Printable View
Hi All, I am having issues with exporting compatible files to a vehicle wrap printer that says they requires eps format. I have tried exporting the attached file as ai eps. but it crashes Xara pro 11 each time :confused:. Is Xara eps. compatible with Ai? or does anyone have a suggestion please...other than going to a darkened room to bang my head against the wall ;)
Can they printing company accept PDF? And can they accept PDF/X? PDF/X should work fine and is vector and can contain bitmaps just like an EPS file.
Looking at your first file it contains both vector and bitmap images. Are you just exporting the image and bonnet outline?
Remember seeing these designs before and you had a few problems then with these files. I can't remember what I said the last time but what a huge amount of work you have done here you are my hero. That doesn't solve the problem your having and my computer crashed as well on the RH side when exporting and I recon that I have a quick and powerful desktop with loads of memory. What I think is happening when your computer is trying to crunch the number for your export it is struggling with the amount of lines and work. Your not going to like what I say here but I would simplify your drawing if I was doing it for a van. You have a few bitmaps which have a very high dpi all that you need is a dpi of 300 I found one bitmap of around 10570 dpi! You have to optimise your bitmaps even down to around 150 dpi. Then you have quite a few of the , let's call them badges, using bitmap effects on your lines around them them (bitmap brushes), take that off as these will cause most of the export problems that your having. That's things like the owl, the claw with blood, and there is one more which I have lost. There are other areas where you have used transparencies with feathering again this will cause problems. Then there is the Giraffe which has a trans, which is the hair texture which has a huge number of nodes on it here again you will need to simplify it. If I was in your shoes I would select that giraffe and make a bitmap copy of it instead of leaving as grouped vector. After making the copy just hide the vector and leave the bitmap using the layers gallery. I would use this way of exporting your .eps for most of the complex badges. The text I would keep as vector and place in the top most stack in your layer gallery or better add the text to a layer which is the top most layer.
I did a very quick bitmap copy of each of your badges and then hid each group of vectors leaving just the background, stripes and text as vector and exported as .eps and it worked. The file is too large to post on the forum but you could do the same in about 10 mins. Good luck with your file getting it printed but there's too much detail in some badges and some of your huge amount of hard work will be lost.
Cheers
Peter
I always export as RGB pdf and then import them into illustrator and then export as pdf-x1.
Thank you Peter, this is a great help, I will give it a go now :)
Remember in the File menu down to Page Options, with that opened click on the View tab, then in the middle at Bitmaps, click on the box which is labeled "DPI when auto generated" and type in 300. Most import that you do that as you might miss when you select your vectors and do a "Ctrl+Shift+C" to create your bitmap copy as it will 96. When the window opens and you see the dialogue make sure that that you see PNG at the top. If it is on the palette options you must see "True colour +Alpha". Alongside the palette you will see Bitmap Size, click on that just to make sure that in DPI that 300 is selected. The default is 96 dpi which is useless for print so go at least 150 but 300 is better.
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.
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!