Topic awaiting preservation: .ai preview? (Page 1 of 1)

Hey,

I just picked up Illustrator CS in my adventure towards logo design. Very cool, looking forward to learning. My question is rather lame but I just got to ask. I got an extra CD with a bunch of clip art (1000+). I can't seem to preview them... like thumbnails. Is there any way to preview .ai files so I can quickly look through them? Thanks in advance. Peace.

Music = Oxygen
70% of statistics are made up on the spot.

Well that depends on your system and the version of the .ai file.

Now you can't realy preview .ai files pre version 8 as they are acturally EPS encoded, and would require the program or OS to interpret postscript on the fly. While Illustartor full capable of doing this to load eps and .ai files. I would be far to slow to be practical use for a directory of images. Luckly there is facility for including a Tiff or PICT preview or thumbnail with in .ai or .eps files. The problem you will run into isthe files must be saved with this option enabled if not you are out of luck and would have to write somekind of action or illustrator scripting to resave all the image with previews or perhaps print so kind of catalog.

Illustrator 9,10, and CS use PDF as it's native format. I assume the same issues apply and windows is simply displaying the PDF page thumbnail or some flattend preview embeded with in the PDF. I would need to read the spec to be sure.

If the image thumbnails exist, you should beable to use Windows XP's or W2K's directory thumbnails option to view them. I don't rember off had a similar function exist on the MAC and as my crappy old OSX machine HD died this week so I can't check.

If you happen to have Photoshop 7 or CS you could also try using it's file browser.

J. Stuart J.


[This message has been edited by jstuartj (edited 12-28-2003).]

Thanks J. Stuart J,

Yeah I tried the file browser in Photoshop CS and the thumbnail viewer with XP, no luck. I was hopeing that I was just missing something. An "action" or "illustrator scripting" would be way over my head seems how I don't even know what they are, but a catalog is a great idea. Thanks for clarifying things for me. Peace.

Music = Oxygen
70% of statistics are made up on the spot.

Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, and InDesign all have scripting backends. You can either use Javascript, Visual Basic on windows, and Applescript on Mac to contol the applications. It wouldn't be too hard to write a script that loads each image from a given directory, scales it and places on a common document. Something similar in function to Photoshops Contact Sheet II, located under the File--Automate menu.

I am not sure what comes with CS as mine hasn't arrived yet. But version 10 comes with VB example scripts for generation of a web gallery and a contact sheet. They are located in the extras folder either on the install disk or it may already installed. I suppect the mac version comes with applescript examples of similar applications.

Try using Photoshops Contact Sheet II to build a catalog of what's on disk. I just gave it a try and it worked fine with my clipart directory. Very slowly, but it worked.

J. Stuart J.

[This message has been edited by jstuartj (edited 12-28-2003).]

Thanks agian,

The Contact Sheet II worked great!

Music = Oxygen
70% of statistics are made up on the spot.