oops i forgot you had tried it in the beginning

I find it odd that illustrator is having to create an raster of the entire product before segregating into printable blocks...
For printing, you have to supply bitmaps ultimately, and we have to add bleeds and other print stuff. Shrug. Printers are pretty fascist about what you send them.
Illustrator won't do an automated version of this on the source vector - there are many google pages about how difficult it is to get illustrator to do this, and it seems it's one of those "omfg Adobe how stupid are you? Why don't you just add the damn feature?" things

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Does Corel draw perform the same naive process or does it generate the raster only for the current printable block?
Haven't got access to CD here, the CD experiments were done by a partner at different office, so hard to check, but I'll ask.
If you want i can try fiddling around on my end, but i will need a copy of the file (or similarly large)
Thanks for the otffer, but .... then I'd have to kill you

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Seriously, it's a very "highly confidential" image

. Makes things harder, of course.