Also, bear in mind that unless your monitor profile is assigned to your screenshot, we can't see what you see. I also think the bottom image looks subjectively better. The top one has a green cast that may or may not be intended. ... View more

It's a relief that everyone so far has correctly advised using InDesign. Only a matter of time... ... View more

pabloá50723009 wrote: I don't know now the profile of the files, but I think it is not important It is important, as the embedded/assigned profile is the one which a colour managed application uses to display an image. If one isn't assigned, then it will use the default profile, which with the Europe Prepress 3 settings is either FOGRA39 or AdobeRGB, for CMYK and RGB respectively. I'd try D Fosse's advice regarding your display profile, too. Would it be possible to upload one of these files somewhere? ... View more

What are your colour settings? What colour mode are these files? What colour profile is assigned to them? ... View more

Are you able to access the Fiery Features page when printing from other applications? As I understand it, once you've clicked Printer from ID's Print dialogue, you've effectively left ID, and it's the OS X printer driver that reads the printer features from the PPD. I'm using ID 2017 under Sierra with a Fiery IC-308 here, and the Fiery Features are there. ... View more

Ah. It's a pity Acrobat can't export to SVG. It might still play a part, though. It could be long-winded (or scriptable), but you might be able to save separate PDFs of each layer then place them in Illustrator and export to SVG. I'd be nervous, though! Or might there be a better stepping stone than PDF to get from ArchiCAD to SVG? ... View more

As Ton said, Illustrator isn't a PDF editor, and PDF isn't intended as exchange format between different applications. Illustrator will attempt to convert objects in a PDF created by another application into native elements, but you should no more expect it to do this 'cleanly' as you would expect ArchiCAD to open a PDF created by Illustrator 'cleanly'. If they're hidden Acrobat layers, you could try making them visible in Acrobat and resaving. That may be scriptable. ... View more

I wouldn't say it's dead by any means. Szalam makes a good observation about the resurgence of all things crafty, but that still seems to be for a particular market. On the other hand, the expectancy that the computer does everything, and that clipart will do, has increased over the decades and shows no sign of stopping. Sometimes you just have to make a decision about whether the extra craft is worth it or appropriate for a particular job. As for automatic flourishes, it would be interesting and possible, I imangine. I vaguely remember the Multiple Master version of the Bickham Script font doing something along those lines, where there was an axis for how extreme the swashes were. ... View more

These are both exact representations of what would get imaged to plate, produced by a Harlequin RIP at 2540dpi, 150lpi, from a 300ppi image with text set in Photoshop (raster) and Illustrator (vector). Which would you rather went on press? ... View more

My first professional experience was in a tiny ad agency, where the delivery method was bromide paper. We hadn't bought an imagesetter yet, So we'd design the ads 1:1 on our little Macs, print individual elements of them at 400%, 300dpi, 20lpi on an Apple LaserWriter, paste them back together (I did a lot of manually cutting around images of cars) then take the board into the darkroom to shoot it back down to 25%. Viola, 1200dpi bromide. I don't miss watching holes gradually appear in my jeans from the developer! ... View more

Upload one of these razor sharp files. I'll build it properly, run both through the RIP at 2540dpi and your chosen LPI, and post a screenshot of the dots that hit the plate with 1 screen pixel to 1 plate pixel. I might even play around to simulate newsprint dot gain if you like. ... View more

royd79955180 wrote: Who uses Quark any more? Long dead, though I have encountered companies that refuse to give it up. Which one is it? It's not 'long dead' if people still use it, and believe me, I'm far from a proponent of clinging to Quark. I'm just stating why EPS has stuck around, for the most part needlessly. royd79955180 wrote: Rasterized type from Photoshop? If you're printing in black and white on newsprint, I would say you're correct. Otherwise, what decade are you talking about? I have color ads running in national magazines every day... razor sharp type. What does the printing method have to do with whether the elements of a file are vector or raster? The only way to get vector type out of Photoshop is to save directly out as an unflattened PDF. The moment you flatten, which you say you do, all live text and vector content is rasterised at the resolution of the document. You are sending rasterised type with that method, fact. You wouldn't want to be a fly on the wall of the production department of those national magazines when they're working with your files. royd79955180 wrote: Well, I can see what kind of "progressive" designers are on these forums. Not going to gain much insight from people that are stuck in the 90s. See ya! ...from an proponent of EPS, without a hint of irony. royd79955180 wrote: From Creative Intuition: "When working with a printer or promotional products vendor or sign company they will most likely ask for your logo as an “EPS” or “vector file.” If you don’t have this file type you need to get it from the designer that created the original art. If that person is not available then your vendor will probably have to recreate your logo from scratch." From Vector Magic - "Adobe's EPS format (Encapsulated PostScript) is perhaps the most common vector image format. It is the standard interchange format in the print industry." Those posts are clearly intended to discourage people from sending raster files of their logo, which is a common issue, especially for promotional product vendors that deal directly with small businesses. It's true that a lot of vendors will ask for 'EPS', for the historical reasons I mentioned. What they really want is vectors. ... View more

royd79955180 wrote: After 20+ years, I depend on this method for ultimate speed and quality. The only thing you can depend on with that workflow is poor quality, rasterised type, unreadable proof PDFs of the publications that include your ads, and RIPs chugging through entirely rasterised pages that they would breeze through if they were constructed properly. The 'eccentric' program is Quark XPress, really. Its historical dominance and unreliable placement of AI or PDF is probably the biggest reason for the inertia that has people still requesting EPS files, even in an Adobe workflow. ... View more

royd79955180 wrote: Getting rid of layers in Illustrator or "flattening" is completely unnecessary. Turn that layers palette off and completely forget about it. The only time you'll ever need to pay attention to layers is if you're using dielines or reference drawings, etc. FORGET THE LAYERS. They mean nothing for your logo project. Save your file as an .EPS and drop it into your project or send it to your client. DONE. ********** ADDENDUM - For your reference, I find Photoshop to be the absolute BEST program for ad layouts. I've been doing this for over 20 years, and Photoshop is fluid, responsive and gives you realtime results. AND you can work in layers that you can understand. Just paste your logo into your ad as a "Smart Object" and you can scale it up and down forever as you're building your ad. Unless your ad has MASSIVE amounts of copy, stick with Photoshop for layout... you'll be so much happier and your work will go much much faster. Yikes. ... View more

Ken Nielsen wrote: Ton Frederiks wrote: Why worry about layers? I wouldn't, normally, but this has 'tons' of layers and bringing those into another file where I'm building an ad adds too much clutter. Would be nice to have one layer with the logo on it. Where's the clutter? There's no reason whatsoever to fuss about those sublayers. In your screenshot, just rename the top layer 'Logo' (for instance), click on its little arrow to hide all the sublayers, and forget about them. ... View more

vtechK120 wrote: If you just want a flattened copy saving your art work as Ai...then copy & Paste into Ps and merge what ever comes in...just a thought Definitely do not do that. ... View more

JThoeming wrote: The coloring of a grayscale PSD (the image itself) works like a Tiff only as a flattened image (without one or more layers) Ah, that explains it. Almost all my images have at least one layer. In most cases a smart object containing the original image (full resolution before resizing and sharpening for print) + adjustment layers. ... View more

I didn't think you could ever apply a swatch to a grayscale PSD. Only TIFFs. ... View more

Feierwoon wrote: Well, my print service provider on his professional offset printer and especially his heavy prepress machinery didn't like the output file either. What didn't they like? Were there spot colours in a file destined for 4-colour offset? That's bad practice, but it can be handled reliably in modern workflows, so long as overprinting is honoured and spot rasters aren't treated differently to spot vectors.. Some RIPs (including Roland VersaWorks and older Fiery controllers) have a spot colour matching system that treats vectors differently to rasters. That's often been the cause of discoloured boxes around transparent images when you let the RIP do the conversion. The vectors get converted according to a built-in library, the rasters something else (I can't recall exactly what). ... View more

Feierwoon wrote: To support transparency in prior versions means rasterizing the transparent areas and mixing the colours, which is not possible with spot colours (or they are no more spot colours!). When spot colour transparency is flattened (as it must be for PDF versions prior to 1.4), Adobe's flattener uses overprints to achieve the correct appearance, so long as the output device or viewing app honours those overprints. It looks like your printer isn't doing, but there may be a setting you can change to fix this. And mixed spot colours are still spot colours. Mixing spots is particularly common in packaging. ... View more

Not really. Modern prepress workflows are designed to eliminate those old problems automatically. On process colour jobs, RGB black text is usually converted to 100% K  when it's normalised/preflighted. If the job's specified by the printer as single colour black, but the artwork is RGB, it can, and usually is, normalised/preflighted to hit the black plate only. This conversion is done with the actual dot gain of the press specified. It sounds like this is the case with the OP's printer. ... View more

How did you measure this 11% grey on the previous jobs? If your printer's workflow software is set up to automatically convert all neutral RGB to the appropriate tints of black, which looks to be the case, then I wouldn't even worry about it. They know their dot gain, so rather than (probably wrongly) assuming it in your conversion, let them do it. ... View more

I can also confirm it's happening here. iMac (27-inch, Late 2013) OS X 10.11.5 (15F34) ... View more

andrewklug wrote: Now I'm exporting my AI files into TIFF from Illustrator and using Photoshop for resizing after the fact. No, don't do that! If the final destination is a raster (pixel-based, rather than vector) format (images for web for instance), then you want to rasterise the vectors at the final size, not have Illustrator rasterise (which happens when you export to TIFF) before resizing in Photoshop. I'd recommend doing all the vector work in Illustrator first. Then, when you need to rasterise, open the AI as a Smart Object in Photoshop, and resize it to the desired pixel dimensions and Save For Web in the desired format. You could cut out Photoshop altogether, and Save For Web out of Illustrator, but Photoshop does a slightly better job of the rasterisation. ... View more

If you start with greyscale objects in an RGB AI document, 'Add Used Colours' changes the appearance of them to what you'd see if you opened the document in PS. So you'd have to take care of the problem manually after (probably by making the swatches RGB and altering their values until you get the desired appearance). Personally I'd call that 'broken'. Using global swatches is generally the best approach (non-global swatches have always seemed silly to me, having used Freehand for many years), but if you wanted to work with many grey levels, I still think tints of a global RGB black swatch is the best way. ... View more

There is no Adobe documentation indicating that grayscale is broken in Illustrator and shouldn't be used, particularly in an RGB mode. A better analogy would be a feature in a car that only experienced drivers of that car know will drive you into a ditch unexpectedly. We know to avoid it, but we can't expect Andrew to. The solution is, if you want to work with neutral greys in RGB in Illustrator, use tints of an R0 G0 B0 swatch. It will look identical to using greyscale, but will export/import into Photoshop correctly. 50% RGB black converts to 128 128 128, but 50% K converts to 155 155 155. In this image, the top steps are tints of RGB black and the bottom is the corresponding K percentages. They look identical in AI, but look like this in PS: ... View more

It appears to be some kind of weirdness (bug?) when you use the greyscale colour model in an RGB Illustrator document. When I use the 'Add Used Colours' command in the Illustrator's Swatch flyout, it changes the appearance to what you've been seeing in Photoshop. I personally never use the greycale colour model in Illustrator. I'd advise instead, setting the 'Black' swatch to 0 0 0, and using tints of that for your grey, or using individual RGB swatches for the greys. It seems to work properly that way. ... View more