How to optimize heavy symbol usage

[tqrtuomo]

I use Symbols heavily to draw heavily-repeated objects on boardgame maps. It's a common piece of advice to do that, since Symbols can reduce file size. However, I'm not so sure about that.

Below is a screen shot of a section of Rubble. It's basically a Scatter Brush that throws the same Rubble symbol around, scaling and coloring and rotating it. (Actually, no - it's two separate Rubble brushes, each of which uses a different colored symbol, because the Scatter Brush doesn't know how to change symbol tints. But as much as I wish Adobe would fix that, there's ways around that, no worries).

So, the version of this done with a Scatter Brush is 2211 Kb. If I expand the brush to create a ton of small bits of individually-filled Rubble paths (deleting the bounding box that got put around each Symbol as it was expanded), the file size goes to 1805 Kb. Huh? I thought Symbols were supposed to be more efficient than Paths?

Then, if I make a Symbol out of an individual bit of rubble (just one of those blobs you see above) and use the wonderful Copy To Multiple Objects script, I can replace all of those individual rubble bits with a rubble symbol. THAT file size is 2527 Kb.

So... what's up here? I thought Symbols were supposed to be more efficient for this kind of thing.

TIA

Tom

[Monika Gause]

Don't understand what you're doing there.

Symbols can't be inside brushes. So what is this?

Also: of course you can apply color tints to scatter brushes.

And then: are you sure it's the same number of objects when you use symbols compared to brushes?

How do you save the files? Exact options, please.

[tqrtuomo]

My apologies, Monika. Yes, that's not a symbol that I used in a the scatter brush, it was just a small path (one of the "bits" of Rubble, basically a rough-edged rectangle. No "roughen" was used on the path)

You're also right about being able to apply color tints to scatter brushes - but it's not one of the Random features. The entire brush has to scatter the same-tint of shape. No big deal; one can use the Random Swatches Fill script to select all the shapes and randomly tint them using a given subset of swatches.

I save the files as .ai files with no pdf compatibility, but with compression. I do not recall if I embed ICC profiles - doubt it.

Thanks,

Tom

[Monika Gause]

After drawing with the brush do you expand the appearance in order to run the script?

After drawing symbols - do you unlink the symbol instances?

Do you use the symbol stainer tool? The manual tells you it will increase file size: Symbolism tools and symbol sets in Illustrator

[tqrtuomo]

After drawing with the brush do you expand the appearance in order to run the script?

Yes

After drawing symbols - do you unlink the symbol instances?

I don't draw the symbols, as you helped me realize. After I expand the brush to create a ton of paths and delete the bounding boxes around each path, I then use the Copy to Multiple script to replace each path with a symbol. At that point, no, I do not unlink the symbols. Saving that file is 2527Kb in size, as I explained above. If I select all the symbols and break the links, then collect all the resulting paths into the same level and save, THAT file is 1812 Kb. Which has me even more confused.

Do you use the symbol stainer tool?

No. I find the symbol stainer/scatterer/xyz-er tool to be way too unintuitive and uncontrollable. Even for this application where all I want to end up with is a big mass of shapes, I have more control with Scatter Brushes.

Thanks,

Tom

[meganchi]

Have you tried double-clicking your symbol in the symbol palette to enter symbol edit mode to change tint or color values?

You could duplicate a few symbols and edit each of them within the symbol palette so that you have various options to use.

[Jacob Bugge · Accepted solution]

Tom,

Apologizing for a possibly silly question, are you setting it to be a Dynamic or Static Symbol, the latter being the one to better save file size?

[tqrtuomo]

Apologizing for a possibly silly question, are you setting it to be a Dynamic or Static Symbol, the latter being the one to better save file size?

ANNND we have a winner!  Yes, I was using a Dynamic symbol. Selecting the Symbol Properties and changing it to a Static symbol, then saving, the file size becomes 293Kb, much less than any of the other options I tried.

Thanks, Jacob. I imagine that little tidbit is somewhere in the documentation and I just missed it.

And thanks, too, Monika, for your help. It's very much appreciated.

Tom

[Jacob Bugge]

For my part you are welcome, Tom.

Many tidbits are well hidden, if only by the sheer amount of them.

[tqrtuomo]

Many tidbits are well hidden, if only by the sheer amount of them.

Indeed. And while it's fun to scour the Web searching for tips and tricks, I can't help but slowly build up a feeling that it should be easier than this. I'm not saying Adobe has Ruined My Livelihood because this isn't my livelihood, but I can sure sympathize with those who ARE in that position. My daughter is a professional retoucher and DOES depend on Photoshop. I asked her how often Photoshop just hangs or crashes on her, and she said about twice a month, which is what I typically experience in Illustrator. If that were MY livelihood, I'd be pretty mad.

What I'd like is better self-diagnostics in Illustrator. Tell me what's taking so long to save, what's occupying so much of the file space. In the situation in this thread, notice that I've got tens of thousands of the same Dynamic symbol, all colored the same, and recommend to me that I change that to Static. Tell me how much time is spent rendering at my current Document Effects Settings, and how much time I might save if I lowered it. Notice that I've saved with PDF compatibility on, and ask me if I really want/need that, because it increases file size.  Notice that the linear point density on my paths often exceeds some threshold, and point out that I might save space by use of the Simplify command. Tell me which items are completely overlaid by others and may be thus superfluous to keep in the document. Etc, etc, etc.

Yes, such a thing would require some extra time to diagnose/process/save my files, but it wouldn't have to be always on - the user could specify Do My Diagnostics Now whenever they wanted to get a feel for it.

Yes, I know that feature suggestions can be logged with Adobe somewhere else on the web. I'm not hopeful that this or any other idea will "go viral" that way.

What I DO hope is that some third party, maybe Astute Graphics, will twig to the business opportunity for this little doodad and get to work 🙂

[Monika Gause]

tqrtuomo  schrieb

What I DO hope is that some third party, maybe Astute Graphics, will twig to the business opportunity for this little doodad and get to work 🙂

They already have. You just need to read it: https://astutegraphics.com/blog/9-ways-minimize-file-size-adobe-illustrator-2/

Self diagnostics can't know what you want. So it will tell you that you can make files smaller. But maybe you need dynamic symbols for a different reason. The app can't know that. Decrease document raster settings while working on the artwork, great, but when you increase it later, the appearance of objects might change.

This is a complex application. These are complex workflows. Most people are annoyed even by popups that tell them of new features, many of which being improvements, timesavers, whatever. Nobody can spare you to read the documentation and to really think through your workflow. It's your personal workflow and the system can't know what you're after.

[tqrtuomo]

They already have. You just need to read it: https://astutegraphics.com/blog/9-ways-minimize-file-size-adobe-illustrator-2/

I have read that before, yes. It's helpful advice, but it's not the "little doodad" I was referring to in my post.

Self diagnostics can't know what you want. So it will tell you that you can make files smaller. But maybe you need dynamic symbols for a different reason. The app can't know that. Decrease document raster settings while working on the artwork, great, but when you increase it later, the appearance of objects might change.

This is a complex application. These are complex workflows. Most people are annoyed even by popups that tell them of new features, many of which being improvements, timesavers, whatever. Nobody can spare you to read the documentation and to really think through your workflow. It's your personal workflow and the system can't know what you're after.

My post was not aimed at reducing a user's due diligence in learning the best practices for their use cases. Rather, I was hoping to explain that this learning would be enhanced by a tool that could provide diagnostics on the user's particular file, from the inside as Illustrator does its thing. You can read some advice on the internet, but that doesn't necessarily help you understand what the major reasons are for your file taking forever to save or taking up tons of disk space.

Even for someone like me who is always trying to learn new things about working efficiently, it's really hard to quantify what efficiencies could be gained by doing things in a different way. And in the case of this very thread, my effort to quantify the space savings of using Symbols led me to some unintuitive answers. This was not a result of being lazy, entitled, or not reading documentation. "Symbols save space" is a pretty iconic piece of advice (and is included in the Astute Graphics link you shared above). As I now know, though, it needs a little bit of appending: "... but only if they're Static", and you'll note that the Astute Graphics link doesn't mention this.

In my post, I tried to not sound like "make it look like I have talent" or "read my mind"; I understand the Old Guard's frustration with questions that come off like that. Off the top of my head, I came up with six things that are related to common file size/complexity issues, and can be calculated by some tool and made available to the user for them to act on or not. There ought to be many more things - things that can only be assessed by the app as it saves a particular file. I'm hoping somebody somewhere realizes that this would be a Good Thing to make the user aware of. For a price, of course 🙂

Thanks for listening

Tom

[Monika Gause]

The trouble is that any piece of advice needs to consider a lot of "IF ... ELSE ..." Maybe some of those IF-ELSE can be derived from other items in that file, but most of it won't, because how should the software know if the file is set up correctly. So nobody will want to read all that, because it will be even longer text than what's in the manual.

And in the case of Illustrator the workflows that have to be considered are countless.

What you want is a consultant. This is actually a job description and in the good old days you could earn a decent living on it. Nowadays nobody knows that those people even existed.