Slow Illustrator CS3

Hi. I just installed Illustrator CS3 (with other creative suite programs) on my mac (had been happily using Illustrator CS before) and have found that it is frustratingly slow when I do my work from drawing, moving items, colors, etc. even with the basic paths and objects. I have tried deleting unconnected printers and rebooting my computer but nothing seemed to work. Please help.

A few things that may speed up your Illustrator:
In preferences turn off "Font Preview" which will turn off the preview of fonts in the Type Menu (it does not effect how fonts preview in your working illustrator file).
In preferences under Display Performance move the slider to "faster updates"
Also in preferences AND System Preferences turn off Version Cue. If you are an independent designer or user working on your own (as compared to someone working in a studio with other users who all have access to the same files on a server) then you really don't need this.

Similar Messages

Very slow Illustrator CS3, Photoshop CS3 performance?

I'm using a MacBook Pro Core Duo 2GHz with 2GB of RAM installed, and I was reasonably hoping that when I installed the CS3 suite, it'd run like a dream.
I've found that when running Photoshop and Illustrator at the same time, with nothing else open but Mail.app and Safari, my MBP grinds to a halt for minutes at a time in mid-project. Switching between programs takes several minutes of beachball-spinning and stopwatch-running. It seems that performance degrades as I work: after working with large files, both programs are so slow as to be unusable until I restart them, or even my Mac.
My RAM is maxed out and I'm using a 500GB drive as an external scratch disk. I can't think of any way to optimize my performance... any ideas? Anyone else have this problem?

Im having the same problem on my MBPro Dual 2.4 17"! However I have had the performance issues before installing the latest Adobe suite. I too belived that purchasing the latest and greatest Apple Adobe guff, that I would have a seriously quick usuable workstation. To be honest I still get better performance from my Old 1.8Ghz G5 iMac with half the ram running the same set of apps. I also have set up for my clients (another studio) 3 brand new Intel iMacs and surprise surprise they too are not kicking the dual G5's they replaced. I hate to say it but I have recently been working on a combination of both my 1.2Ghz WinXP Athlon machine and old iMac and had a far better workflow than waiting for the MacBookto get its act together! Maybe Intel really is not the way to go, as I have also found the Core Duos to NOT multitask very well either! Apple I will never be buying a new Mac again, and don't be surprised if a 17" MacBook Pro ends up on eBay very soon! Jay please let me know if you have found some kind of solution, as running one app at a time (as suggested in a prev post) is not really what we shelled out the $$ for!

Illustrator CS3: Very Slow Open, Very Slow Save

Hello all,
I just recently have been issues with Illustrator CS3. Up until about a few weeks ago, it had been running flawlessly. Now, whenever I try to open up any EPS or AI, Illustrator will literally take at least a minute to open it. This happens with a complex 2mb AI files, but also for a tiny simple files consisting of a 1" square on a blank artboard. No matter the file size, it will take around a minute to open it up.
Opening a 44kb .eps: 75 seconds
Opening a 210kb .ai file: 67 seconds
Saving a 76kb .eps: 56 seconds
Export to grayscale PNG: 66 seconds
Export AI Layers to SWF Files: 2 seconds
This is ridiculous.
Saving is the same issue. It takes a ridiculously long time to save even a blank document.
It's not my machine (2x2.66ghz Intel Mac with 5gb ram, OSX 10.5.6). Photoshop feels a little sluggish too, but not to this extent. InDesign, Flash, Dreamweaver, Acrobat all run perfectly. I even uninstalled all the CS3 products and reinstalled to find the same issues. And now that I've been given a time sensitive job, I need to get this program running quickly again.
I'm not sure what I can do to solve the problem, aside from trying to reinstall OSX and start fresh. Any and all help is appreciated! Thank you!

Well, I reinstalled Mac OS X before even trying those methods. It was less of a hassle than I thought it would be. Solved the problems with Illustrator. Everything is running fantastic.
But, I was just working in Photoshop, opening about ~20-30 small PNG's at a time to resize, grayscale, etc. I opened up about 60 at once to make things go quicker. They all opened up, with a little bit of lag. Now, if I even try to open up 10-15 PNG's at a time, they load very slow, like the problem I was having before with Illustrator...
Is there anyway to reset some memory settings? Or clear some cache? I believe this is what caused my issues with Illustrator before (opening too many files at once.)

Illustrator cs3 very slow saving

I use illustrator cs3 and for some reason it has become ridiculously slow to save files. If I export to some other file illustrator is very fast, but saving takes 1 or 2 minutes. I have turned off version cue and pdf clipboard settings, but didn't help. I'm working on XP machine.

It appears that many have viewed this question, but know one has a solution. I do have an update. I uninstalled CS3 completely from my "C" drive and defragmented all drives on my computer. I then reinstalled CS3 on my "D" drive. With a fresh start I then loaded both updates to illust cs3 which is now version 13.0.2. Extremely slow saving problem remains, however exporting to a .png works like a charm. Seems alot of people coming here for answer, but no luck. If I stumble on anything I'll return.

Illustrator CS3 will not open! Please help!!

I've been using illustrator CS3 all day (no problems since I installed upon purchase over a year ago) and this afternoon illustrator crashed. i tried to open it again and nothing. it brings me to the illustrator screen saying "initializing" and then nothing. the icon stops bouncing and my hard drive races like it's about to explode. i've done every fix that's out there (including the version cue update fix), ran Tech Tool Pro, repaired my permissions in the disc utility, made sure everything is up to date, cleared all caches and still nothing. i've deleted over 5 gigs of stuff from my hard drive to make more space for Illustrator and am now running with 30 gigs free. still nothing. illustrator starts up in the dock, the CS3 screen comes up, gets to "initializing" and then the icon stops bouncing in the dock and the hard drive races. i'm at my wits end. can anyone help?

Weird the EXACT same thing has just happened to me. Funny I did almost the exact same things you did before looking up in this forum. Have uninstalled and then Reinstalled. My Photoshop works but also discovered my Indesign doesn't work. I never installed the Version Cue thing because I had problems with that in CS2. Other things seem to be running really slow, I use a great spam program called spam sieve that has also been crashing. My Leopard boot disc won't read for some reason so am going to try to reinstall system files tomorrow once I can borrow a friends disc. Did you ever get it back working? what did you do.

Illustrator CS3 crashes after Yosemite upgrade

I have just upgraded to Yosemite on my 2010 Mac book pro. Everything seems to be running ok, slightly slower but ok, the main issue I have is that Adobe Illustrator CS3 has stopped working. The rest of the Adobe creative suite works fine - Photoshop, Indesign etc but not illustrator. When I first launched the app after the upgrade I was asked to install a Java upgrade which I did, I then re-launched Illustrator, and it tried to update, but a message came up stating - could not connect to internet...no internet connection, the initialising window opened and looked like it was going to work but it froze and I had to force quit. Now it doesn't get passed the initialising window and just doesn't open. I have cleaned the font cache and I have started my Mac in safe mode, illustrator works in this mode, but when I start up again as normal it still doesn't work there. I have tried to find the preference file in users so I can delete it but I can't find this file and not really sure if this is what I need to do to get it working anyway! I have reinstalled the Java update but this has not helped. Sadly I don't have the installation discs so am unable to uninstall and then re-install the Adobe Suite. If anyone can give me help I would be very grateful! Just now I am very frustrated and wish I had never upgraded! Thanks in advance, and thanks for taking the time to read my post.

Found a solution and posted it here: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1610653?sr=stream
I also had problems with Adobe Illustrator CS3 and Yosemite. After the upgrade I installed Java for OS X 2014-001, as suggested by others. This seemed to work (sometimes) but when I opened Illustrator for the 2nd time it failed to open. Illustrator opened without crashing, but it did not show any menus, if I opened an .ai file the file did load and show on the screen, but I could not click on the window (unresponsive). Essentially this made Illustrator useless. I tried the following:
Re-installation
Install Java for OS X 2014-001
Cleaning font cache
Checking permissions
Installing other versions of Java (both JRE and JDK)
Nothing seemed to help. Until finally 15 minutes ago I found the solution by accident:
Open System Preferences > Java
Wait for the Java Control Panel to load
Open Adobe Illustrator (while keeping the Java Control Panel window open)
You can also make a launcher with AppleScript to automate the process:
tell application "System Preferences"
    activate
    set current pane to pane "Java"
end tell
tell application "System Events"
    repeat until exists process "Java Control Panel"
        delay 1
    end repeat
    quit
end tell
delay 2
tell application "Adobe Illustrator"
    activate
end tell
tell application "System Preferences" to close every window
do shell script "killall java"

A familiar 'Illustrator CS3 on iMac G5' problem?

Hello folks,
I should possibly post this on the Adobe forums too, but I'd like to cover the 'hardware' angle here first.
I'm a graphic designer. I've been working on a multiple-page newsletter in Illustrator CS3 (granted, I should normally use InDesign CS3, but I had to stay with Illustrator for this particular assignment). Each page is on its own layer and the entire document has character and paragraph styles applied to its type.
The problem is it's taking absolutely AGES to format any type. Any action, from applying a style to even deleting a single space takes no less than 3 to 4 seconds. You can only imagine how frustrating this is! (not to mention the amount of time I'm seeing eaten up...)
Yesterday, some layers seemed to respond faster than others, but today all were identically slow. Each page is a simple layout with just one image and one block of text - so it's not even a heavy/complicated file. I have lots of unused RAM left when working (over 1GB unused as I check on the iStat widget), so no issue there. However, I notice the fans become louder and the CPU is maxed out at about 95% usage when performing these tasks!
How can this be? Is there anything I should do to 'optimise' either the application or the system itself? I'm not sure if this is a hardware or software issue at present.
Does anyone recognise a pattern here from similar experience? Any advice would be most helpful.
Thanks much.
Steve.

Boot up from your System Install Tiger DVD & run the repair disk/permissions options.
You may also wish to do the following if your fans are still running louder than usual.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301733 iMac G5: How to Reset the SMU (iMac G5, the iMac G5 (Ambient Light Sensor), and the iMac G5 (iSight)).

Does anyone know where the pictures are for illustrator CS3

Hello Everyone,
Does anyone know where the pictures are that they use in the tutorial of illustrator CS3? I am new to the new illustrator and want to follow along and learn how to use the program.
Also is illustrator CS3 going to be discontinued soon, because once I get something it becomes discontinued

>Also is illustrator CS3 going to be discontinued soon, because once I get something it becomes discontinued.
http://store1.adobe.com/cfusion/store/index.cfm?store=OLS-US&storeRegion=US&nr=0
(Caution: unnecessarily bloated, slow-loading site)

Problems with line widths smaller that 1 pt in Illustrator CS3 in Spanish

I am asking this for a friend who doesn't speak English; I don't work in Illustrator and don't even know the program. She is using Illustrator CS3 in Spanish under Windows XP Service Pack 2 also in Spanish in a machine with 4 GB RAM and 500 GB HD. As in many non English speaking countries, the decimal separator in Spanish speaking countries is the comma (,), not the point (.).
Her problem is related with applying line widths smaller that 1 pt using the dropdown list of values. Values smaller that 1 pt appear in the list with a point, not a comma, as separator: 0.25 pt, 0.50 pt and 0.75 pt instead of the expected 0,25 pt, 0,50 pt and 0,75 pt. This wouldn't matter at all; the problem is that trying to apply any of these values resuls in 1 pt wide lines. She has made a video (less than one minute) that explains the situation much better than I could do:
http://es.tinypic.com/usermedia.php?uo=AE87RzhYHCdn5HPHtpPkoA%3D%3D
Curiously, if she introduces values by hand, they are accepted in these two forms: 0,25 pt, and 1/4 pt, and applied correctly, both showing as 0,25 pt (not 0.25 pt).
Of course she can introduce values by hand every times she needs thin lines, but this is a wokaround, not a solution to her problem. Which is aggravated by the fact that she constantly has to use the thiner lines.
In desperation, she reinstalled Illustrator CS2, where the problem does not exist and everything works as expected. But she needs the new features in CS3.
I apologize if this is a known issue with a known solution, but I couldn't find anything about it in the FAQs, and after a couple of searches and wading through several pages of the topic list of this forum.

Back to report. I suggested to my friend to try Jacob's idea first, as it was the easier and fastest. However, I also suggested a small change, due to the following. As the dropdown list was already showing points as decimal separators, I thought it might be better not to change the language. I suggested instead to customize the settings for numbers in her chosen Spanish, changing the decimal separator from the comma to the point, and the thousands separator from the point to the comma.
She has just reported that she changed the language from Spanish to English, and then back to Spanish; and then she customized the separators as I had suggested. That did it; with this change, she can apply the smaller widths using the dropdown list, and she is so happy with her success, that she isn't going to try James's suggestion for the time being, although she may do it later on.
By the way, my friend lives in another country and we are communicating through the Forums in Spanish. This explains why communications have been very slow, and also why I don't know if she shifted from Spanish to English and back to Spainsh because this made no difference, or for some other reason. In any case, she asked me to thank very heartly Jacob and James for their help.

Batch won't run unless Illustrator CS3 is active window?

I'm hoping someone can help me out with this as it's driving me nuts. Basically I'm trying to batch an action I made in CS3 to run on about 700 illustrator files.
Everything runs just fine and dandy until I switch from Illustrator to another program (Firefox, photoshop, bridge, anything other than illustrator), once illustrator is no longer the active window, the batch process stops. When I make illustrator the active window again, the batch starts again. This worked perfect in CS2 and I never had this problem until CS3.
This is a huge pain as I can't work on anything else while keeping the batch running in the background.
Here's the nitty gritty details:
XP SP2, Illustrator CS3, smoking fast machine
Action was created in actions palette to do the following:
Unlock All > Select All > Create Outlines > Convert to Grayscale
Ran the batch via the actions palette, choose "Save and Close" and "log errors to a file".
I've restarted Illustrator, restarted the machine, recreated the action, broke the folder into smaller folders with less files. It's making my Tuesday feel like a Monday.
I've search all over and found nothing. There was one post here on the adobe forums, but it was from October and it never got answered. If you have a solution you will be my hero!
Thanks!

Yes, I have absolutely seen this! At our office we batch process Illustrator files to JPEG very frequently, and it's a huge nuisance to have Illustrator block the system during the batch processing. Everyone here is on XP SP2 as well, and we all have this issue. In fact, trying to switch in and out of Illustrator while it's batching can cause the application to crash fairly regularly for us.
I can confirm that the Mac version of Illustrator CS3 does *not* have this problem, as I am batch-exporting right now with Illustrator in the background on my Mac. (Mac OS X 10.5.2, Illy 13.0.2)
A fix for this would be most appreciated, Adobe!

Tablet PC calibration error in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator CS3 whilst in Extended Desktop Mode

Hey everyone!
I've run into a snag which hasn't bugged me before because I never used a second monitor, but now that I do, Photoshop and Illustrator don't function properly.
I am running my Adobe products on my Lenovo X61 Thinkpad Tablet, which is Wacom PenEnabled. It's got the basic digitizer pen and pen pressure features, no stylus tilt or anything.
Whenever I run Photoshop or Illustrator in Extended Desktop Mode so I can have a different window open on my external monitor and the Adobe app on my tablet screen, my stylus goes strange. It seems to think that the extended desktop is part of the Adobe window, so when I move my stylus to draw, the cursor will appear on the external monitor, usually proportionate to the size of the screen...ie. It interprets the external and tablet screens as one desktop and the top left corner of my tablet screen is the top left of my external, whilst the bottom right on tablet IS the bottom right on tablet, if that makes any sense...sorry.
So I can't draw anything in photosho unless I set it back to standard desktop mode, or mirrored desktop. I've searched over the net and these forums and I can't find a fix for this. I was walking in harvey norman the other day and the Wacom Cintiq 12" was there on display, and it had the same issue with extended desktop and photoshop.
Has anyone had this issue before and/or does anyone know of a fix for it? I'll keep searching around and playing with the computer until I fix it and I'll post any solutions I find here if noone else has one.
My system details are:
Abobe Photoshop CS3 10.0.0
Adobe Illustrator CS3 13.0.0
OS: Windows Vista Build 6001, Service Pack 1, 32bit
RAM: 2GB
HD: 18.2GB free Disk Space (out of 66.3GB on the Active Partition)
Video: Intel GMA: Mobile Intel(R) 965 Express Chipset Family

I'm using an HP tx2011au tablet pc, using adobe flash cs3 and have the exact same problem. it becomes decalibrated only while the flash window is open, and only while flash has a file open, and only when using an extended desktop. even if flash is open and it has no files open it works fine.

Adobe Illustrator CS3: Fatal error during installation

Hello,
I just bought the AI CS3. It installed OK on my friend's laptop (windows). However, when I clicked the big button in the installation:
"Install Adobe Illustrator CS3"
A window showed:
Initializing Adobe Illustrator...
Then I got a message:
"Setup has encountered an error and cannot continue. Contact Adobe customer Support for assistance. Fatal error during installation".
I've tried several times. My computer meets all the requirements (it's a really new and faster PC). And there's no old versions of AI on it yet.
Can anyone help? Thanks!!!

Do you have any other Adobe products on your computer? When I installed CS3 on my Mac, I kept getting failures. After contacting Adobe, they told me I had to delete ALL other Adobe products -- including Flash and Adobe Reader. Plus, I had to do searches and delete any support files associated with them. It took hours!

Snow Leopard prints pdf in other colors than the Illustrator CS3 design

2 days ago I installed Snow Leopard. Yesterday I tried to print an Adobe Illustrator CS3 document that I made into a PDF. My logo which is gradient aqua and yellow prints grey, black and red. It appears fine on the screen and prints fine as an AI document. I emailed the document to my husband as a PDF and he also just installed Snow Leopard. The email pdf shows the proper colors but it prints in the same weird grey, black, red for him as well. All our old documents from years back which have my logo print in this wrong color combo. I spoke to Apple today and I printed a random Safari photo doc ( a zedonk, zebra donkey, check her out)! saved as a PDF in the proper color combo. We installed a graphics update for Illustrator but no resolution. It appears the problem might be the pdf file sent through Snow Leopard can't read the colors. Help!

Try printing the PDF with Adobe Reader
<http://get.adobe.com/reader/?promoid=BUIGO>

Copying objects from Illustrator CS3 to FreeHand 11.0.2

Working on a Mac in OSX 10.4.11, I was able to select and copy objects in an open Illustrator CS2 file and paste them into an open FreeHand 11.0.2 file, where they would be fully editable. After migrating to OSX 10.6.2 and upgrading to CS3, this no longer works - the objects selected and copied from Illustrator either do not appear (only corner indicators are visible) or a pale version appears as an uneditable low-rez image with funny colors....
Because there are so many missing features in Illustrator, it's important for me to be able to work back and forth between the two apps. Has anyone been able to achieve this (formerly) simple interactivity?

I got the following post from Danny Haas:
If you go to Edit>Special>Paste Special and then select AI/EPS from the list
it should paste just fine. It works well for me.
Worked for me too, although text was not imported as editable text. To do
that had to special paste the text separately as unformatted text, and then
reformat in FH.
From: Judy_Arndt <[email protected]>
Reply-To: <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:19:27 -0700
To: PETER AGOOS <[email protected]>
Subject: Copying objects from Illustrator CS3 to FreeHand 11.0.2
I skipped AICS3, but now use AICS4 for some tasks.
The only solution I've found is to save the AI CS4 file as AI 8, open that
in FHMX and copy from there.

illustrator cs3 crashes upon launch in mac os 10.4.11

illustrator cs3 does not complete its launch in mac os 10.4.11.
[i'm running a powermac dual 1.25 ghz power pc g4 mirror door].
the same happens with indesign cs3.
photoshop cs3 launches just fine.
can anyone help?
thanks.

You might try trashing the settings folder.
It could be a font issue or a font cache issue as well
to trash the settings folder you go to
User/Username/Library/Preferences/Adobe Illustrator CS3 Settings
The font cache that could becuasing the problems would be found by doing a search for AdobeFnt.lst they usually have a number after Fnt like 01 or 11
They can be trashed and new fresh ones will be made but this could be a corrupt font.
This is a bit old but you might look at this as well. But you have an older system so it may apply.
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/167/tn_16763.html

Slow Illustrator CS3

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