[strata]

Hi,
we're having a problem here at work which is that our design company has sent us eps pictures produced by illustrator on macintosh, but when I try to open them on my pc with illustrator it tells me that it's an unknown file and that it cannot be opened...

I think it might have something to do with saving it with a pc preview, but how do you do that on a mac?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Ko]

Hmn...

Illustrator.ai/Illustrator.eps files are and should be platform independent, so it might be that they have a newer version on their Mac, than the one your PC. Although Illustrator usually recognizes a newer file format as an Illustrator file, but for obvious reasons does not open it.
But if you have Illustrator 8 and receive an Illustrator 10 file, version 8 might not recognize it... So, maybe get your design company to save the file as an older file format, which every version of Illustrator is able to.

I often transfer Illustrator files from my Mac at work, to my PC at home... And I've never had any problems.

Good luck

- Ko

[strata]

Yeah I thought of that, I checked and we're both on ai 9... I'm thinking that perhaps the e-mail compression thing screwed them up (the files weren't zipped when we recieved them)... it's happened before I think, so I'll ask them to send them again... and nobody believed me when I said that they were platform independent mwaha!

thanks man =)

[Ko]

Mmmmkay... e-mail is bad for some filetypes.
.eps files and fonts especially, get screwed when sent uncompressed by e-mail.
There's a good chance, that it's the cause of your file corruption!

Let me know...

- Ko

[Afgun]

Hi there. I had once the same problem. I solved it this way: when saving under mac choose illustrator eps and enter the name with the end ".eps" ,because the PC needs this information for reading and writing the file. While the Mac write the information directly in the file without such an ending.

Good luck

[strata]

Thanks guys =)

yeaaap, it was the email compression bastard of a thing... plus they didn't have file endings =)

I got this reply from a guru type of person:
"If they are sent to you, and you use automatic decompression software eg Messenger, Outlook Express etc, the programs tend to extract the file, and lose the Mac creator and type codes. This makes the files unusable on any platform, as they are pretty mangled. The thing to do is disable the automatic decompression (choose "save to disk" instead) and decompress manually using a suitable application."

so yah =)

thanks!