Spin lillies / Thursday, September 28, 2006

Here is some more Illustrator practice. The process of converting my lilly drawing to vectors in Flash was a terrific pain. Because the process was so irksome to me, I’ll try to explain what I did to preserve the Illustrator drawings for Flash.

Flash always mangles the complex Illustrator files I try to import into it, so I have to resort to a little trick. With my illustration open, I go under File then Scripts. Then I choose the script which exports all open Illustrator files to PDF files. A dialogue comes up and asks me which folder to save into so I choose one.

If you are going to try this, you should also know I’m on a Mac running Flash 8 and Illustrator CS. Saving as PDF from Illustrator produces a jarbled illustration. Then I take this script-generated PDF and open it in Safari. From Safari I choose “Print”. At the print dialog there is an option to save. I save the file as a PDF (again). The double-saving as a PDF somehow strips the vectors of any crap that Illustrator writes into the PDF it generated. It’s a shame Flash’s import can’t avoid breaking the look of my Illustrator files, but the reality is that Illustrator-to-Flash imports is weak and unpredictable. Once in Flash I use another process to convert the vector pieces into legitimate movieclips which I can then tween.

So this time, even the “trick” failed to give me the right results in Flash. This time I had to import not into Flash 8 but into Flash MX 2004! If I tried to import into Flash 8 directly, the gradients of my lillies would disappear. But (somehow) the gradients survived the same process in Flash MX 2004. Go figure. Either way, the process was needlessly difficult.