It?s all about the TIFFs

Travel:It?s all about the TIFFs:

{by Mordy Golding}

"A post on the InDesign Secrets blog and some questions I?ve recently received while on tour on the Discover Adobe Creative Suite 2 Tour made me think about posting this ? some of the content I had posted previously on the CTP-Q Print Planet forum, and there?s some other related stuff as well here. On the CTP forum, this topic came up mainly due to issues where a user noticed that after placing certain kinds of images into Illustrator (PSD files), the image ended up being chopped up into pieces, while it was not happening when placing other image files (TIFF files).

First, let?s talk about how the TIFF format might be more beneficial than using PSD or EPS when placing art from Photoshop into Illustrator.

Illustrator is quite an old application and while a lot of the internal code has been rewritten and updated over the years, a lot of the old code is still there as well. Keep in mind that Illustrator has over 5 million lines of code, so it?s impossible to rewrite the entire application at once ? but portions of the code are rewritten over time. One example is the text engine which appeared in version CS (although the rewriting of that text engine actually started 5 years prior during the development of Illustrator 9).

In early versions of Illustrator (we?re talking version 1.1 and 3.2 here), Illustrator wasn?t really built to handle large raster images (and there was little reason to imagine it should), and so when large images were placed into Illustrator, those images were chopped up into smaller pieces. Why? Because in those days, programs were bound to linear memory allocations. Remember those? If AI would request a huge block of memory when it placed an EPS file, it would be very hard to find a block at that size, and that memory wouldn?t be released and would result in a waste of memory. By chopping the image up into smaller chunks, Illustrator could request smaller memory allocations and better manage system memory and its internal memory."

Full post on http://c31b.travel-ontour.com/TravelIts-all-about-the-TIFFs/ by Mordy Golding