Expert: Amy - 2/1/2008

Question
QUESTION: I am running windows xp, CS3.  I have a hard drive dedicated to Adobe for my scratch disk and to save files.  I have a complex, 400MB Illustrator file that will not save.  I have been working on it for over a month.  All was well in December, but now when I save the file, I get a "unknown error occurred".  I closed down all other applications.  Tried saving on my C drive and a SaveAs on my dedicated hard drive.  Still will not save.  In some instances when trying to save, I receive a "not enough ram" message.

I opened Photoshop and saved a 400MB file in photoshop with no problems. I created a new Illustrator file that was small and saved with no problem.

The only way to save the file was as a template.  Is this a known issue in Illustrator?  Isn't Illustrator suppose to handle large, complex files.  Help!

ANSWER: Hi ko.

Do me a favor and see if you can save after converting all fonts to outlines.

If you can, I know where to start troubleshooting.

I know you can't really save the file this way, it's just a troubleshooting step.

I really doubt it's RAM.  Are there linked images? "refresh" all your linked images if that's easy for you.

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: I restarted my computer.  I opened the file, made changes and it saved fine.  Therefore, I didn't convert the fonts to outlines.  I don't have linked images in this file.  While I'm working okay now - what if this happens again?  I'm still searching for answers.

Answer
Unknown errors are the most frustrating kind.
There are so many different causes and sometimes nothing you can do to prevent them.

In my experience, the problem is one or two "bad" objects or FONTS in the document.

What you can do in cases like that is try to copy all the artwork from the problem file to a new file and see if that saves correctly.

You can narrow down the problem object sometimes by copying the artwork, section by section, or layer by layer, or object by object (whichever works best for you) into a new document and attempting to save the new document bit by bit.

If you are interested in learning about all of the situations that people claim are linked to these unknown errors, there are a lot of threads on the adobe forums about them.