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Re: Export PDF plot or Save Selection As -- big troubles with Illustrator

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg90095] Re: Export PDF plot or Save Selection As -- big troubles with Illustrator
• From: Bill Rowe <readnews at sbcglobal.net>
• Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2008 05:55:05 -0400 (EDT)

On 6/27/08 at 6:18 AM, siegman at stanford.edu (AES) wrote:

>In article <g3vkrr$kes$1 at smc.vnet.net>,
>Bill Rowe <readnews at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

>>On 6/25/08 at 6:29 AM, siegman at stanford.edu (AES) wrote:

>>>Any idea what's happening here???  Seems fair to call this a bug
>>>-- somebody's not doing right by the PDF format.  But, an Adobe
>>>bug or a Wolfram bug?

>>Well given two Adobe products treat the same file in different ways
>>from your description, I would say this is a problem with Adobe
>>rather than Wolfram. I don't have Illustrator to test this further.

>Maybe, maybe not.  I have used these two Adobe products jointly on
>many, many graphics files, and they have always worked superbly
>together. There could be some bad PDF code in the document at issue,
>and one product manages to work around it while the other
>doesn't.  (Two different software apps should handle a properly formatted
>document the same, but nothing says what either of them must do with
>a badly formatted document.)

Certainly there is no guarantees what any software will do when
opening a badly formatted document. One would hope the software
would at least give the user something that would clearly
indicate the software was encountering what it sees as a badly
formatted document.

But having said that, the ability for two software programs to
work well together written by the same company does not in any
way imply the results you are getting from opening PDF files
from a third are badly formatted or that the bug (assuming there
is one) is in the third program. Without access to the source
code of Illustrator, Acrobat, Mathematica and the problematic
file there is no way for me to know precisely the source of the
problem you are encountering.

Simple logic suggests if two or more software programs
independently created can deal correctly with the file, and one
program cannot, the likely source of the problem is the odd man
out. And from your description that is Illustrator. Note, this
reasoning is far from ironclad. But more times than not, the
program producing the odd result is the place to look for the
source of the problem.

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Re: Export PDF plot or Save Selection As -- big troubles with Illustrator
    • From: Andrzej Kozlowski <akoz@mimuw.edu.pl>