Expert: Scott Valentine - 10/15/2007

Question
Hi Scott,

I work in prepress and have not really encountered this problem before.

A client sent artwork in in Illustrator CS2. The file fails to open. When the
Photoshop .tif is trashed, the rest of the file opens just fine. When I try to
open the .tif in Photoshop CS2, it is corrupt. I retrieved the file from an ftp
site. The originator of the file is working in CS2 on a PC. I've had him
compress the file, try byte order, psd, eps and have run out of ideas. The
compressed files crash StuffIt when trying to expand. If you double click
the .sit files, StuffIt shows that the files are compressed 86% or more (98% on
the psd compressing from 35 Mb to 420K).

I've done some searching on the internet about this, but have found nothing
like it. The only thing I can think of is that maybe he's actually using CS3 and
saving to CS2.

I'd appreciate any ideas that you may have.

Thank you.

Dave

Answer
I'm not sure what's going on here, David. You might have your client check his preferences and make sure he's got any compatibility settings correct for previous versions. This should cure the problem if he is using CS3.

If Stuffit is showing that much compression, I'm willing to bet your client's files include something odd like imported artwork in different color spaces, or linked images that don't get properly exported with the file.

It is entirely possible that the file itself has just become corrupt, with lots of gibberish in the header files. If it's reasonable, consider having your client open the file, then copy/paste the individual layers to a new file, then save/export that one. It might be wise to start with paths only, save and see if you can open that, then make another file that includes any imported raster graphics.

One last thing is to check the FTP settings - they should be set to 'automatic' so the FTP client doesn't mess with the format (you'll have to search for this explanation online - it's beyond the scope of this answer). The short version is that some clients treat files as text or graphics differently, and while it usually won't be a problem for compressed files, it can cause problems from time to time. It's worth checking into for you *and* your client as problems can happen on both upload and download.

I hope something I've offered helps. If not, please feel free to follow up and we'll try to tackle the issue a different way.

Good luck,

-Scott