I have been using Illustrator and the AI graphing tool to create graphs since Illustrator 88. Its behavior has always been unpredictable and to a great extent replotting is not repeatable. Supposedly this is due to the fact that it was orginally concocted as a macro macro. I have learned to live with that and have my workarounds.
However, each new version of Illustrator has brought various new failures to this tool, such as crashing when pasting in data sets or applying gradients to bar or pie fills (this still happens with CC). Most annoying is the sudden loss of cut and paste functions after the current session has been running for a couple of days. Sometimes cut-paste just stops working and sometimes pasting data results in an entire Excel worksheet pasted into a single graph cell. The only fix for this is rebooting the computer and relaunching AI. I have experience this problem as far back as CS2 and on a half dozen different machines, OSs and AI releases. Still happening in current CC version. I have learned to live with that, just have to suffer the reboots.
I have recently had to plot charts with very large datasets and negative scales. These also cause AI to fatally crash. I do a lot of complex financial and economics related charting on tight deadlines. Everytime this happens it puts me in a panic. AI is not an ideal charting tool from a technical perspective and is downright labor intensive. But, it is the only tool I can find which can ouput publication quality charts in PostScript and has sufficient flexibility to create the charts that my PhD clients cook up. I guess I have to learned to live with this too and in addition to the reboots must come up with increasingly bizarre workarounds -- like plotting upside down and then copying and inverting the graphic.
There are dozens of scientific and statistical graphing apps that can handle the calculation and plotting including Excel. However, none that I have found know what PostScript is or in any way lend themselves to publication quality rendering or control. As funky as AI is at plotting data, it still seems the only game in town -- particularly if you want to integrate it into a cross-media Adobe based publishing environment. But for how much longer? With every release I fear that my business will be brought to a standstill by the lack of support for the AI graphing tool. Graphing may not be mainstream but is a vital communications tool for a lot of technical communicators -- not just for making cute pictograms. This seems like a great opportunity for a major upgrade or even an add-on extension for serious chart masters.
If someone out there can recommend an alternative approach or suggest solutions for these recurring problems I would certainly love to hear about it.
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