Expert: Kevin Stohlmeyer - 6/17/2008

Question
I seem to been having problems lately with not being able to open some illustrator 10 documents here at work. They are not big files and rarely have anything in the document except text.

When I am opening the file, a dialouge box comes up and says "Can't open the illustration. The illustration contains an illegal or misplaced operator. Offending operator: 'ter'."

So, if you could help me with this, I won't have to recreate it using the print out.

Thanks,
Keith Plott

Answer
Hi Keith,

Believe it or not, I know what the error is and it is obscure (but is generated by version 10):

The document contains the Wheelchair Access symbol from the Symbols palette.

You can do one of the following to fix:

1. Place the document into a new Illustrator file.  Create a
new Illustrator file, and then place the damaged document into
it. Make sure that All Documents is selected in the Place dialog box.

2: Recover a plain-text version of the document.  If the file
was saved with compression (the default), you must first recover a
plain-text version of the file, which you can then open in a text
editor.

Good luck!

Thanks

Kevin