CS4 "corrupt" file?

Question

I have a file that was created about a month ago. I printed it (Epson 2400) and everything was perfect. Last week, I re-opened the file and printed it and the print was horrible; it looked faded. Everything looked fine on the screen. Nothing has changed. Opened and printed other files that were created at the same time and they're fine.
I ended up creating a new Illustrator file, copying the layers from the original file into the new file (via copy and paste) and to my surprise, the print was right on. This leads me to believe that something happened to the original file but I don't get an error message or any indication of a problem other than the print. Both files are CMYK with the same profile.
If anyone could shed some light on this, I'd appreciate it.
Thanks in advance,
-Ilene

Answer 1

If you look at Photoshop updates, you will see a lot updates (for CS2, CS3, CS4, etc.), but Illustrator have not provide a single update for almost 3 years. And Illustrator versions have very serious and critical bugs.
Well, I'm not the greatest AI user, but I don't really see it this way. A lot of what you encounter as bugs, I couldn't care less about. That's just the curse of how what specific work we do, influences our perception of a tool. Example: If I had my sayso, we'd gotten rid of "useless junk" like the chart tools (that really only produce charts that make Mr. Tufte shudder) long ago - one portion of code less to maintain and one less potential point for bugs. Yet, others use them all the time and they even have some creative uses. In reverse, I'm craving for consistent CAD tools, as it would help me to prepare my 3D content when I do visualisations. But dilge - nothing really there and until this day AI can't do a proper fillet without help from scripts or plug-ins.
Similar comparisons can be made fo a million other tools and that's where things get extremely foggy - both from users and the developers. Simply put: Whenever a feature is added in response to feature requests, it takes away resources from other tasks and at some point you have so many loose ends, you can't untangle them all. So by all rights, the dev team may have the will, just not enough resources. On the other hand - if you developed a tool without responding to external input, it may represent the perfect realisation of a programmer's "vision" - for a while. As the user's skills and needs evolve, the tool would become less attractive and finally fall off the truck. That part, I'm sure even you would admit, is why, if AI followed such a rigid routine, you and I and otehrs would have stopped using it years ago. So all in all, still someone has to make the hard decisions of what "bad" old stuff gets fixed while new things are added.
The whole thing is certainly not easier when working in a big company that produces many, many programs. You see, isn't it great that you can import or export Photoshop files, Flash content and PDfs from Illustrator? But doesn't that also mean, that the AI team are dependent on the other teams responsible for those components? Does that not hinder going faster on their end? Imagine, if one of those things needs updating and it doesn't get greenlit simply because it isn't ready yet! Something as essential to Adobe products as support for the PSD format not working could delay the entire release of all otehr programs, not just Photoshop.
One more thing you should consider, is that actually most Adobe apps are very, very old. In fact, Illustrator was the program that laid the foundation for the company's development as a business along with some other things. Because of the age, it has aquired "bad habits" long before people like me even used it. In addition, along the way as features were added, this was often done by acquiring external code by ways of plug-ins or hiring a specific developer, and neither you nor I really know the licensing legalese that brings with it. While you can assume that the code has been rewritten to more modern standards a few times (after all, we no longer use Windows 3.1 or MacOS 7), the licensing stuff may prevent the code from being modified in certain ways. Effectively a feature may be "locked" into a given state and unless someone comes up with a way to completely replace it without losing functionality, it has to be used that way to comply with the legal agreements.
My complaint is that Illustrator team doest not care to fix Critical bugs (like the CS4 memory bug, or problems handling photos, etc, etc.)
Trust me, they certainly do care, but as per the above, there are limits as to what they may be able to do and what they are willing to do. You should also note, that how critical a bug is, is not determined by its visible sideeffects. Especially memory problems tend to be very specific and if they cannot be clearly reproduced, they tend to fall off the lists very quickly. In that case one would often simply assume a combination of system-specific issues with otehr software, hardware and perhaps insufficient configuration.
Plus we should ask why Photoshop team can accomplish a lot more than the Ai team?
Do you really think? I don't feel that way at all. Beyond the fact, that the Photoshop team is at least 5 times as large as the Illustrator team, but the program also has a 5 times as large user base (everyone uses PS in one way or the other) and thus may be 5 times as complex to maintain, I don't really see how they achieve "more". Photoshop suffers from the same problems as AI - it's based on an outdated concept of how image processing should be done and is full of legacy features, half-finished "new" features that have just been plugged on and serious frakk-ups. You know, I could start from A and go to Z and come up with an issue for every letter. The most remarkable ones that immediately spring to mind being the network printer issue that plagued CS3, which is unforgivable, to the OpenGL stuff introduced in CS4, that often doesn't work or imposes silly limitations like things becoming awfully slow with a given number of images open. It's great when it works, but I can understand anyone who would want to send gift-wrapped hand grenades to some of the developers when it doesn't. They do some things right like trying to get rid of modal dialogs and using panels instead, but they do just as much wrong with those same panels and many other features.
Regardless, in the end, there is only one truth here: On balance, PS just works for a majority of the clientel and for a vendor of commercial software that is the decisive factor. The same can be said for Illustrator and that pretty much covers all the options. We can discuss this for a month and not come to a solution that will satisfy all sides. You just have to learn to live with it. It's their loss if they don't listen and, on the other hand, we're off the hook when something goes wrong. Still, it doesn't stop me from filing bugs and making noise in some places and that is the one thing I would ask you to do as well: Retain your critical attitude toward these things, but try to to be a bit more constructive and not so quick to judge. You won't get anyone from Adobe to confirm or deny any of this officially, but they surely monitor these forums and take notes. If phrased properly, they will listen.
Mylenium
P.S.: For more on software development, also check my ponderings on my personal blog like this for instance.