> Von is pretty specific in his needs because his art is basically illustration ..
Indeed. It's also the reason I am pretty confident I can pull that part off.
There are other problems with text, apart from being a mess. My target output is EPS, and that is not a text-friendly format, to say the least. It does not support text formatting, kerning, line spacing -- not even paragraphs, only continuous streams of text.
The best way to deal with this would be converting the file to a format that
does support these things natively. Something like Illustrator's internal format (... then again, the general vibe on this forum seems to be anti-Illy).
Anyone got a better suggestion? (Please keep in mind that I won't want to examine yet
another weird file format just to write to. So please, don't ask for a conversion to native Quark XPress or InDesign.)
A third option, besides Dumbed-Down EPS, or someone elses native format, is to convert to a private format in a reasonably easy to parse way: as an annotated XML file, for example. That way it can be an intermediary for others to read.
As for progress: in the Adobe forums I mentioned that I was looking in applying color to the line art. That works since yesterday evening
I can now convert plain
colored artwork to EPS and place the result immediately into InDesign. I'll be looking next to adding a few other color attributes.