I have an action (a series of actions, actually) in Illustrator that works just fine. (It does what it's supposed to.)
It does not have any "Open" or "Save" commands. (It just modifies the color of the file.)
When I initiate a Batch from the Actions panel, I select the source and destination folders and the action I want to run. It churns through all the images as it should.
However, when placing them in InDesign, there is no preview image. Even with the "High Quality Display" option under Display Performance. Just tiled blocks of text the image was "saved without PDF content."
And I know where this option is in the Save dialog when saving manually. The checkbox to "Create PDF Compatible File."
There just is no such option in the Batch command. And the default setting (sticky from the last time it was done manually) where it's checked on does not get applied.
If I am processing AI files that were already (manually) saved with this option, then all the changes get saved into the preview used in InDesign. But if process any other file type (PSD, TIFF) it saves out AI files (this is what I want) but "without PDF content."
I remember back in the day, when we would export EPS files (back when we used to use EPS files) there was the option to include a TIFF preview, and this needed to be enabled to allow a low-res raster preview of the vector art to show up in the layout. (This is going back to Quark.) But with the option to view high-res, it didn't use the greeked preview but rendered the actual vectors, and the art became visible.
This doesn't appear to be happening, as even with "High Quality Display," which renders the live image, not the lo-res preview, the vector images do not show up — just the tiled text blocks.
Just for clarification: I've tried (as was suggested elsewhere) including a Save command in my action, and then using the "Override Action "Save" Commands" in the Batch dialog. What happened was it broke the action, as the batch refused to wait for Illustrator to finish saving before moving along.
And I could just use the "Save and Close" option. But as I said, many of these files did not start as AI*, and this just prompts a Save dialog while running through a batch of a couple hundred files.
(* For the record, I typically take the type layers in Photoshop and re-save them as AI to preserve the live text, so they're not rastered.)
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