My coworker and I inadvertently discovered this when porting an Illustrator file created by an external firm to a Flash site. This was the first time he had attempted to use the new Illustrator import feature for Flash CS3, so we were both pretty excited to see what the results would be.

The AI file had had all the fonts broken apart as outline prior to being shipped to us so when he brought the file in and exported it, neither of us were surprised to see a pretty big file size. However, when we moved all the text onto a layer, made that layer a guide and rexported it, the size only went down marginally. What gives? Well, upon closer inspection of the library, turning on the use counts and finding a couple raster images that were being reused a couple times as unique and new symbols, we decided to take a peek at the rest of the bitmap images in the library. It turns out that the original designer had placed some 300 DPI images in the AI comp, and those images, when imported into Flash retained their high resolutions. These contributed to about 1MB of the movies total size.

I suppose this is a feature and not to be unexpected, after all, it does create some possibilities for scaling and manipulating the art after being imported, but it could possibly cause some confusion as to where the extra filesize is coming from ‚Äì nothing a good ole’ size report and “keep use counts updated” can’t help you find out.

“But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you
‚Äôve made it clear. You‚Äôd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won‚Äôt delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.”

- Thanks Kevin… my faith in Digg being user powered is now restored. Good to see you fighting the good fight.

read more | digg story