did you increase the dpi of the jpg after importing it?

the only other thing i think it could be is an insane ammount of points for the fonts and other objects.
chris<pixelmonkey>

EPS out of AI? PDF compatability on or off? ASCI or binary encode? Compression options?

What apps involved?

no no size changes whatsoever - i scaled down the JPG in Illustrator to fit in the ad as it was a little too big - but not significantly bigger!!!

I hope I am right, that I have to embed the jpg in the link window - correct? and that's the only raster file in the ad - everything else is vector - oh and btw it's not a full page ad - it's a tiny ad like 4 x 3 inches or somming. I mean this is really weird...

BW or 4 color? What are you building it in....? Save the file as a tiff instead of jpeg, convert your fonts to paths....there's a few things to do but a little more info is needed.

it's 4 color, fonts were converted to outlines, just two more rectangles in the background and an image that originally had 300kb - text is about 200 characters - no text effects or bitmap effects - NOTHING.

How do you scale down a jpeg in Illy? In Photoshop how big is that jgeg?

Everything cleared off the sides of the pasteboard? Check your raster settings? Ya got the best doctors working on this!

What I mean is: You can size down a jpeg in Illy (a smaller footprint) but if it's a 12meg PS it's going to stay that big until you scale it down in PS then bring it back into illy.

OK i will try out some stuff and see what's happening here.
Thanks so far for your help! I will get back to u soon

more along the lines of what Rick was suggesting, try a Select All (Ctrl-A) to select all of the items. There might be stuff left over that has no stroke or no fill so you can't see it regularly. It's worth a shot, you might have something hidden that has a ton of points on it. I would also see if you can streamline your layers in any matter, you might have a lot of unnecessary groups, even though I don't think it would great that big of a file. If Jim or Rick can't take care of it between the two of them then there is no hope left in the world. They are the Un-Official Prepress Gurus or varying age.

Thanks for the kind words, Mynock.
I don't know about you, Jim, but I like the idea of varying age. Today I'm feeling kinda old so tomorrow I think I'd like to be....

Illustrator has always done a poor job of maintaining placed images. Thats why its not a page layout program. Up through version 10, embedded images routinely ballooned file sizes by way more that the embedded images themselves (I've seen a 3 or 4 MB file pump up the Illustrator eps to as much as 20 MB), but you could get around this by making sure the file was linked, and not embedded. Illustrator CS automatically creates eps files that are pdf compatible - which means it contains a pdf file in the file information in addition to the illustrator eps file, which means that it embedded the image file to make the pdf, which balloons the file size. Nice, huh? Oh, and you cant keep it from doing that (at least saving the files as .ai allows you to uncheck the box for pdf compatibility) so your stuck with large file sizes if you absolutely must have an .eps file. But not to worry, everybody and their mother has a 40GB hard drive at the very least these days, right?

Your files right on track with what I've seen - 300K JPG = could be 5MB uncompressed raster material - placed into illustrator ... easily double or triple the uncompressed raster material to 15 MB - not uncommon.

The way I'd get around it? Open up the file in a version of Illustrator earlier than CS and do it from there.

I just read this thread and wanted to mention something I've noticed about EPS image embedding many... well, a long time ago. On the PC at least, there is no internal 'optimal' accommodation for compressing embedded raster images into an EPS that's coming out of AI. In fact, there is compression going on, but what's there is not configurable by the user.

Here's a sample of a few tests that I did with AICS1:

Saved an empty page EPS (default colour preview) with default brushes/symbols/swatches etc: 592k

Empty page with default brushes/symb/swatches but NO preview: 592k

Empty page without brushes/symbs/swatches OR preview: 318k

So this indicates that the 'weight' of the default libraries is somewhere around 274k in EPS form.


Next, I plunked a high rez 1-bit TIFF, 10,000x10,000 pixels (1200dpi) image-- all black. The TIFF was saved compressed with LZW from Photoshop and is 50k in size.

Placed this on a blank default page and resaved and got: 1,568k file
Without preview: 863 k.

Now, this indicates to me that the color low rez rgb preview added 705 k.

Resaved with bw preview: 865 k. Obvious, big savings there.

Saved, once again, same file, without brush/swatch/styles or preview: 589k.
Same, but WITH color preview: 942k.
BW preview: 590k

I had transparency support on in the preview section for all tests (the default). When I get time, I'll try and see how that effects things (not much, I will guess).

Anyhow, I hope these tests, unofficial as they are, give you some idea of how EPS handles embedding compressed files into the format. It's a far cry from the 'default' results I get from Corel's EPS Export --which I still like because it gives the user access to many features that AI doesn't. FTR, the same TIFF placed on a Corel page and exported to a 72dpi 8bit color preview EPS, level 2 was a whopping 25.2 megs. Without a header that went down just a meg, indicating to me that Corel is doing what apps like PageMaker do: expanding EVERY pixel, even if it's in black and white 1 bit space, to the full, 32 bit space of CMYK as it embeds it into the EPS file.

Perhaps the best solution is to steer your workflow towards native AI's (where compression is an option and transparency is supported in ID) or even PDFs and linked PDFs whenever possible or practical. I suspect, though I haven't tested it, that DCS EPS are NOT compressible within EPS 'capsulization' and may be another source of EPS ballooning.