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Follow-up: Looking back at the last FreeHand version, there is one stray empty type box. Right about the place that would cause the Illustrator EPS files to get progressively wider due to stray art. So what do we know about whether an empty type box can be selected in Illustrator, or whether it would evade detection by "select all" (and if so, what then)?

Follow-up (2). At bottom of my first post I was wrong - when I open the troubled EPS files as TIFFs in Photoshop they open up super wide (from stray art to map, or past the map to more stray art) just as they do in Mail.

Now let's say the files are mildly corrupted. I'd love to be able to do what I sometimes do in FreeHand, which is copy the art to a new, blank file. But I need the layers to come along with the art, and to the best of my knowledge, AI puts everything on the one, active layer regardless of how many dozens of layers the source art had. Am I wrong? Is there an elegant workaround, or a setting I'm missing?

Here are 2 things I would look into:

Do the images need to be updated after bringing into Quark?
Does the problem still occur when using crop marks on the illustrator files and then placing into Quark?

Well I assume there is still stray art but perhaps it is locked. But why do you have so many stray objects text or otherwise?

You are making it hard on your self if you need to have this text or other objects for possible future use then turn them into symbols which can then be edited at a later date. You use the symbols as library or resource file. This will give you a better, leaner and more productive way of working and you are less likely to have stray points.

But if you are using the Use Artboards option in the save as EPS dialog then the stray points should not be an issue unless the fact that it started in Freehand some how is impacting on the save as eps process.

What you might do is copy the art of each artboard and paste that into a new fresh document with the same number of artboards. I would not however take a shortcut and select all as you will probably copy the offending object(s).

You can also draw a rectangle to the size of the art boards with no stroke or fill and align it to the art boards then select that and the art on the artboards ( including art bleeding off the artboards and then turn those to symbols and save the symbols as a symbol library
and then open those in the new document and place the symbols in the right artboard in the new document. Now you should not have any stray point, objects or anything else.

on a side track
re:
But why do you have so many stray objects text....?

Because Illustrator is finicky when it comes to selecting text! You make a new text insertion point rather than get the text you are trying to select.

From my experience, customers have sent pdf files created from some other program, Illustrator files that have been saved and back saved many times, or from saving a Quark file as a pdf or eps.

Either way, rather then clicking and trying to find every little thing this way, either use crop marks, go into Illustrator going into preview mode and looking for stray points, or using the object>path>clean up will help.

      Because Illustrator is finicky when it comes to selecting text! You make
      a new text insertion point rather than get the text you are trying to
      select.




I don't really find that to be true unless you are talking about sloppy work. If you do make an insertion point when you want to select the text then undo it, if you leave it there then it is your fault for not cleaning it up as you go. And you do have two options for selecting the text, look in the preferences and you see you can choose which way you want to select text.

Hi All! Thanks for your feedback.

The maps don't use symbol libraries because I started them in FreeHand and some of the source art goes back a good 8 years; redoing the page-sized maps with libraries is arguably less practical than simply maintaining it. (I used to work with xrefs in AutoCAD so generally get the concept, but need to play with symbol libraries before I am comfortable with them). I like the directness of grabbing a symbol and editing it. Even if there is the occasional tradeoff of having to adjust all hundred of them. This client has a solid enough set of styles that I may use them as a test case.

A Solution and a Discovery:
Figuring the outskirts of the AI artwork were simply buggy, I solved my immediate problem by copying just the art I wanted onto a fresh page. I had not done this before because I thought AI was UNABLE to paste artwork and carry over the layers the art was on. Turns out it CAN, but the setting in the layers panel pulldown menu is turned OFF by default. I turned it on and was able to copy the art, layers and all. I sent a sample to my client, told them about this setting, and they were able to fix the rest of the files in-house.

In FreeHand the "paste remembers layers" setting is in one of the Preferences panels (another logical place to put it). Figuring such an obvious feature MIGHT exist, rather than wondering why Adobe hadn't yet added it, on a whim I looked up "layers" in the index of the Illustrator CS3 Manual, and there it is on page 306.

(The manual, purchased separately from Adobe, is a fairly handy little book and sometimes it's easier to find stuff that's called by different names than by browsing online help).