Having issues saving as Illustrator document. Why?

I've seen this problem a LOT with illustrator CS and the only way we've been able to get around it is to delete CS off the machine and re-install.

There are a few things you can try that occasionally work but I wouldn't hold out any hope:

• Try saving to another location, sometimes an external drive triggers this.
• Create a new document and copy this one to it then try to save that.
• Quit all other Adobe apps open and try again.
• Reboot and repair permissions within OS X.

These have sometimes been sucessfull in different orders for different people, but it's an issue I've seen frequently with CS and CS2.
Fingers crossed my copy of CS3 hasn't done it yet...

I have the whole CS install disks on 3 different disks for all programs. My question is (and I'm sure it's a stupid one)—how do I just install Illustrator and not everything else (i.e. InDesign, Photoshop, Acrobat, etc.)? When they're bundled on 3 install disks, I really don't know how I would just get Illustrator to install without the hassle of reinstalling everything. I guess it wouldn't be the worse thing to have to do, but still.

Any suggestions?

suzanne maestri-walters :: graphic designer

Did you recently upgrade Acrobat? Have you had a firmware update? That has triggered the problem before.

But, the first thing to try is to delete Illustrator's preferences first.

Or try saving a file as an Illustrator template. Then, reopen that file and see if you can save as an ai.

Or, open a sample file from the Goodies folder. Make a simple change and just Save.

Hope something works!

Unfortunately, I recently opened Acrobat a few days ago and it automatically upgrades. So possibly that's it? I don't know, maybe. That could be about the same time that all of this started happening.

How do I delete Illustrator's preferences? I have never had to do that before, so I honestly don't know how—believe it or not.

Otherwise, I guess the worse thing that I will have to do is delete my whole CS applications and reinstall. No biggy, really. But a little time consuming.

User-Library-Preferences then Adobe Illustrator Prefs.

Try restarting Illustrator. If that doesn't work, delete them again and then delete the file:
com.adobe.illustrator.plist

Just search for that in the finder. It's called exactly that.

I will try that tomorrow. So I just delete the whole preferences folder for Illustrator? I just want to be clear before I screw something up.

Just out of curiosity, what exactly does deleting the preferences in Illustrator accomplish?

It's just a file, not an entire folder. You can also just use Spotlight and search for "Adobe Illustrator Prefs" and it will find the file.

Preference files are created by about 98% of all applications in the MacOS when they are first started up.

They are dynamic and generally contain info about your system, font resources, where to find any needed application files etc.

In the old days..back around System 6-9, you would delete the preference files and then rebuild the desktop (holding the Command and Option key down while restarting) and that would solve about 90% of the problems one had!

Until font management came around! haha

I did exactly what you said and deleted both files, but it didn't work. I reopened Illustrator and tried saving one of my eps documents as an ai file but I got the same error messages.

I think I will either just trash all CS programs and reinstall and start from scratch, or just save all of my documents as an eps.

Unless anybody else has any other suggestions, I'm willing to try.

Thanks!