Managing large numbers of layers in Illustrator

[JohnGoldsmith]

Hello @SarahBell, I was reading your piece about improving mapping workflows and I wondered if you have some advice about dealing with maps with a lot of layers?

Right now I'm exporting an .aix file from ArcGIS Pro. It's intended to be a 3.5m x 2.5m print map and includes a lot of data for admin boundaries, towns, roads, heights etc.

Once the aix has been generated opening in Illustrator takes about 15 mins (on a reasonably powerful machine) and although rendering does complete it's vitually unusable after that with long waits between turning layers on an off.

Do you have any adivce for this scenario?

I had wondered whether I could export selected layers to multiple .aix's and then only work on a given set in Illustrator at a time, and or perhaps rastering a set of layers so I could work on other but still see those rasterized one - is that feasable?

All advice gratefully accepted!

Thanks

John

[SarahBell · Accepted solution]

Hi @JohnGoldsmith . That is quite a large map. Because of the processing that takes place to make the map ready for you to design, plus the size of the map itself, the opening time is going to take a while. Good news! The AIX processing time is something in our road map. The second thing you noted, where turning on/off layers takes a while, is an Adobe Illustrator RAM issue, and something beyond our control. I recommend checking out Adobe's documentation for increasing Illustrator RAM. There are a few things I know of that you can do to alleviate the issue. One is to turn some of your layers into outline mode. This saves RAM by not rendering appearences - just the basic outlines of the artwork. You can also turn off the visibility of layers you don't need to see to save RAM. The other thing is to increase the RAM that Illustrator uses. Basically, to rendering paths and anchor points in a WYSIWYG preview, Illustrator uses RAM. This increases when you pan/zoom or turn on more layers. It is typically not an issue until you have a high number of paths and anchor points, which you would on such a large detailed map

[JohnGoldsmith]

Hello Sarah,

Thanks very much for your reply and details on this.

The layers outline mode sounds a good plan and I have also gone ahead and bought some more RAM.  I was on 16GB and am going for 64GB - I'll post back here to update how that goes!

In the meantime, is there an option to only export selected feature layers from ArcGIS Pro to an .aix and, can the Illustrator extension import multiple .aix's or is it a one time thing?

Thanks again,

John

[SarahBell]

Yes, you can export specific layers from Pro as an AIX file. To do this:

• In ArcGIS Pro, turn off the visibility of the layers you do not want, and then export the map.
• If you want to eventually combine your AI layers into a single AI file, then you can paste them into a common AI file. Illustrator has a few different pasting options that help keep layers aligned, and pasted in their own discrete layer(S) if needed. Also, there are a few different Illustrator pasting shortcuts that allow you to paste in front or back, etc. 

I hope this helps!

[JohnGoldsmith]

It does!  Fantastic - thank you.

I'll report back here to let you know how I got on and what difference the extra memory makes.

Thanks again for all the insight.

John

[JohnGoldsmith]

Hi,

Just updating here - I'm still hitting the "file is damaged" issue with Illustrator 27.1.1, but in the meantime I'm also struggling to get a sub-set of selected layers exported as a (reasonably sized) aix file. 

I've unchecked most layers to turn off visibilty and selected the tree nodes that I want to target but I still seem to get a 27GB file.

Are there any specific instructions or videos that show this process?

Thanks

John

[MarthaBostwick1]

I find that the AIX files tend to have extremely dense anchor points in linework - and the first thing I tend to do is to simplify all my lines. This in the past has reduced my file sizes by half or more. 

I've experimented on the AIX output settings to see what differences result in changing the export resolution - unfortunately not a lot of help in most cases. In Desktop, you always had much better output in your AI file if your output resolution was a multiple of 72 - this doesn't seem to have a bearing anymore with Pro and AIX files though. 

[JohnGoldsmith]

Thanks @MarthaBostwick1 that's good advice.  I'll bear that in mind as I try these other export options.

All the best

John