I am trying to plot a massive amount of data points (25.000 and more) and edit the resulting pdf in Illustrator. I noticed a peculiar behaviour that I want to understand better:
When I plot the datapoints (with R) as glyphs (single letters from a long text) like in [1], and embed the graph in Illustrator, it is slow/sluggish, but I can still work with it.
If I plot the data as points, embed them, Illustrator can simply not cope and freezes for minutes or crashes.
A glyph contains many more bezier handles than a circle (which consists of four), why is Illustrator nevertheless much faster with glyphs than circles?
Side remark: Adobe Acrobat Reader works fine with either.