Re: The Age-Old Illustrator-to-Frame Question (and Gripe)

[Dov Isaacs <isaacs@xxxxxxxxx>]

Having followed this cute thread the last day or so, I'd like to add
some comments.

First of all, FrameMaker never really officially and fully supported 
import of Adobe Illustrator .AI files. Officially, FrameMaker only fully
supports import of .EPS and .PDF files saved from Adobe Illustrator.

Secondly, until several years ago, the .AI file format used by Illustrator
was almost identical to the .EPS format. In those cases, if one attempted
to import on of those .AI files, it often "worked" because internally,
despite not having a .EPS suffix, it looked like an EPS file. The current
(i.e., Illustrator 9 or 10) .AI format likewise can be imported into
FrameMaker if and only if the .AI file was saved with the option to make
the file PDF-compatible. (Contrary to an unfortunate public perception,
Illustrator's native file format is NOT PDF. Illustrator stores its
formatting information in a private data area within what looks like a
PDF file which can optionally have all of Illustrator's private data
repeated as genuine PDF data for display and print in Acrobat.) In this
case, FrameMaker is successful in importing an Illustrator file because
it has PDF information as well.

The safest and most highly recommended method of Illustrator content
import into FrameMaker continues to be EPS.

With regards to the "preview" of EPS ... that is a known limitation of
virtually every publishing program around except InDesign. In order
to fully and properly display the contents of an EPS file, the importing
program must have a full PostScript 3 interpreter available within the
program to parse and interpret what is in effect any general PostScript
that could be in the imported EPS file.

EPS previews in most programs are considered to be FPO (for positioning only).

        - Dov



At 11/21/2002 02:10 AM, Roger Jones wrote:
>At 02:27 PM 20/11/02 -0800, Tom Regner wrote:
>>. . .
>>Nowadays, Adobe doesn't seem to want to remember the fact that Frame and Illustrator used to work together seamlessly.  Now it is nearly impossible to get decent graphics from Illustrator 10 to render well at all (the "Save as EPS" solution notwithstanding) when imported into Frame. I just tried it.  A simple vector drawing, with perhaps three colors to show states of LEDs. Not only does it look like crap in Frame, the only way to get it to fit on the page (since there is no "set dpi" available for EPS, apparently) is to use the "scale" function, which makes it look even worse.
>+++ Agreed. From any point of view it is not exactly impressive that output from one Adobe product either won't display properly in, or won't import at all into, one of its DTP packages.
>
>>Anyone versed in Illustrator knows it is a far superior tool to FrameMaker's native drawing
>>package (can you say "stone ax"?), and it is enormously frustrating to be six years into the
>>future and see that we are LESS capable than we were with down-rev "inferior" products in terms of importing graphics.
>+++ For limited purposes, I rate Frame's drawing tools more highly than Illustrator's, simply in terms of ease of use and logical behaviour (starting with alignment of objects).
>
>. . .
>
>>So, these terse replies about saving as EPS from Illustrator and then importing that into Frame are getting on my nerves.  It simply isn't working, and I've tried about two dozen different methods of getting my nice-looking Illustrator drawings into Frame with absolutely no acceptable outcome.
>+++ The way I work is to get the final size right in Illustrator, export as EPS, import into FM (and laugh every time at the quality of the TIFF preview display), and wonder again why on earth Adobe don't fix it.
>
>>Adobe has to fix this.  This is ridiculous.  I'm a huge fan and evangelist for the company, but
>>I can see why so many of my co-workers grumble about Adobe.
>+++ I agree, on every point. But I first made that request at least several years ago.
>
>All the best
>
>Roger Jones at Terra Publishing


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