Gripe with Adobe Illustrator

I was making an A1 size poster for a presentation. Now there aren't many good poster software that handles a large poster size as A1. People even uses Powerpoint, which I think is just not very good. So I decided to try Illustrator, which has advantage in being vector graphics, so I can rescale my poster.

Now I have had some problems with its stability and crashing once in a while with heavy effects applied. Lack of an auto-save feature makes it sometime quite frustrating. I got into a habit of saving often, when I have long forgotten since the era of Microsoft Office autosave and recovery feature.

Now I have made a good poster. I need to print it with a HP DesignJet graphical plotter. I tried saving it as PDF files, or untouched as AI files. They all open up on the screen nicely in the computer that controls the printer. No problems there. But, when I tried printing, some text boxes would disappear, some would be printed in wrong places, some even went out of the print border.
That's indeed very strange. I thought it was pdf flattening the layers incorrectly, I tried different exported settings. Finally I loaded up Illustrator on the printing PC and printed it direct, it was even worse with more text disappearing, etc. Some text boxes are fine, some aren't. There's absolutely no difference between them in terms of font, typesetting. It was reproducible as well. It's always those few boxes. Relocating the layers doesn't help. Flattening the layers doesn't help, indeed I don't even understand how flattening works in Illustrator. It's not the same layer flattening as in Photoshop.

Ok, so I thought let's export the poster as raster graphics, namely JPG, TIFF, etc; so I an guarantee that what appear on screen will be what it would print out. Guess what, it wouldn't let me do it. "Virtual memory has ran out. Please free up some memory and try again", says VersionCUE.dll. And the message box prompts for "Retry" or "Cancel". I checked my free memory. Gosh I am running a 4GB RAM system, with 10GB of HDD free. No way it's not got enough free memory. At least 3GB are there in form of physical and virtual memory. I clicked "Cancel". Guess what, it crashes the whole program!.

I took advices from the net and disabled Version Cue from File Handling options. Now it gives me a different message: "Insufficient memory to complete the operation". Right, thanks. I went to preferences and go to Swap disk setting, I added a secondary HDD which also has 10GB space. Nope, still saying "Insufficient memory to complete the operation".

Now I can't print out my poster. What good is a DTP program that doesn't allow you to print stuff out well? Bugs with text positions, and can't even export something as simple as raster graphics. JPG of 300 dpi and A1 size would only be around 150MB. Incidentally lowering the dpi to 150 works. But hey I want the maximum quality my printer can support.

I sort of understand why though. Illustrator is a 32bit program, it can't address more than 3.2GB RAM. But hey, a bmp of such size won't take 1GB I don't think.

I hope they make 64-bit versions asap, and make it more reliable. Illustrator is a flexible and powerful program to create graphics I found, wait a minute, only if we can output things reliably and accurately.

My system config:

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Intel Q6600 @ 3.3Ghz
ASUS P5K-E WiFi AP
MTRON Mobi 16GB SSD *2 RAID 0
4GB OCZ ReaperX HPC RAM
Western Digital Raptor 72GB
Western Digital Caviar SE 320GB
Vista x64 Business Edition