Exporting as Ai eps. troubles

[hseiken]

PDF is printable distribution format... or something to that extent, so it's very acceptable as a medium of delivery, just do a test open in Acrobat Reader before hand. It can separate out your images into CMYK for professional plate printing as well printing as well. Some printers prefer EPS if the image is all vector to begin with so they can, in Illustrator, correct things like overprint so your design comes out looking good.

There are some issues with Illustrator/Xara compatibility on vector formats. What I've learned is that both programs handle feathering and masking differently. So xara will, when exporting, turn anything feathered with the feather slider into a transparent image. When using masks, Xara doesn't fix incompatibility, so it's best if you have a mask to go ahead and cut everything out to the shape of the mask and disable the mask. It's the one sure way to avoid headaches. As well, when coming BACK from Illustrator to Xara, Xara will always open any Adobe format with layers set up oddly (again for compatibility).

These are the things I've noticed. I frequently have to do conversion backflips since some of my classes require .ai to be turned in instead of a generic distributable format like JPG, PNG or PDF.

I believe some of the compatiblity of Xara with .ai/.eps is handled when exporting to PDF due to how it must set up it's files.

As well, there's always the option, if you're worried about it, to render out WWWWWAAAAAAAYYYYYYY too large of an uncompressed bitmap and the printers can resize it to fit their resolution and printing needs since you can always scale down an image and get rid of detail but you can't pull detail out of thin air when upscaling a raster image..

I dunno if any of this helps you, but if nothing else, if you run into these situations, you might have an idea of where best to start troubleshooting the format problems.

[Albacore]

Most of #Metal Buddha's problems were due to Xara's brushes that he used. I for from my own experiences is that they cause problems in both eps/PDF when exporting. I agree with your comments about making each badge into a ClipView/Clipping Mask before exporting as I do that myself. Your comments about resolution are correct, #Metal Buddha, didn't say the size of the vehicle wrap so I just went with the page size of his drawing in the case of the R/Hand side was A3. If it has to cover an area of 6' x 4' then he should compensate for that by making the bitmap copies at a DPI of 600. Again some of the other areas which would cause me concern would be some of the line widths inside the badge's were at the size given in the drawing were 0.06 pt. These lines would/maybe be exported in both .eps or PDF but would not be seen. I think this happens around 0.2 pt in a PDF but can't really remember at the moment. What he has done, is a huge amount of work, to give you an example in the giraffe's the texture transparency has over 600 lines in it!