http://www.stalkingwolf.net/software/cocothumbx/

creates a thumbnail of any file. Install it, do a search for .eps drag and drop the lot into cocothumbX and then do the search for .eps again and hey presto.

Previews Illustrator, EPS AND InDesign!!! Plus $5 bucks off for the next several days.

-chip.

Plug in for Quick Look that will do just this, however.. doesnt work for me.. crashes finder.. you can try it out though..

- james.

The OSX drawing program Intaglio creates EPS files with thumbnails of the image.

“(Oh, and somebody up above mentioned Illustrator files. This, in my opinion, is an EXTRAORDINARILY bad idea. You’re basically removing any other program’s ability to read Illustrator files. InDesign, for example, cannot render placed Illustrator files that don’t have embedded PDFs. All InDesign can see is the PDFs. Unless you’re very, very, very tight for space, you shouldn’t do that. I don’t even know why Adobe exposes that option in the save dialog box.)”

I said this after having done a lot of research into problems we were having with transparency in InDesign. This included consulting with three print vendors as well as reading a lot of Adobe documentation. Granted not all Illustrator and Photoshop files contain transparency. But we wanted to maintain a consistent workflow and library of images. We work exclusively in InDesign. If you work in Quark, this wouldn’t apply. However, using native Illustrator and Photoshop files wasn’t my idea. It’s Adobe’s best practices when working with InDesign files that contain transparency in the InDesign file or any linked files. This is almost always the case in our situation.

Illustrator and Photoshop EPS files are flattened, while native files are not. According to Adobe, it’s best to wait until the last possible moment to flatten your graphics. This means importing native Illustrator and Photoshop files into InDesign. That way any other transparency effects you’ve added to the InDesign document (i.e. drop shadows), plus any interaction these effects will have with placed files, or placed files will have with each other, will be rendered by InDesign so that they flatten correctly. There are still some things to be aware of as of CS2. For instance, text needs to be placed above any transparency effects. This could be a drop shadow (either made in InDesign or imported in a file) or a clipped or masked Photoshop file where the bounding box overlaps the text. If the text isn’t placed above (either in the same layer or a higher layer), InDesign effectively outlines the text and it appears bold. I don’t know if they’ve addressed this issue in CS3.

There is another issue as well. Printers all have different workflows and RIPs as well. Often times they have specific EPS settings they use in house. It’s therefore wiser to let them make the EPS files to their specifications. That way, if there’s a mistake in the settings, it’s their fault and not the designer’s or agency’s. You also don’t have to save several versions of the same graphic for different vendors.

And I was only speaking for myself and the way I need to work. Everyone’s situation is unique. So, in deciding what file format to save your graphics files in, you need to consider all those aspects that pertain to you – layout program(s), transparency, who you are in the process (designer vs. print vendor, etc.) It also wouldn’t hurt to consult with your vendors to see how they’d like the files delivered. That’s what we did. We haven’t had a problem or a complaint from our print vendors yet.

To see Adobe’s documentation, visit adobe.com and search for transparency. There’s a lot of information available.

EPS files are unlike almost every other graphics file, as they’re not really graphics. They’re self-contained, fully-executable files. They’re programs, real, honest-to-god Turing-complete programs, and they have to be opened and executed like programs.

I think that has something to do with the new Finder not displaying the files. In the window you showed in the beginning, the Finder would have to, basically, launch a huge number of programs on the fly, read their output, and then display them. I imagine that would slow things down considerably.

I’d have to go home to test this (no Leopard at school yet), but I’d be interested to see if EPS files with PICT resources embedded show up in the Finder. A lot of programs used to use low-resolution PICT resources to preview files, so I wonder if that would work.

(Oh, and somebody up above mentioned Illustrator files. This, in my opinion, is an EXTRAORDINARILY bad idea. You’re basically removing any other program’s ability to read Illustrator files. InDesign, for example, cannot render placed Illustrator files that don’t have embedded PDFs. All InDesign can see is the PDFs. Unless you’re very, very, very tight for space, you shouldn’t do that. I don’t even know why Adobe exposes that option in the save dialog box.)