Expert: Amy - 5/18/2007

Question
I'm doing 3 presentation board, each 100 x 70 cm and set up one Illustrator file with 3 layers. It's an interior and i figured a way to texture a wall, I import a texture put it in the swatches and apply it to many rectagualr shapes. Many of this shapes use opacity masks but still mostly containing other rectangulars.

And now - my file is 500mb!? correction, after a save it went down to 252mb with only 3 swatches deleted (don't remember any other changes)

All my attached files (alltogether 20 but there are duplicates - for example a linked 1,5mb file is shown 5 times in linked files window)

I cannot understand how can it be so big, And it prints 10 minutes in acrobat virtual printer and saves about the same time

I will probably end up throwing this file away and doing it from scratch in Photoshop (which i recon has a better pattern control) but did I really mess so much in llustrator? I would like to know what did I do wrong?

Answer
Wow. That's big!  You are the 5th person in 2 days to write about huge files.

I don't think you did anything wrong - sounds like a large document - the opacity masks on a pattern probably increased the size tremendously.

It's got to be related to the imports. What are the linked files? Tiffs? If so, make sure the Tiffs are not compressed. Make sure you don't have an uneccessarily high resolution on those texture files, either. Make sure you're working in the same Color Mode for both the document and the imports, too.  What happens if you turn off those opacity masks and do a SAVE AS (not a save). And when you save, of course, don't check "Include Linked Files" (can't remember exact wording).

What happens when you link the image into a new document, apply it to a shape and save it? How big is the file?

You might want to check the Illustrator forums on Adobe.com for other tips/hints on how to reduce file sizes. There are a few other people with suggestions on the subject.

Yeah, PhotoShop will probably be a better tool in this case. I've actually been using it a little more frequently for a similar reason - a service I use has a 12MB file limit and Illy gives me a file about 15MB while PhotoShop keeps it to around 5MB. I'm faster and have more control in Illustrator but file size limits could not be worked around.

-Amy