The whole workflow is wrong and unfortunately a typical case of where neither party involved understands the other (no offense), i.e. screwhead vs. artist. You have a number of options, but my advise is based on UG/ NX and AutoCAD, so I can't vouch whether it will work in SolidWorks. CAD operator creates a "named view", then converts it to a 2D plan view/ elevation for export as a line drawing. Should take care of any obscuration issues, but may require to consolidate some of the specifics of the drawing Export a 3D PDF, but choosing to also embed all existing data as 2D, including custom views Create a 3D PDF, open it in DeepExploration. Create your own view and tracing by choosing a suitable fiel format (AI, PDF, 2D DXF etc.) If you have  Acrobat Pro Extended, you can also edit the 3D PDF in 3D reviewer and create your own sub-sets/ assemblies and export them as separate 2D drawings as high-res TIFFs. and of colurse, since you already have 3D data, using 3D features to render a bitmap file  or produce a tracing would certainly work, too. Mylenium ... View more

Pasted files are embedded and get assigned the current working profile. That almost 100% precludes color conversion issues here, but the file might have gotten damaged when pasting, so there is still a tiny chance that something might happen. AI's file format integrity is just awful and goes belly up with even seemingly simple stuff. Therefore definitely investigate problems with clipboard handling and possible interference e.g. from Office programs. Linked files that you inserted via the Place command in the file menu are a different story. Those may get converted if they have different color profiles assigned. That's not just CMYK vs. RGB, but also dfifferent RGB profiles being mixed. You can set these options in your color management settings. I doubt you randomly turned something on or off, but what might happen is that you in fact changed color handling elsewhere and that now makes AI act funky, e.g. by changing your monitor color profile. This might affect proof preview and in turn also color profiel conversions when you output to bitmap formats... Mylenium ... View more

Different color spaces/ profiles in the embedded/ linked bitmap files? Could well cause notable memory and other issues when exporting. Would be my best guess... Or perhaps meta data in one of the linked files? Mylenium ... View more

I am sure that this is a permissions thing in the registry. Let's get one thing out of the way: Permissions and the registry have very little to do with each other. That aside, simply look into your group policies (gpedit.msc). The most likely cause for memory issues is not the program, but rather some other tools and services that run with reduced privileges and cause problems. A simple elevation to allow limited users to "start, shutdown and manage system drivers" may be enough. And yeah, providing the full system specs wouldn't hurt... Mylenium ... View more

JoJo Jenkins wrote: When saving an image as a TIFF, in the TIFF options dialgoue box, the user is given the choice of "Mac or PC byte order." If I choose PC, does that my TIFF file can ONLY be opened on PC's? I've never heard of platform-specific TIFF's before... Thanks.... Look up Little Endian vs. Big Endian on Google. As Marian said, mostly historical. Mylenium ... View more

No, can't do. This is all hard-coded. Just buy yourself a different mouse. Macs can even handle any USB mice and you can get good ones for 20 bucks. Mylenium ... View more

Do I need a newer version of Illustrator 99% yes. A few people have had luck with compatibility modes, but these cases seem to be rare. Just too much AI doesn't like about W7. If you have W7 Business or Ultimate, you can of course always use the XP Virtual Machine. Mylenium ... View more

Conversion should always work, regardless of what the font copyright bits are set to. To me it seems that somehow you are being presented with a cached version that does not contain the native contours. Operating systems do that to optimize on-screen performance e.g. for system fonts or in office applications. Trashing the prefs is a good place, though and while you're at it, the AdobeFnt.lst files everywhere on your drive make good candidates, too. Mylenium ... View more

Create a Null in the center, then add a lookAt(position,thisComp.layer("Null").position) to the 3D orientation property. Mylenium ... View more

To expand on Rick's suggestion: Holding down Alt toggles between linear and Auto-Bezier keyframes. This also works on paths in the composition window as well as masks, as it effectively invokes the anchor point conversion tool which is otherwise available as a sub-tool of the pen tool. Mylenium ... View more

Yupp, James should write a book. I'd gladly buy it. He's such a wealth of knowledge when it comes to AI and working around its deficiencies. Mylenium ... View more

Hi Sharon, nice stuff! if I ever needed a clean drawing, I'd hire you right away. We do some of that, but the dirty way using 3D programs with sketch shaders and vector tracing, complemented by a few additional components. A good way I found to draw at any angle is to create arbitrary guides based on a uniform angled grid. The simplest way of doing that is to use a basic hatch fill on a large object, rotate it to the desired angle using the rotate tool with fill only option, expand it and then convert it into guides. then you simply add a horizontal and vertical grid. If you work in a specific scale, this usually is enough to just let items snap to the grid while you transform them and get some halfway correct perspective. if necessary, you can even move the guides since they are all parralel to begin with. Many perspective elements can also be drawn quite well using blends with the replace spine option, where the spine would be lines and curves previously aligned with the grid. you then only need to expand them and use Pathfinder to clean the overlaps. Mylenium ... View more

As John said, there is nothing to rasterize. Pixels are pixels. At most you could convert the layer styles to individual layers, but that's it. There is no specific option to flatten them into the currently active layer, so merging with a blank layer is the only way to do that. Mylenium ... View more

Check your ducument color depth and mode. It must be 8bit RGB. Mylenium ... View more

Is there a way to recover or bring out the hidden text? A forensic X-Ray would be your best bet. Ask around, perhaps you can even find some radiologist in your area who would be willing to give this a spin. Mylenium ... View more

Neat trick... Mylenium ... View more

Check the audio settings in the conventional output module panel. I'm sure it's turned off or the wrong sample rate (needs to be 48kHz). Mylenium ... View more

Patterns --> Basic?! Works for me. If you need the hatching to be according to DIN, ISO or local construction rules, you may need to adjust it or build your own ones, though. Mylenium ... View more

Apply a pattern fill. There are various of them included with AI. Just open the respective additional swatch library. To rotate them, use the rotate tool's panel dialog and chose to only transform the fill, not the object. Mylenium ... View more

What would you require that functionality for? 16pc and 32bpc already far exceed those specs and even though they are dithered down to be displayed on your LDR devices, that should be more than enough to work with. Additionally, 10/12/14bpc support would only make sense, if you worked with a file format that also stores that info natively as well as requiring a whole lot of other magic in the color profile engine, the print engine, filter handling and so on. So by all means, this is much more complex than just shuffling around a few bits and bytes in the display routines, which in turn means it's not coming any time soon. Definitely not for CS5 and most likely not for CS6, either. You have to understand that any software vendor will have to weigh the development effort agains how many users would actually benefit from such a feature and currently that is probably only a fraction of a percent, so it is not a must-have feature. This may change as wider gamut devices become more affordable and thus more widespread used as well as OSs supporting them, but for the time being it is something most people have no need for. Mylenium ... View more

C'mon people, please do not discuss the use of pirated software on the vendor's forum, for goodness sake. Mylenium ... View more

One thing I had totally forgotten, is an expression using sampleImage(). There's one such project floating on AEnhancers that detects the text bounding box. If you expand a little on that, you could modify it to use half the text height. Mylenium ... View more

Generally yes, but be aware that this will also depend on the structure of how you lay out your artwork, font embedding issues, printing issues and a few other things. As an alternate route, consider working in Acrobat and using proper form fields for any text that needs to be changed from time to time. While there are also some limitations, it is at least fully controllable. Mylenium ... View more

No, even in CS4 PDFs will be opened as single page AI files. A script exists somewhere, that incrementally extracts al lthe pages and adds new artborads for them, though. Mylenium ... View more

Mmh, I'm not sure if AVCHD, even its "Pro" flavor, is really the format of the future. I think that because of growing availability of almost infinite amounts of storage at low prices, even for hobbyists and semi-pros at some point RAW recording becomes a viable option, or at least only relying on binary compression, not destructive reduction of the actual image content. Beyond that I'd be careful with predictions. Formats these days come and go quicker than you can make up your mind about them. And of course for compositing in the strictest sense one could still argue that support for such formats is non-essential as comparing compositing tools to mere editing programs is not exaxctly fair. If AE wasn't so integrated with Premiere, would you even care for trying this? Other competing programs certainly don't - combustion*, Fusion, Nuke and even Motion do not accept anything other than image sequences or Quicktime files instead of offering native support. If you get my meaning - as much as AE is ahead in this game, it ultimately also turns into a disadvantage. the constant hunt for supporting the latest video formats IMO costs a lot of resources and effort that potentially could be spent otherwise... Mylenium ... View more

Anyhows - I had thought Adobe already have access to such files, this camera is all over now, very popular. I do not know. He's the employee and gets paid the big bucks. If he says so, we'll have to take his word for it. That aside, one should not expect a software vendor to automatically have access to any camera model, latest computer or whatever. Even a big one like Adobe has a limited budget for that and, lest we forget, even if they could buy it all, they'd not hire a hundred extra people just to test it.... Mylenium ... View more