...but I'm making progress.

Following the advice of Fox and SDG, (thanks guys!) I've been purging. My file was bloated! Got rid of those old fonts! In addition, most of the stuff in there was from my digitizing plus lots of test layers. All kinds of big raster images which showed up as linked files. So I got rid of all those layers, and I consolidated a lot of layers together. When I digitized my source geologic maps, there were alot of different rock formations. Each got it's own solid hatch layer. But the scale of the map forbids showing all of those layers as different units on the map, so they had to be consolodated. In the master file it is important to keep those distinctions in case I want to reassign units to different groups. But for this final product, I can merge all those hatch layers down to a managable level. Now it only has a third of the layers it did before. There are more I could 86, too.

The printer would like an eps file, so I tried that directly out of AutoCAD. I opened the exported eps in PaintshopPro and it looked like hell (rather cubistic, actually). Then I tried it on my Wife's Illustrator, and it too looked like hell. As did opening dwg's in Illustrator. Okay...work around. Export paper space from CAD as pdf (highest possible settings, standard color workspace for professional printing), open in Acrobat, adjust margins, page size, etc., then saveas eps with crop marks, bleed marks, and all the rest. Open in Illustrator as check (it's what the printer is using.) Bingo. I've got a CMYK preview. Great. Some problems remain. Have to go back and convert an image to CMYK. Some line weights are wrong...thank Autodesk for multiple p-line edit! I'm not crazy about some of the colors...could be the monitor (not calibrated)...going to run through the same process with my color chart, see what it looks like. Final check will be printing as an eps on the HP.

Anyway, I'm making slow progress up the learning curve. Lots of trial by error, beating my head against the table, reading help files and manuals, the occassional shout of triumph; and, of course, the RL recommended occassional diversion to clear the brain.

Thanks again.

jms