The art of hacking: opening really old Illustrator files

Sandee Cohen was kind of enough to forward to me a conversation she had with Steven Gordon (Steven is the co-author of the Illustrator Wow! Book with Sharon Steuer) with regard to opening Illustrator 1.1 files in Illustrator CS2. Back in Illustrator CS, Adobe disabled the ability to open Illustrator 1.1 files believing that the format wasn't used anymore. Seems that Steven still uses this format, and needed a way to open the files in his copy of Illustrator CS2. Below is the thread and the ultimate solution to the "problem".

I post this here also because I believe it's a good lesson to learn that might apply to other problems that crop up from time to time with PostScript files.

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To: Sandee Cohen
From: Steven Gordon
Subject: Very old Illustrator files

Sandee,

Are there any software or utilities that can open older Illustrator files, such as AI7 and AI1.1?

I'm trying to resurrect an old AI7 map and also trying to use output from older mapping software that outputs an Illustrator 1.1 file.

Do you have any suggestions?

Thanks

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From: Sandee Cohen
To: "Steven H. Gordon"
Subject: Very old Illustrator files

FreeHand should be able to do it.

If you don't have a version of FreeHand that can run on your current machines, send the files to me and I'll convert them for you.

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From: Steven Gordon
To: Sandee Cohen
Subject: Re: Very old Illustrator files

Great suggestion!

I used to have, and use, the NFR version of FreeHand 10. But last summer I cleaned house, literally, and I believe that software is filling a land fill, supporting a new trailer park somewhere around here.

I've attached an AI7 map; it has a TIFF image linked to it but due to size (5MB) I won't send it along too. If you can save it in AI8 or a later format, I would be very grateful.

Thanks

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From: Sandee Cohen
To: "Steven H. Gordon"
Subject: I did it...but I don't know exactly how

I tried to open the file you sent directly in FH. Didn't work. FreeHand said it wasn't a proper eps file.

I changed the suffix to .ai and tried. Didn't work.

Tried to open it in Illustrator CS. Didn't work.

Then I got crafty.

I went into FreeHand and exported an empty file as an Illustrator 7 file.

I then used a text editor to open your original file as well as the exported Illustrator 7 file as text.

Your original Illustrator file seemed to have some garbage in the header.

I copied just two or three lines of the header from the exported Illustrator 7 file (which actually said Illustrator 3 as file type), and then replaced some of the header info in your original file.

I then saved the text files. And then dragged the new version of your file onto the Illustrator CS icon. (I suppose I could have dragged it onto the CS2 icon, but at that point I was living in the past.)

Amazingly, the file opened.

There are all sorts of error messages I got about legacy text, the missing tiff, text that could not be embedded in the Illustrator PDF, stroked text that is not honored, etc.

But I have the file, which looks pretty damn good!

I'm amazed and impressed with myself. I haven't edited the text in Illustrator files in over ten years!

Let's hope I can remember what to do if you need another file converted.

Best,

Sandee

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From: Steven Gordon
To: Sandee Cohen
Subject: Re: I did it...but I don't know exactly how

It worked beautifully!

While you were doing that, I tried something similar...I opened a blank CS2 file and the AI7 file in TextEdit and tried copy-paste to get the AI7 file into CS2. CS2 didn't like the resulting file so that looked like a dead-end. However, your approach worked. It must have been the header lines. So I could use the new header lines, possibly, on the AI1.1 file and see if that will open.

It's like entering a brand new-old world, for the first time ever, again. ;-)

Thanks, Sandee.

Have a great day (you made mine great).

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From: Sandee Cohen
To: "Steven H. Gordon"
Subject: Re: I did it...but I don't know exactly how

You made mine, too. I love solving these puzzles. They're better than the
morning crosswords.

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From: Steven Gordon
To: Sandee Cohen
Subject: Re: I did it...but I don't know exactly how

Oh boy! This is spectacular.

Here's another workflow kink solved by your method. I have ArcView 3.0, the last version that was developed for the Macintosh. It's circa 1997. It can export only an Illustrator 1.1 file.

Now, I can replace all of the header lines in TextEdit with the following lines (up to the bounding box coordinates) to make it open in AI CS2:

%!PS-Adobe-3.0
%%Creator: Adobe Illustrator(R) 12.0
%%AI8_CreatorVersion: 12.0.1
%%For: (Steven Gordon) (Cartagram, LLC)
%%Title: (Prospect \(conv\).ai)
%%CreationDate: 4/19/06 10:49 AM

And the point type objects are live! Yea!

I'm going to pinch myself (before lunch, of course).

Thanks, again, Sandee.

Steven

Note that all of this was possible because older versions of Illustrator used PostScript as a native file format and the PostScript is of course code that is editable in a text editor. As of Illustrator 9 however, Illustrator's file format is PDF-based and therefore much harder to work with. I'll be posting a way to edit corrupt Illustrator files shortly as well.