So I’ve been trying some alternative methods for taking the full-size (8.5×11″) Plan of Salvation and scaling it down to about 3×2.5″ so I can fit eight on a page. Originally (this is back when I was in the mission office) I scaled it down in Illustrator and made seven copies, but the problem was that the Gaussian blurs didn’t scale with everything else. Strokes scale down, text scales down, but not the blurs. And since there are several (seven or eight, probably), the thought of doing that for every language is…less than riveting, let us say.
Today I thought that perhaps I could scale it down in Acrobat, once it was already in PDF, and then there wouldn’t be any Gaussian problems. But you can’t do that in Acrobat. So I tried exporting the Illustrator file to Illustrator EPS and importing it into InDesign, but the EPS file was huge (the original file was 5 megs and the EPS was 50) and that didn’t work. Next I tried importing the Illustrator file directly into InDesign and scaling it down there. It kind of worked, but the quality was definitely not as good as it should’ve been. (Alright, alright, it was decent, but these cards are small and they have to be legible.) So, barring any other brilliant ideas, I’ll be back to scaling them down in Illustrator and tediously going in and fixing the blurs. One alternative, I suppose, is doing it once for the background art and then copy the text over each one. Hmm… It would certainly be less work.
Anyway, I made an Excel file this afternoon with all the various translations in it, so there’s a central location for the text (which is nice if I ever have to regenerate it, because some of it I convert to outlines and thus lose the text itself). The languages I have translations for so far are, in alphabetical order: Cambodian, Chinese (traditional/simplified and Mandarin pinyin, with Cantonese pinyin on its way), French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Korean, Laotian, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, Vietnamese, and Welsh. So hopefully I’ll have all of them up in PDF and PNG on a new Plan of Salvation web page on Blank Slate before too long.
[tags]Plan of Salvation, art[/tags]
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