Perhaps I should encourage a response by detailing what I see as the difficulties of editing 'broken' text in imported EPS files that have been parsed into Illustrator.
First, one way to correct broken text is to select the various bits of text as a group and copy them to another spot. This produces a long line of text that is unbroken word-wise but requires line-breaking. Unfortunately deleting the text and dropping it elsewhere, which would get rid of the broken text at the same time, merely reproduces the same damned broken stuff. Copying and dropping is not a lot quicker than simply copying the text from the original and dropping it in Illustrator.
Second, the way Illustrator parses bold reversed type (at least in the series of flowcharts I am talking about) is to create graphical outlines that don't convert to proper text easily. It is just as quick to drop from the original or to retype.
Third, in both the previous points, there is a need to select all the broken text in a particular spot that needs to be edited. With so many individual frames involved it is onerous to select them all by Shift-clicking and near impossible to do it by marqueeing, where everything else near by gets selected, or worse still things start to move. This is where I need help. If I could select paragraphs quickly without having to deselect the surrounding matter, much time would be saved.
Surely many on this forum have been required to carry out surgery on inherited graphics. I would be most grateful for some tips or feedback on the issue.
Hi Tony,
This "broken" text when opening EPS files created from other applications parsed in Illustrator has always been a problem. My suspicion is that this is, in part, just the nature of EPS files. Illustrator has to make its best guess as to which pieces of text belong together and which should be separate text blocks, and it doesn't always guess correctly.
Try this: Open your EPS file in a text editor so you can see the actual PostScript code. Search for some of the text that is contained in the EPS, and compare how it is listed in the EPS to how it is broken up in Illustrator.
It would be interesting to compare how Illustrator handles text in a given EPS versus Freehand or CorelDraw.
Sorry I don't have any suggestions for ways to fix this. Sounds like you are already well aware of the work-arounds and their limitations.
Lance
Thanks for the text editor suggestion, Lance. I will definitely give it a go.
Tony,
I believe this is an issue with the EPS file format itself. The best, and only way I know of right now, is to stick with an AI/ID workflow and keep the files native. ID can handle AI files just fine and if you update the text in the AI file then all you need to do is update the link in ID. I'm so happy ot be able to not worry about EPS and TIFF files and what happens when I need to update a Photoshop or Illustrator file.
If you need to work with Quark still, you might try using PDF files and place them in Illustrator or InDesign. While you can't edit them, they might be cleaner and easier to work with.
Can you send me a typical EPS example file? My company makes a software tool called ps2vector, that can batch convert EPS to a number of other vector formats, including back to EPS (others are SVG, WMF, CGM etc.). The interesting thing about it, in this case, is that it tries to combine individual characters and words into one-line text strings. No full paragraphs (mutliple lines with text wraparound), but from your description this might already be a significant improvement. Font styles like Bold can also be reproduced.
Jeroen Dekker
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