Flashes of Panic

One of the things I do as part of my job is take masses (literally, thousands) of EPS files from Illustrator, where they were used for the printing of textbooks, and produce JPEG files which will then be used in PowerPoint presentations or course websites or whatever.

EPS is a complex and powerful format (essentially, Encapsulated PostScript) which produces immense files and can’t be used by web browsers or presentation software. To make the EPS files into a more usable format, I need to “rasterize” them in Photoshop, a process which is not unlike printing a photo from a transparency, but is probably more like scanning a transparency. In order to handle the volume, I’ve created a series of “droplet” scripts in Photoshop and ImageReady which I shuffle the files through; otherwise I would spend months on these files, rather than a few days. I can do a small book in a day, something which was (apparently) once inconceivable. I don’t gripe about them, either; the load they place on my machine (if not on me) is a handy lever for justifying the purchase of shiny new hardware.

The perennial snag is fonts. In EPS, text is editable and carries font information for display. The font file needs to be present for the file to rasterize properly, and since they were created on another machine, there are always font issues. Today’s is particularly difficult; I’ve spent all afternoon on it so far, with no progress.

The good news is that once I solve the problem, it will fix approximately three-quarters of the files I was asked to re-do. If I solve it.

Now playing: The Blonde Waltz from Us And Us Only by The Charlatans