OT: Illustrator line feed inconsistencies

["Jason Aiken" <jason.aiken@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

FrameHeads,

Delete this now if you don't care about the inner workings of Adobe Illustrator. I've observed some very strange behavior in the EPS code when viewed through a text editor. Can anyone explain what's going on or share if they've seen this before?

EPS files saved in Illustrator 8.0.1 on Windows 95/8 inconsistently receive the Windows line feed (LF) and carriage return (CR) characters when the files are viewed in a text editor. In Word Pad, they show as solid black characters, but in other editors such as vi, they show up as control M's.

For some reason, Illustrator is saving these LF/CR pairs inconsistently, eliminating valid line breaks that disrupt PS viewers from displaying/printing the EPS files. Some LF/CR pairs are respected, but others are obviously not acting as they should. For example, a bad line may look like this:

2355:0 J 0 j 1 w 4 M []0 d^M%AI3_Note:^M0 D

The ^M combo is the LF/CR pair. According to standard LF/CR behavior, the line above should look like:

2355:0 J 0 j 1 w 4 M []0 d
%AI3_Note:
0 D

Why the arbitrary failure to respect the LF/CR pair? Are these inserted somehow by Windows (I'd blame Word if I could, really I would)?

This is a pretty serious issue because it completely thwarts many PS viewers, chokes Perl conversion utilities, and causes trouble on UNIX. In a 3,880 line file, 145 lines contain inline LF/CR pairs or the LF alone.

We're kinda building our own Frame Enterprise, Frame Designer, Frame Writer scenario, but we need those EPS files to work on our server if we want to have graphics in our manuals (minor detail, right?).

I'm probably going to head to the Adobe Online User-to-User forum with this one, but my question may not apply to typical Illustrator users. I've posted it to my favorite Framers lists because I know some of you folks get down and dirty with your techie stuff. Thanks for reading if you're still awake.

Happy Friday all,
Jason
Frame Templar
Babylon


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