AI-10 to AI-8 file explotion

[sharifsucks]

hi i made an illustration with ai 10 which is about 6Mb. in order to get this thing printed at my school i must convert this into an ai8 file, because that's the version my school has available. but when i try to save it as an ai8 file, it would take almost 20 minutes proccesing, and with the size of over 220Mb...is this normal? it would take ages if i put such a big file on my .com server so i can download it at my school, which would also take ages. i also don't have a cd writer. so what should i do?

shouldn't AI files be small since they're al vector graphics? and i also understand that the size of the artwork doesn't matter, it's 60cmx50cm.

thank you very much.

 

[askIllustrator]

6Mgs!? good lord how many nodes did you use? Are there placed images? Try to break it up into floppy sized files and reassemble at school. six megs... gees. BEHOLD! As Steve Jobs introduces us the latest in desk-lamp technology!

http://www.apple.com

 

[sharifsucks]

220mb...that would be...about 200 floppies?
i made an illustration with a lot of outerglows, drop shadows and featherings...i also dont understand this...i also took some photos into flash,trace bitmap, and copy hte vectors into AI...would that be the problem?

 

[carlow]

hi,

A lot of the things you did with your file won't be saved if you will save as a AI 8 file. Going back to an older version always loses some things AI 10 can do, so that will be a problem too.
I presume you embedded the placed files. This makes the file so huge. Replace the files and link them instead of embedding them. This way the photo's are not 'in' the AI-file. On the other hand you will have to put the photo's on your server as well as the AI file. Look to see how big the placed files are and try to reduce them in size. Make sure when you do this that the files do not loose too much quality.

hope this helps
grillhouse

 

[askIllustrator]

From a designers standpoint, use AI's bells and whistles VERY sparingly! Its a tell tale sign of an amature. Ive heard the term, "Pollishing a turd". Take a good look at your design and question how badly you need certain effects. Furthermore, Grillhouse is right about backwards compatability. Even if you did get your file to school you would be very unhappy with what you got since it would rasterize all your glows and shadows. See if you can retrace the stuff in flash at a smaller setting so you can reduce the node count. What i meant about downsizing is saveing a few files with a few elements each, save them each to separate disks and reassemble the full image at school. BEHOLD! As Steve Jobs introduces us the latest in desk-lamp technology!

http://www.apple.com