Oh my gosh! For the first hour, this workshop on doing scientific illustrations in Illustrator was seeming kind of worthless. The speaker's teaching a lot of valuable things that a layperson could only learn through awful, tedious experimentation with Adobe's bizarre-ass interface, but it turns out they're all the same things that I've already learned through awful, tedious experimentation with the bizarre-ass interface for Photoshop and GIMP.

But then! He revealed something AMAZING that will save me hours and hours of pain! It is that the vector format of Illustrator is the same as the vector format used in PDF graphics! This means that if you want to copy a graph out of a scientific paper, you don't have to do a lousy screenshot that won't resize and can't be edited. You can open the PDF in illustrator and grab the graph in the form of its underlying graphic objects. But that is not what's so amazing. It's something way, way better and I think there are maybe two or three people here who will understand why I'm so excited.

The PDF export format for Excel also uses the same underlying vector format as Illustrator!

Have you ever spent hours trying to get the graph you made in Excel look right, but it won't let you have the points in the specific order you want and you can't find the hidden option to stop it from dropping the line to zero every time you have a missing data point and you want to specify a color code for the twenty bars in your chart and it means you have to open each of them individually and screw with the dialog for choosing fill and line and transparency? And then you can't get it to use the precise scale you want on the X axis? And then it crashes? If you export the document to PDF, you can open that damn graph in Illustrator and edit it in a real graphics program! This is going to be great!


Hey, does anybody know if there's a free software alternative to Illustrator, the same way that GIMP is a pretty good alternative to Photoshop? I realize that others would be more likely to share my excitement if Illustrator weren't such a phenomenally expensive niche program.

Of course, it's not an issue for me, since I have access to the Adobe suite via my live-in usability and graphics design consultant. Oh yeah! I didn't mention that euziere made it here and we're been hanging out all the time. That might also have something to do with my energetic mood (:

euziere (my girlfriend, for those of you joining late) is finally moving to San Francisco. She'll be here on Sunday! I'm looking forward to having some time with her -- we're been long-distance for way too long.

I wanted to post about this a while ago, but I was also going to make that the official job search networking post on her behalf. But she's still refining exactly what she wants to say about that, so I'm just posting this now. euziere is coming to town! Yay!

I was planning a farm party-style party out west for late January, but it seems like interest has cooled a bit. Also, venues are a bit expensive, and we need to be able to accurately predict how many people we're going to have. But if folks still want to go for it, I will get back on the job immediately and finalize some plans. Please let me know if you're still interested in coming out here either on MLK weekend (1/18) or the weekend before, and you think you can probably make it.

Thanks!

- Michael