can easily be converted to WMF. I quickly discovered what I was
doing wrong in the past attempts to flow text across columns and pages,
rebuilt and reformatted the whole document, and am just now printing off the
first "final copy" for review. As crippled as PageMaker is, it was by far
MUCH easier for building this document than Illustrator.

Somewhere along the line I'll have to see about getting my hands on
InDesign. I've encountered several people suggesting it for lengthy
documents. Would you consider it to be more or less resource intensive than
PageMaker? (In other words, can I anticipate my FreeCell personal best to
improve while using InDesign, or is it pretty much as responsive as
PageMaker?) And what can I expect for shortcomings in InDesign?