FM 7 and CS6 Illustrator art

[Combs, Richard]

Rob Shell wrote:
 
> I have been using Illustrator CS6 for some months. The EPS files I generate
> work flawlessly with FM9 and with FM 11.
> I cannot imagine that they would not work with earlier versions of FM. One
> could also try good old tiff....

FM has imported EPS since at least as far back as version 5.x. Prior to FM explicitly supporting native .ai file import, EPS was the recommended way to import Illustrator graphics. (Yes, I know that lots of people had no trouble importing .ai files in earlier versions of FM. That's because there's what amounts to an EPS representation of the graphic inside the .ai file, and FM could usually see that and treat it as an EPS. Usually.)

The main problem with EPS is that Windows can't natively display EPS. So your EPS graphics will print/PDF in all their glory, but on screen you'll either see a gray box, if the creator didn't include a TIFF preview, or the crappy low-res TIFF preview. A good alternative to EPS is PDF. 

Saving an Illustrator drawing as TIFF (even at a much higher resolution than the EPS preview) is a bad idea because TIFF is a raster (bitmap) file format. Scalable vector drawings should remain in scalable vector form if at all possible. 

Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
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rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-903-6372
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