Expert: Amy - 7/6/2007

Question
Hi Amy-

To start with, thanks for your time in just reading this. I organize a convention every year and we're moving venues, so the new venue gave us a PDF of their floorplan so we could modify in to our floorplan.

I opened the file in Illustrator CS/11 (on a PC) and started modifying the floorplan. I soon saved it as an AI file and continued to modify it. After spending a couple hours on it, I took a break and when I went to re-open it, it gave me this error:

"Can't open illustration. All objects in a compound path must be paths, and they cannot be brushed or be part of an object."

I hit "ok" and when the file opens, it looks like the unmodified PDF file. What's weird is if I open the file in photoshop or acrobat, it looks like the modified version (though without any layers).

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks very much,

Jim

Answer
Hi Jim,

That's bizarre. I'm hoping that the Acrobat and PhotoShop "views" aren't just giving you the last raster preview that was saved.

Try placing it into a new AI document (embedded, not linked) and see what shows up then.

Also, if you've got the full version of Acrobat with Distiller, try distilling it to a new PDF file and opening that. Or is that how you got the PDF file you're talking about?

I'd be happy to give that a shot for you if you want to send the file to AmyLynPace@yahoo.com.  If I can't get it to work here, I've got CS2 at work and I'll try opening it with that on Monday.

-Amy