Hi Charlie
You are correct about the oulines in poscript, postcript likes things compartmentalized and even creates a bounding box for stuff inside it. But objects without fills are not 100% transparent (if I am understanding you correctly). I do not have Draw 9 so I am not sure of the actual terminology used (they change the interface with every release), but in Draw 7, you used lens that you could apply transparency too. Parts of the underlying objects will show thru depending on the settings used. All of this adds tremendous amounts of math to your file. Then when you start combining transparent objects with other item, blends etc...holy smokes...the file can become incredibly complex.
Every thing in a drawing ap will affect the file size. even if you dont see the objects. For instance, if you powerclip a bitmap into a small vector object...the parts that are inviseable do not dissappear to the file (and more importantly to the printer). Even if you only have a tiny bit of an 20 meg bitmap used in the effect...the whole 20 megs and the object that is powerclipping it will have to be sent to the printer as one object. And if you copy and paste the poserclip...you have just added another copy of the bitmap to the file. And I guess this is really what my point was...what you see in a drawing ap...is not all that gets sent to the printer.
Postscript 3 is supposed to be able to handle transparency. But I could probably count all the shops in Calgary with level 3 postscript on 1 hand. Pretty well everyone is still using PS2. And I doubt that will change in the near future. And besides, I dont think that even level 3 PS will be able to handle the kind of stuff that I do in Xara and what you do in Draw.
What I would recommend you doing is to do what ever you want in Draw. Knock yourself out and do what ever effects you want to. Then when you are done, export the file as a tiff image. You could also save and then use Draw's convert to bitmap too. Just dont save affter you do this as you will still want the editable file for corrections/changes. Open the tiff in Photoshop and check for colours. You may even want to do some special effects in it that are best done in an image editing program. If this is for the printing presses, convert to CMYK. I often end up bring the tiff into Quark or Indesign and adding type in that ap. But you could also bring your tiff into a new file in Draw and add other vecor objects etc. This is the safest route. Bitmaps are wonderful...and they are about as WYSIWYG as you get in the computer world.
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