There is no EASY way to do this in Illustrator. Only the Illustrator way, which means multiple steps and jumping through a lot of needless hoops. The sick, sad world part of this is that Adobe owns the source code to Freehand - and Freehand had this feature for years, with an elegant implementation: If you had nothing selected, it exported the entire document. If you had an object(s) selected, it would export ONLY the selected object. Simple. Intuitive. Easy. Ditto for adding/deleting Bezier points, editing objects, and a million other things. Damn, I miss Freehand. ... View more

I think it's a memory problem. It happened to me as I was working on a file. I realized that I had Illustrator and Photoshop runnning at the same time. After closing all of them and reopening just Flash, the problem went away. Overall I've found Flash 5.5/Mac to be kind of a pig about RAM. In particular, it takes a noticable amount of time (sometimes up to 10 or 15 SECONDS) to flip from one open FLA to another. Flash 4 did not have that problem. Sounds like an internal memory management problem/memory leak thing to me. Captain Digital ... View more

Feh. If Adobe actually DID listen, they would have taken one of the following steps (in order of likelihood): added all the features to Illustrator that FreeHand had 10 years ago that are STILL missing. continued to update/upgrade FreeHand (not as stupid as it sounds...look at how many different clothes detergents Proctor & Gamble makes that compete with one another). release the source code with a Creative Commons license, and allow developers to create an open source alternative to Illustrator (okay - THAT would be suicidal for illustrator, but a guy can dream). I know a few things about the way Adobe (and all software companies for that matter) work. I worked for competitiors of theirs, and a company they acquired. Lots of friends still work there at Adobe. Problem is, what we don't see as consumers is what REALLY goes on there - the jockeying for dominance by one product group over another, the limited resources and the constant battle for them between fixing what's broken (not a money-maker but helps the customers) or adding new features (attracts new customers but introduces more bugs). At Micrografx, we used to joke that a X.0 release was our "X.UH-oh" version. At one time tech support guys would ask each other, "did they want help with the "original recipe" or "extra buggy." But what really kills me is I have a lot invested in FreeHand. And it had features and functionality that is simply not in Illustrator, even now. That's insane. To make an analogy in another area, it's like GM buying Chrysler for their variable-speed transmission, and other cool technology, then discontinuing all the unique features and products, and continuing to sell the same old stuff. I realize that vector drawing is a mature category, but we deserve better than Illustrator. Even worse is the Windows-centric nature of Adobe. Back in the day, Adobe was a Mac company, first and foremost. Their Windows products were...um...kind of a joke. Illustrator 1.0, for instance, cost $100 more than it's Mac counterpart, and could only PRINT in color...it couldn't display anything in color on the screen. (!) Somewhere along the way, someone made a decision to develop on Windows (with a huge advantage in overall market share, this makes financial sense) and port the code to Macs. That's a BIG mistake, because ported code is, by definition, bloated and unresponsive. It's a cost-effective way to do business...right up until your users wise up. Unfortunately, by going for the larger Windows market, Adobe's forgotten that in graphics, Macs are still the choice of a majority of graphics professionals. How do they diss Macs? Let me count the ways: let's take video, for instance. Take a Mac and a PC. Equip both with the same CPU, RAM, and Hard Drive. See which one plays back video faster. Surprise! It's the PC. Why? Bloated code. Same is true for Flash. And Photoshop. The only thing that allows Adobe to get away with listening to their bean counters instead of their customers is they have VERY little competition. In fact, where they DO have competition, they are (surprise again) competitive. Final Cut almost destroyed Premier. But Adobe got serious about improving Premiere, and today it's begining to win the hearts and minds of the Apple faithful. As I see it, there are two solutions here. I'm good with either one. Someone (like Apple) steps into to make quailty apps on the Mac that will make it a two horse race. Adobe will improve...or die. Apple buys Adobe and folds CS6 into their software line, like Final Cut Pro and Logic Studio. Don't care which happens. But I'm really very unhappy with the state of things as they are. So...Adobe...ARE you listening? ... View more