Illustrator illegal operand 'w' (mac)

[lauralamotte]

I have created an Illustrator drawing. When I closed the file and tried to reopen it, I got an error message: Illegal operand Offending operator 'w'. it continues to open the file, but many pieces of the drawing are missing. I can force open it in Photoshop, and all of the drawing shows. I tried to toss Illus. preferences, but that did nothing. Any ideas of how I can save this drawing?

 

[fryke]

I suspect there's _actually_ something wrong with the Illustrator file (and not your Illustrator installation). You might try to place the EPS or AI file (what is it, actually?) into an InDesign document, create a PDF of it and open that PDF with Illustrator in order to resurrect some of your work (albeit with a lot of strange paths that get added by creating the PDF), but I guess the most simple way is to actually open the file in Photoshop, print the file and re-draw it in Illustrator. (You can also copy from Photoshop to Illustrator. Won't give you vectors, but you can put the bitmap in a special layer, fix it and make it translucent if you're working with a current version of Illustrator.)

Btw.: Has the file been previously worked on in a different version of Illustrator? What version of Illustrator are you using? 8, 9, 10, CS or CS 2? All this is important, of course...

 

[bobw]

If you get similar errors along with that;

%
0A
0R
0001K
01000Xy
1J1j6w--M
=========================================
Open the file in a text editor and change the two dashes before the M to a number between 4 and 10. (It is the miter limit.) Be sure to save as plain text.
=========================================
You can try to open up a new Illustrator document and File/Place the problem file and embed it to get the vectors back.

 

[lauralamotte]

Thank you so much for the quick reply. The file is done in Illus. 10, and is an eps. It has only been worked on in Illustrator. I should have chosen Freehand. In the best possible scenario, I could retreive the drawing with vectors, because it is unfinished. It looks like I need to redraw it, but it seems as if that dreadful program is just holding back the drawing to antagonize me. It shows in Photoshop, so I know it's all there.