Expert: Kevin Stohlmeyer - 7/24/2008

Question
My colleague uses CS2 and I use CS (we're both on pc's, not macs). I'm very new to Illustrator so my question might seem a bit silly! If she saves a file in CS2 in ai format, she will often put objects in the scratch area. I need to see these, but when I open the file in CS, I can't view anything in the scratch area at all. I don't have the same problem when I save files and then open them at a later date. We always save in ai format, I think PDF compatibility is turned on, by default. Apart from that we haven't mucked about with any of the settings. I would really love to know what your thoughts are on this!

Answer
Hi Lucy,

CS cannot open native CS2 files. What is happening is your version is reading this as a PDF and ignoring anything outside the page. You need to have your colleague save down to version CS in order for you to use this file efficiently. This is very simple, when she saves as .ai, in the options window, she can choose the version. If this is not done, you will lose a lot of editability (more than just lost info in the slug area).

Thanks

Kevin