illustrator files?

[BobHill]

Barbara,

How complex is your .ai file? Although it may take some time to rasterize it (depending on complexity) PhotoShop will open .AI files just fine. However, I'm not so sure about those from version 7. Were they created by a PC or MAC and are they going into a PC or MAC Elements? If you EXPORT the .ai files in Illustrator 7 to either .TIF or PSD format and they'll open just fine in Elements though.

Bob

[Barbara Brundage]

Hi, Bob. These are files created in finale that are exported in .ai format. I get no choices or options except whether or not to embed fonts. They were created on a mac going to a mac, but since that version of finale is very windows-centric, they may be being created as windows .ai files--there's nothing to show which.

My problem is that finale exports eps files that work just fine if I can just import them as is, but I have to export complete pages. If I open an eps page in PE to crop it, say, to get just the measures I need, it becomes very blurry in any page layout app I have access to. Whereas dropping the entire EPS produces a nice sharp image.

[Richard Coencas]

Barbara,

I'm not sure if finale creates an ai file that is fully compatible. Elements will open ai files created in recent versions of Illustrator. Would you like to zip or sit up a few of these and send them to me. I can try them out here on some different OSes. [email]rcoencas@adobe.com[/email] <mailto:rcoencas@adobe.com>

Rich

[Barbara Brundage]

That's funny--I just posted and it disappeared. Your mailto link was different a minute ago, too, Rich. Oh well.

Anyway, thanks. I have sent you two separate examples.

Is it still possible to purchase full Acrobat for os 9? I am so sick of Makemusic and I would like to just walk away from Finale, but I have never found that printing from EPS gives as a good a result as when they can plate from a hard copy of a Finale document printed out on a good PS 3 printer. I don't think Finale's future looks too promising and I'd like to get my old files into a useable format so that I can move on to something else.

[Barbara Brundage]

Incidentally, Rich, when I bring these .ai files into OS X to work on them, I notice they are showing the same icons as simpletext files would. I did a get info and that's what the system is seeing them as. PE doesn't show up on the list of available applications.

[Richard Coencas]

Hi Barbara,

I just wanted to let you know that they will open in Illustrator 10 on OS X, though the fonts are getting replaced on my system. They won't parse in any version of Photoshop, which leads me to believe there is something unusual about the way that Finale writes the ai format. I will pass them on to the Photoshop file I/O quality engineer.

Rich

[Barbara Brundage]

BTW, Rich. Those files were created with Finale 2000c. Finale totally changed its native file type (to .mus) in 2002, so it's kind of moot now from Adobe's standpoint, since whatever weirdnesses are in the current version (and I'm sure there are plenty) will be different, most likely.