damaged people dot com

I've had it!

I have learned three things this week while developing a logo for my church's university outreach:

1. Never use a laptop w/ a 16MB vidcard to render a large PNG banner from a vector source.

2. Lobby someone, anyone to come up with a common vector image standard that is not PostScript based (SVG seems to have fallen down on its face).

3. If you want a graphic done right, get Adobe Illustrator.

(Disclaimer: I know there are ways to get what I want if I want it bad enough, but for the purposes of this post, I will speak only in terms of the standard channels.)

I was asked to refine a logo for the abovementioned group and so I used my FreeHand 10 that I got with Studio MX. Problem was, it was bunging up text in 1 particular font (that I reinstalled and then got another version of this, but with same result) when I convert the image to PNG. Fine, so I convert the text to paths, and what do you think - the text gets deformed.

Alright, so now what - Lessee, I used up my trial versions of Illustrator CS and FreeHand MX...wait! I have a trial of Corel Draw 12! Fixes the rendering problem. Problem is, it doesn't let me have control over other aspects - phoo!

I end up installing the Freehand MX trial on my laptop. Works fine (does not deform curves as bad, but still chops the font) until I try to convert a Letter-sized version of the logo to PNG. It works on it for 2-3 min, and the PNG turns up blank.

I end by cutting to PDF (with some rendering artifacts I am not sure I like, plus you can't readily make changes to it, which our college leader wanted to do later) and calling it good.

Some of you image experts can pry find holes in my methodology - mebbe I should have cut a TIFF, since they were going to print a banner at Kinko's. I sure can afford to spend more time refining my skills, but in terms of precision and results, I am going to tag Illustrator first chance I get (hate the slow load time, tho').

Here endeth the rant!

Illustrator is the bomb!

What kind of deformation were you getting with the font?

It chopped the top off of Goudy Stout. The amount of chop was proportional to the amount of anti-aliasing I specified. I wanted the thing smooth.

Corel did not do this, and I assume (but cannot confirm, unless I FFR or install CS on my laptop) Illustrator won't...but it seems to be limited to an aspect of this particular font.

Referring to TIFF's - Tiffs do not support transparency, right?

I did a banner at Kinko's recently (thanks for the help Bio!) and they really, really want you to use a .pdf file format....they even have a converter that you can get on their website to make a .kdf (kinko's version of .pdf), so your choice of .pdf wasn't far from the mark.

Just have Bio do it...that's what I did.

I know...bio is DA BOMB! <petulance>But I wanna learn, too!</petulance>

bugfreezer wrote:Referring to TIFF's - Tiffs do not support transparency, right?

Yes and no.

When you port a tiff into photoshop, it can be transparent (depending on how you made it)... but I don't think it is in other applications.

Vague, I know.

bio wrote:When you port a tiff into photoshop, it can be transparent (depending on how you made it)... but I don't think it is in other applications.

Vague, I know.

Specific enough that I know that I don't want to use that format if I want portable transparency.

Thanks!

The only portable transparency-capable graphic format I know of is an applied clipping path in an eps saved from photoshop. Unless it's for web, obviously, then a gif works as well. I could walk you through clipping paths step-by-step if you still need help.

That's most kind, Miftah. I just now read up on clipping paths. I had to do that in Freehand, as Fireworks does not have that feature. The (perceived difficulty with) scalability of the EPS files (and the quality of the software rendering them - dismal in most cases outside of Adobe) is the only reservation I have about using them. The last EPS I ran for this project in FHMX wasn't too bad.

:edit

Correction...FHMX bunged up the eps I tried to make.

:/edit