Need help with trade show banner

[Watcher900]

I'm designing a banner 6' X 2.5' for my trade show booth. I sell Coat of Arms & Surname history gifts on paper that looks like parchment paper. I'm using ProX11 and I want the banner background to look like parchment. I did it using bitmap fill and transparency and it looked pretty good. It would not export to PDF because the bitmap is to large. My question to you, is there a way to make this in a vector format? Does anyone know a tutorial you can point me to or can give me some tips? Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thank You.

[mwenz]

Would you post your XAR file? If it is too large for the forum you would need to upload to dropbox.com or the like and provide a download link to it.

Mike

[Watcher900]

I deleted that file because I can't use it. Besides, I need to know how to make parchment paper without using bitmaps. I'm not looking for someone to make it for me. Thank you for your interest.

[mwenz]

Suit yourself. Likely it could have been output to PDF using the bitmap--I have done larger ones. But to determine the issue so that you could do it yourself would have taken looking at the file itself.

Google "vector parchment background" (without the quotes) and find one then.

[mwenz]

Some general tips on large format work, especially when transparency is involved.

Images at 100% scale do not need to be greater than 150 dpi for large format printing.

If the transparency is added to the background image, it will take longer to process and create a larger pdf than necessary. A better thing to do is to use the photo editing tools in your Xara application to desaturate the image. If transparency is needed to get the effect desired on a background image, make a copy of it as a png with no transparency and at 15p dpi if it is greater than that. This will keep the appearance but reduce the memory footprint. Delete the original.

Text ought to be on a top-notch layer unless some portions thereof need to be included in an effect that will become rasterized.

If a large background bitmap has been created and the original deleted, consider saving and exiting before an attempt is made to create the pdf. Then restart, load the file and immediately create the pdf. This will make sure there is the most free memory possible.

There is more info about large format work, but from reading the opening post it sounds like that may do it for you.

[Egg Bramhill]

How about using a tiled bitmap texture too. This decreases the file size considerably.

The attached has a seamless tiled background.

This is covered with a fractal filled page sized rectangle with an 80% transparency to distract from the seamless tiles repetition.

The crest is vector and the text converted to Editable shapes.

Exports to pdf at 150dpi on my machine okay.

[mwenz]

Where there's a will, there's a way. At least if the software cooperates