[rsp]

I'm trying to import some small images to Illustrator to use, but the problem is it places this huge selection box or something around the pasted-in image and it won't let me rasterize the drawings giving an "out of memory error" despite giving Illustrator 70MB of RAM. Using the Place command to import them in as PICTs yields the same result. Trying to paste in the images in other programs like AppleWorks gives no problems at all. Has anybody encountered this before or know a way to solve it? Thanks.

[l'ignorante]

Sorry, not familiar with your problem.Meaning never encountered it.
How big are the files you want to place? And what exactly do you want to rasterize, a combination of pics and vector images?

[rsp]

Originally posted by l'ignorante:
<STRONG>Sorry, not familiar with your problem.Meaning never encountered it.
How big are the files you want to place? And what exactly do you want to rasterize, a combination of pics and vector images?</STRONG>

They're very small images (as PICTs they are just 4K) and I want to paste them into to an Illustrator diagram (vector) and then rasterize the whole thing so I can paste it into a word processing document.

[ 06-06-2001: Message edited by: rsp ]

[mollicat]

Hi;
The box around the image is Illustrator showing you the entire image size of the pict file, not just the colored part. For example, if you drew a "smiley face" like the smiley emoticons here in Illustrator, you would draw a yellow circle and because it's vector , the circle is what you get. But if you open Photoshop or another raster image editing program, you select a size for your image, say you made it 2" x 2". Then you draw a smiley in the middle of the area, and the smiley is only, say 1" in diameter, and you save the file. When you place the file into Illustrator, you get a 2" x 2" square bounding box, with your 1" diameter smiley in the middle. Of course, if you then place this image on top of your vector art, the art is blocked out by the entire bounding box of the placed image.
The simple way to work around this is just to send the placed images to the back of the vector art.
If that does not work with your design, the next simplest way is to make a mask in Illustrator, which will only show the "painted" area of your pict. To continue using the "smiley" example, you would make a mask to show only the 1" smiley by drawing (in Illustrator) a 1" circle with no fill or stroke, placing it ABOVE the smiley PICT, selecting both the drawn circle and the PICT image, and then do a "CMD 7" or go to the Object menu and select Masks then Make Mask (CMD 7 is just the shortcut for that). The 2" x 2" box would still show up when you selected the art, but it would not block out any art underneath it. Obviously, this could be a pain if your picts are very complicated designs.
As far as the crashing when rasterizing, don't use the "raster" filter from the filter menu. Just select "export" from the file menu and choose a format that works for your word processor. You can choose from quite a few.
----
hope this helps
mollicat

[rsp]

Originally posted by mollicat:
<STRONG>Hi;
The box around the image is Illustrator showing you the entire image size of the pict file, not just the colored part. For example, if you drew a "smiley face" like the smiley emoticons here in Illustrator, you would draw a yellow circle and because it's vector , the circle is what you get. But if you open Photoshop or another raster image editing program, you select a size for your image, say you made it 2" x 2". Then you draw a smiley in the middle of the area, and the smiley is only, say 1" in diameter, and you save the file. When you place the file into Illustrator, you get a 2" x 2" square bounding box, with your 1" diameter smiley in the middle. Of course, if you then place this image on top of your vector art, the art is blocked out by the entire bounding box of the placed image.
The simple way to work around this is just to send the placed images to the back of the vector art.
If that does not work with your design, the next simplest way is to make a mask in Illustrator, which will only show the "painted" area of your pict. To continue using the "smiley" example, you would make a mask to show only the 1" smiley by drawing (in Illustrator) a 1" circle with no fill or stroke, placing it ABOVE the smiley PICT, selecting both the drawn circle and the PICT image, and then do a "CMD 7" or go to the Object menu and select Masks then Make Mask (CMD 7 is just the shortcut for that). The 2" x 2" box would still show up when you selected the art, but it would not block out any art underneath it. Obviously, this could be a pain if your picts are very complicated designs.
As far as the crashing when rasterizing, don't use the "raster" filter from the filter menu. Just select "export" from the file menu and choose a format that works for your word processor. You can choose from quite a few.
----
hope this helps
mollicat </STRONG>

Thanks for the advice. I'll try it out.

[chris v]

The other option is to run your files you want to place through Streamline (a very handy and pretty cheap program), and turn them in to vector art, then just copy and paste that into illustrator. You may need to save them as tiffs for streamline to recognize them.

If you think you might be doing large amounts of work like this in the future, you might consider learning to make clipping paths in Photoshop, so you don't have the overlapping square problem when you,place bitmap graphics in illustrator. It's one of those things I don't do often enough to retain offhand- I've got to relearn it every 3 months or so, but it's not really that hard.

CV