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This reminds me why topics involving politics and religion are banned in a lot of moderated forums.

In October I'm going to reach my 25th anniversary at my workplace, this large-ish sign company in Lawton. Business has been pretty good the past couple of years. It got an additional boost when a couple rival sign guys in our community came to work for us after having a falling out with their...

I'm not sure what to think about the SVG format. It's great for web page graphics. But as a general file exchange format for graphics purposes it has some serious hang-ups. The SVG format was initially released by the W3C in September of 2001, nearly 17 years ago. It took roughly a decade for...

My point is the computer graphics industry really has no singular "industry standard" of software or hardware. The nearest thing we have to that is Adobe Photoshop (not Illustrator). There are dozens of niche industries that fall into the computer graphics field, each with its own...

That's still sounds a lot like, "real professionals use Adobe Illustrator." And it reminds me of the worn out stereotype, "real professionals use Apple computers." If someone is using computer graphics software/hardware not approved by the fashion police that worker is seen as not being a legit...

Whether a CorelDRAW user gets the pop-up message or not the application is still herky-jerky viewing the whole page/art board when the zoom gets out to around the 100' level. Keeping the focus on the original topic of this thread, this point is kind of important since at least some people seem...

The problem is there is no complete "open source" solution for all the software needs of a sign shop. Going open source is pretty much a non-starter. And even plenty of open source applications and the file standards they try to establish come and go.

Depending on the type of file and how it was created the clipping masks may be auto-generated. This is definitely true with PDFs. I think it has to do with making sure any effects in the graphics are not altered in different versions of Adobe Reader, other PDF viewers and on other platforms. In...

Opening really old files and getting unexpected results is definitely a legit complaint with CorelDRAW. This is one reason why I tend to convert all fonts to outlines and release/finalize any live text on path effects once I am finished with a sign design. The type handling in CorelDRAW has...

CorelDRAW has been a "standard" in most sign shops for over 25 years. It didn't just start growing into that role. Nevertheless, CorelDRAW is not a replacement for other sign production applications such as Flexi or other "CAS" programs. CorelDRAW doesn't replace large format RIPs, like the one...

Vector objects that are pigged with thousands upon thousands of anchor points can pose all sorts of problems. If the object is a compound path with many sub-paths you can try releasing the compound path and re-combine only the sub paths that need to be made into a compound path. Some printer...

IMHO CAD programs, such as AutoCAD or whatever, are lousy for sign making. They're good for designing buildings, not signs. Just about any CAD file I receive has problems with it. Paths are often "exploded" into thousands of little 2 point line segments. Hardly any "closed" shapes exist in the...

Actually the current 227" X 227" max art board size in Illustrator only dates back to 2000 with the release of Adobe Illustrator 9. It was the first version of Illustrator built natively on PDF technology, which paired alongside the then-new Adobe InDesign page layout application. InDesign has...

Pretty strange. When I visit the MyFonts web site, referenced in the image you posted there is nothing there regarding the type sample I uploaded. There are two type families called "Montana" available at MyFonts, but they look nothing like the sample I posted earlier. The one released in 2017...

This one is a pretty annoying font mystery. Can't seem to identify this dry brush typeface (see attached sample). MyFonts says it's Arbor Brush. The problem is there are subtle differences between that typeface and the attached sample. Plus, Arbor Brush was published in 2012. This sample comes...

I'm not sure I would call it a "mortal sin," but rasterizing is definitely a last resort. Certain objects should never be rasterized. For instance if someone is printing a display that contains blocks of paragraph text those text objects will look absolutely, unprofessionally horrible if they're...

You may have to convert your spot colors to CMYK. I often don't trust spot colors anyway and if matching a certain PMS color is critical I'll make a number of boxes with tweaks to the original CMYK approximation of the spot color to see which one prints nearest to the one in the physical Pantone...

What is going to be the physical size of the job when it is printed? The Illustrator file's document raster effects settings can make a big impact on file sizes, especially if you're using "live" raster-based effects on objects, such as drop shadows. A normal letter size document can get away...

First thing: anyone specifying Pantone colors should be using an actual physical Pantone swatch book as the primary reference. That's a critical thing if you're going to do color printing in house. Spot color swatch books are nice to have in graphics applications like Adobe Illustrator, but...

I would also be on the lookout for a failing hard disc, or (just as bad, if not worse) a failing motherboard. Make sure your files are backed up. If you can't move the files around to other drives you might have to remove the drive and attach it as a slave to another computer to copy the data...