Can someone 'splain an .eps file to me?

[CES020]

I had a file I created in Corel or Illustrator, I can't remember which one at the moment. It was simple, just 2 words for dimensional letters. That's why I can't recall where I did it, since it was so simple, and I probably used whatever I had open to do it.

However, I was sending it off to get quoted for being cut and I saved it or exported it as an .eps file. The file size was 8MB. I put it in a fileshare site and emailed the company that was quoting it. They responded that I needed to zip the file and email it to them.

So I zipped it. Came back less than 100k in size.

So what gives? What takes it from 8MB to 100k by just zipping an .eps file? Do I have something set wrong that's saving way too much information to make it 8MB? It was nothing but black letters, 4" tall and 7" tall in the drawing.

Can someone 'splain it to me so I can understand?

Thanks!

 

[tanneji]

you are probably saving the tiff thumbnail ... this can jack up the file like crazy! When you save the eps, illy pops up a dialog box, select none and uncheck the tick box that says something about thumbnails or previews

 

[stephenj148]

an .eps file is an encapsulated post script file. Basically in a nut-shell it can be scaled to any size and not loosing quality. Not sure what the issue with size your having is.

 

[rfulford]

An eps file is a postscript file with a image file embedded for preview purposes. Depending on the size of the eps, the preview can increase the file size significantly. This is probably why your vector file enlarged when you saved out as an eps. When you zipped the file, the file was compressed and the file size reduced. Zip compression is run line compression so the compression can be quite significant if there are large areas of similar data such as a solid colors.

 

[CES020]

I work with eps files all the time, I just never zipped one that I paid attention to, and looked at the size.

Probably was Illustrator I did it in.

I'll try the tiff option and see if that makes it a smaller size.

Thanks!