Expert: Amy - 4/17/2007

Question
I receive the following message when I am loading my AI 10 file, "Can't open the illustration.  The illustration contains an incomplete or garbled object description."
"Offending operator: ';' "
Context:
6 () XW
U
9 () XW
X+
/A|11TextFrameGroup ,
;

Answer
Hi Brenda,


Sounds to me like the file is corrupt, unfortunately. It might be that a font in the document is corrupt, too.

You can try changing the file's extension/filetype to PDF and try to place it into a new blank AI document. Make sure "Link" is not selected when you do the place.

You can also try deleting all adobe font list files.  Do a search on your machine for Adobefnt*.lst files and delete them.

As general practice, you can delete the AIprefs file whenever something odd happens:
1 - Quit AI
2 - Locate and delete AIprefs file
3 - Restart AI

But honestly it doesn't sound like deleting the prefs is going to do anything in this case.

Well, I hope that you can place the file and continue to work on it...


Amy Pace