January Entry: An invitation you can’t refuse

[kalmarjan]

It sounds as if you have a few problems when it comes to using illustrator.

1) One Gig of ram may not be enough, so have you checked the location of your scratch disks? Is the scratch disk on the install drive? That could be your problem right there. If you have a second physical drive on your system, try setting the scratch disks there, and you should notice an improvement in your system experience.

Sandeman

[mathuwm]

Doohh

Just because one remembers to setup their scratch disk correctly in Photoshop does not mean they will remember to do so with illustrator

Also I have les than 2GB remaining on my start up disk

I will have to do some disk clean up maybe uninstall some of the kids games (lego star wars takes over a gig)
Etc.


I also downloaded the trial version of Xara Xtreme this program looks really cool

Thanks

[Gamerprinter]

Great to see someone try out Xara Xtreme, you won't regret it. If you have any feel for a graphics app, you should figure Xara in a day or two. Oh, maybe not every nuance of the app, but its very easy to figure out.

In Photoshop, for example, you open a raster image, apply a filter to see the result - as far as memory usage goes, PS creates a duplicate of your original to apply a filter to it. Once applied PS creates a duplicate again to show you the results. Just to do a simple operation eats 3 times as much memory as necessary - hence filled scratch disks on large projects.

In Xara, you open the raster image, select a filter or option, this is applied to the original image and you see the same image as result. Xara never created a duplicate at anytime - no reason too. If you click undo, you are undo the applied filter, the original is viewed without filter, still original image. This is a much more efficient use of memory - that's why Xara is so fast.

Xara has some ultimate size restrictions compared to Adobe products - its not the perfect proggie in every way, but fast, powerful and easy to use. Post a WIP of your first project using Xara and explain detailed steps, I'd be interested - in helping to educate the rest of the Guild...

Good luck!

PS: I've got a couple light duty Xara Xtreme Tutorials in the Software Discussion Forum - look for entries around July/August 2007, that's when I uploaded them.