.ai files placed into another .ai doc then the completed .ai doc placed into In Design.

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
March 9, 2022
3 replies
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I had a complex illustration of an ‘engine’ that was going to be used, with tweaks/highlights/exploded parts, in multiple illustrations. I decided the best way would be to place the ‘engine’ illustration within the ‘main' .ai files so that when I tweaked/highlighted/exploded parts I could save as, rename and then replace within the ‘main’ illustrations, which worked fine with very little work at all. These were then placed in In Design. Everything Hunky Dory till now (I hope it all makes sense)? The problem though is that when the In Design file is packaged it doesn’t collect the ‘placed’ .ai file!!

Secondly, with the new version of Illustrator, on opening any of the said ‘main’ illustrations the placed .ai file that was within had recalled/moved so was useless. This was without touching the original placed .ai. Needless to say if I edited the placed .ai it did the same. Physical size of the placed .ai file was the same, nothing extended outside the ‘bounding box’, although when placed into ‘main’ .ai doc the ‘bounding box’ changed shape from the original when opened in the new version of Illustrator. Sorry it’s so waffly but hard to explain.

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A

andy@kayakdesign.co.ukAuthor

Known Participant

Here is an example of the placed .ai files rescaling/moving in the new illustrator. ScreenDump 'A' shows the original illustrator file (earlier version of illustrator) placed into another .ai doc and the whole lot placed in InDesign. All fine.

ScreenDump 'B' shows the same illustrator file opened, just opened nothing else, in Illustrator 26.1. Look how much the 'green' placed image has enlarged/moved!!! It's within a mask. As I said there are many versions of this, the idea being that I modify, rename, save as and then replace in Illustrator and it'd put the new version in exactly the same place, same size. That's what used to happen until a few months ago. Anyone any ideas? It'd be a mammoth task to go through the whole manual trying to scale/fit all the placed .ai files to the relevant masks.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

Do those AI files need to be edited?

When you save an AI file for placing into InDesign, you need to make it "PDF compatible", which means, there's a full PDF inside the AI file. In this PDF everything is embedded, also linked files. When placing the AI file in InDesign, InDesign uses that PDF and completely ignores the AI part of it.

So when the main AI file is in the package, that is enough for production of the InDesign file. Of course when you want to edit any of those AI files (even the main file), then you are in trouble. For opening the main AI file, you need all the linked files.