How do you work with the limited art board size?

[ams]

I've never experienced an art board limitation. Are you working at 2,000 inches for your proofs? In the sign business, it should cover everything you do.

 

[shoresigns]

I've never experienced an art board limitation. Are you working at 2,000 inches for your proofs? In the sign business, it should cover everything you do.

In Illustrator, the workspace that you draw all your artboards and artwork on is 227.55" x 227.55". That's not large enough for many jobs I work on here, so I use 1:10 scale as needed.

 

[AKwrapguy]

As far as Corel vs Illustrator, it's like 3M vs Avery or Oracal. Pretty much what ever you learned on is what your preference is going to be. My boss pretty much uses Gerber Composer for everything. He's very good with it and knows how to use it and all I have to do is than convert the file to a PDF and make sure it's sized properly and I'm ready good to go. As far as the original question working with limited art-board in Illustrator. I use a simple 10% scale. So if your doing a vehicle wrap you grab your template and of the vehicle is 285.37 inch just make it 28.537 inches. This way when you import you artwork into the the rip software all you have to do is move the decimal point to the right one number and every thing is sized properly.

As far as the part where you place the photo of the vehicle to make sure everything fits or when your designing, I would think that this would be more of the issue since it's very had to get a perfect straight on shot of the vehicle and the natural 'fish eye' aspect of the lenses of most non-professional camera would give enough distortion to make me hesitant of measurements/placement.

 

[ams]

In Illustrator, the workspace that you draw all your artboards and artwork on is 227.55" x 227.55". That's not large enough for many jobs I work on here, so I use 1:10 scale as needed.

and that is one reason I won't use Adobe products.

 

[Bobby H]

I don't know if anything will come of it, but the developers for Adobe Illustrator are aware of the art board size complaints (along with other long-standing complaints).

The real question is "Why would you want to switch from Flexi to Illustrator?" I was a CasMate Pro (Scanvec) user from 1990 (DOS days) and as the software progressed, they decided to purchase Amiable (FlexiSign) to provide more of a stable programming platform due to the intense design functions/tools available within the CasMate.

I started out using CASmate when it was still a MS-DOS program. It did some things well, but not others. I had to hop from DOS to Windows to make scale drawing client sketches in CorelDRAW. It was annoying having to convert fonts into SCF format for the DOS version of CASmate to use. Life got easier when Scanvec ported CASmate to Windows. We switched from CASmate to Flexi in the late 1990's when Scanvec stopped further development of CASmate (the program wouldn't run worth a hoot on Win 98SE).

Even back then I would do a lot of more complicated design work within CorelDRAW or Illustrator. Some of the functions in CASmate were unstable. I could be welding some objects together and get a crash box, "floating point: square root of negative number," and I would lose any work I didn't save. I'd save multiple copies of project files in progress since CASmate would sometimes lose its mind and go on an infinite undo spree until there were no objects left on the artboard and even in the file itself.

CASmate and FlexiSign have both been effective programs for sign manufacturing, but they have not been without their faults or limitations. Flexi still has a very clunky, 1990's style user interface. And it still doesn't support all the features of OpenType, which is a serious problem. Many modern OTFs have very complex character sets. I have to use Adobe apps or a recent version of CorelDRAW to access those character sets.

SignMan has it- I labored thru this entire discussion thinking exactly this. The same suspects will support AI and Corel [which are good for some things] but FlexiSign is a signmaking program and does it well and quickly.

That really depends specifically on what kind of sign you're designing. I'll design a neon sign in Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW long before I mess around doing it in Flexi. Flexi will get the finished art when we're ready to plot neon tube patterns or rout metal letter parts.

Our shop has 3 Flexi licenses, but we mainly use them for driving vinyl cutters, doing other file prep work for our routing table and accessing old CASmate .SCV files. Flexi isn't involved at all in our large format printing work. Adobe is the front end of that, with Roland VersaWorks and Onyx Thrive driving the printers. Most of our client sketches are generated in CorelDRAW, since that's what we've used since the early 1990's. I do most of my full size design work within CorelDRAW. I have to use Illustrator for some other tasks.

Having to use multiple applications is a fact of life for most people making a living doing graphic design work. It's a waste of time trying to make one application do everything.

Ideally, all artwork should be submitted via high-quality PDF with fonts converted to curves, transparencies flattened, etc. Designers that submit native files, Corel, Illy, InDesign or otherwise, need some lessons.

Unfortunately way too many clients don't bother with creating their art files so they can port easily to other applications on other computers. It solves quite a few headaches for our shop to be able to handle Adobe and Corel files natively. The Adobe capability is pretty important since national businesses trade in those files far more often than Corel CDRs.

In my opinion, CorelDraw is very viable for of nearly all of what most people might perceive they would need InDesign for. Granted CD is not as well suited as ID for very large jobs, but I would only put down CD and pickup ID if I were starting a 64+ page magazine.

CorelDRAW finally got rid of one serious limitation when they finally added a proper level of OpenType support in version X6. InDesign has been fully OpenType capable from when it was first released nearly 18 years ago. CorelDRAW still has serious problems handling Adobe-generated assets. InDesign will handle any Photoshop or Illustrator-generated assets just fine.