File won't Open--Illegal operator

[tmarketinc@adobeforums.com]

This happens fairly frequently lately. We have been working on a piece of vector art and have saved and closed it. The next time we open it we get this error message:

Can't open the illustration. The illustration contains an illegal or misplaced operator.

Offending operator: 'ter'
Context:

; /Dict ;
/Part ,
;
/Part ,
/CompoundFilter :
(Chain Style Filter) 0 0 /Filter

After this we can never open the file in illustrator again. We can place it in another program such as InDesign. We can open it in Acrobat. But we can't do anything to it in Illustrator.

Has anyone seen this? Does anyone know what is causing this? Does anyone know how to fix and/or avoid this?

[Dee Holmes]

Do a search on this site for the wheelchair symbol. There are specific instructions on how to remove it from your startup files, but if you're opening other peoples art files, you will have to manually delete it from the symbols pallet.

[Aktarul_mumin@adobeforums.com]

Yes we have seen this many times and it only happens mainly with AI 9.0.2 , basically you are buggered !

But you can salvage some art work placing the corrupt doc as an image on new blank doc.
Apart from that nothing more you can do .
Thanks

[Wade_Zimmerman@adobeforums.com]

You probably don't have to place it as an image in ai but simply place the ai file in an empty ai document then resave it and you will in the future be able to open the file normally.

If it does not place there is another technique for such a technique do a search for Offending operator "ter" or recovering damage files and look for a post by Mordy Golding on how to do this.

[Dee Holmes]

Which was way to complicated for me to figure out.

I would try to place it anywhere. We have had good results with placing it in Quark 4 if it was an .eps and then saving it as a Quark .eps and then opening it in AI.

If you're desperate, try opening it in anything to convert. Buy if your're familiar with BBlite or text editing and that sort of thing, you can fix your original file manually. Which is what I think Wade is refering to.

[Wade_Zimmerman@adobeforums.com]

The "ter" in this case would appear to be the filter that had been applied to the document some where you will have to correct the missing text related to that filter.

[Dee Holmes]

That's where it gets complicated. Just try to place the file into another document and convert it to an .eps then try to open it again in AI. Or try .pdf for that matter.

But if you are litterate with text data you can try to edit it in a text editor.

I can not no matter how much I try!

[Max_Heim@adobeforums.com]

Help!

This just happened to me this morning, with an important work-in-progress that I saved last night (LATE last night). My error message was different:

Offending operator: 'To'
Context:

0 0 Xd
6 0 XW
1 To
1 0 0 1 -7579 7795 0 Tp
0 Tv
0 To

When I hit the OK button, Illustrator crashed. This is 10.0.3 on Mac OS X 10.2.8.

I have a backup of the file, but of course it is also corrupt (having backed up the corrupt version last night).

I don't think the placing trick will work since it is a complex multi-layered file with several placed photos, saved in AI format. The content in the visible layers is only a fraction of the drawing (just the particular part I was working on).

Can anyone direct me to a method of editing the Postscript to straighten this thing out?

Desperate...

[Max_Heim@adobeforums.com]

Answering my own post here... ;-)

The "place" method didn't work for me -- it only gave me the layers that were visible when I saved the file (2 out of 17).

Following a related thread led me to the FAQ on recovering corrupt files (thanks to Mordy for that procedure). But I still didn't know what to edit in the Postscript to fix the error. So here is the workaround I invented "ad hoc":

I scrolled and found the "begin layer" and "end layer" tags that surrounded the code in question and deleted the entire layer. Then I went back to the top of the file and changed the number of layers to one less. The resulting file opened fine in AI 10. The funny thing is I couldn't even identify what layer was missing -- it may have been a previously deleted or empty layer that was cluttering up the file with gibberish.

Anyway, I hope that is useful to someone in a similar situation.

[Wade_Zimmerman@adobeforums.com]

Max

Pleased that it worked for you. The place method only sometimes work and I have never seen that particular operator posted before.