Okay, boyz and grrls

I have to use a map of railway corridors, taken from a PDF. Fortunately, the map is in vectors. Unfortunately, every line contains somewhere between a gazillion and three googols of points. Whoever made it apparently either used a MS product, which tends to draw curved lines with infinitesimally small WMF straight line segments (and we know what the MF stands for), or drew the map in PS and then converted the lines to pathways or some such nonsense.

For example, a curved lines that starts at Vancouver and then passes through Seattle and on to Portland has 452 points, where 7 would do. A line that goes from Minneapolis to Spokane has 1023 points. The outline of Idaho has 362 points. The outline of Colorado--a rectangle--has 48 points.

I opened the PDF in AI, extracted the map, then copied it to ID and started to work with it. That's when I noticed how many points the map contained. Everything slowed down in ID, so I decided to simplify the lines. You can't do that in ID, though, so I went back to the map in AI.

I can't figure out how to simplify the lines. I found the Object > Path > Simplify command, and I was able to reduce Colorado to a 6-dot rectangle. But I couldn't figure out how to smooth out the curves.

Anybody know how to get the Simplify command to work intelligently?

Danke


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Michael Brady
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