Illustrator no longer displays the white channel of a placed DCS/.eps.

Question

I should have spoke up sooner because I thought this would get fixed pretty quickly but I just upgraded to CS6 and it's still broken. I use Photoshop to generate color separations for screen printing. We do simulated spot process which means we print the prodomient colors of the image rather than gambling that CMYK will work. We print white because garments are often any color you can imagine. So I use the DCS.eps format alot. I place this linked in Illustrator. Up untill CS3 this worked fine. I skipped 4, but upgraded to 5. Five doesn't display the white channel. (These files are Multichannel mode, each channel is a Spot channel. saved as dcs/eps) I have not tried output. It may print fine. The thing is I end up with a client perched on my shoulder like a buzzard and if the white parts of the design or the white channel/screen isn't their to support the top/upper colors I look like I don't know what I'm doing, or I left the white out, etc. I've been in both offset printing and screen printing and T&T (trinkets and trash) for a long time. Messing up paper is one thing. Messing up an Under Armor or Nike or you name it garment is a whole different ballgame so they are pretty tense when it comes to what they see. I already have to explain that it looks pixelated and rough because it's an 8 bit preview but will print sharp.
What are the odds of getting this fixed? It worked like a charm for years (Illustrator 4 to CS3)
Any help with this would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Evidently, Illustrator is creating its own preview, rather than using the one embedded in the EPS.
Create a Multichannel file containing several spot color channels. Make the images of the various spot channels overlap each other. Select white as the color for one of the spot channels. Set each channel's Solidity at 100%. Save as DCS2 with 8-bit TIF preview.
Import the DCS2 file into Corel Draw. Select the Place As EPS option, and it displays the dithered 8-bit composite preview embedded in the EPS, and the spot white channel shows.
If you import the very same file into Illustrator, it's as if Illustrator interprets the content of the EPS (i.e.; a stack of grayscale images) and displays its own preview as if Overprint Preview were turned on. In other words, Illustrator's "preview" of the file seems to act as if you had:
1. Saved the DCS2 file as multifile.
3. Imported the individual grayscale separation files.
4. Applied spot color Swatches to them and set each of them to overprint.
5. Turned on Overprint Preview.
Illustrator knows nothing of individual ink opacity. So as Illustrator's Overprint Preview always does, the white image (being set to overprint) disappears. Note that's not the only difference. The other separation images also display as overprinting, so areas of overlap change color, despite their "Solidity" (opacity) having been set to 100% in Photoshop.
Pretty much the same thing occurs if you save as PS CMYK with spot color channels.
If you place the image (either the DCS or the PS) in Illustrator and print separations to the Adobe PDF virtual printer, you will see that the spot white separation does print, and its image overprints the other seps, as it should. The problem is getting a reasonable preview to show your customer. One way to do that is to print a composite PDF from Photoshop and place that into Illustrator, just to serve as a temporary preview for layout purposes.
I'm on Windows these days, so don't know if there are caveats on MacOS regarding "printing" to PDF.
Just more of Adobe's "cross application integration" of these CS bundles.
JET