As a lot of you have heard, CS4 versions of Adobe's Creative Suite apps have been tested with Snow Leopard and the few problems we found were mostly minor. For more a whole lot more info and perspective, read John Nack's post "Adobe Snow Leopard FAQ"
This entry on Infinite Resolution is meant to give you a bit more specific information about Illustrator. We have done extensive testing of CS4 on Snow Leopard, as well as a shorter set of tests with CS3. Although we certainly have not done the exhaustive tests with CS3 that we would need to do in order to say that we officially support this configuration, I can tell you that for the most part both CS4 and CS3 versions of Illustrator work well on Snow Leopard.
So, what problems have we found that you should know about?
- Both .ai and .eps files saved from Illustrator open with Preview instead of Illustrator, until you tell the OS to use Illustrator for the file types. See this KB article for more details.
- Saving files to a server through SMB protocol may cause crashes. This looks like it is not specific to Adobe applications. See this KB article
If any new information surfaces, I'll update this blog to let you know.
Thanks for the information. Feeling much better :D
so, what about the broken ability to record new layers in actions?
its been broken since the advent of CS4, when will Adobe be kind enough to look into this?
or are we supposed to wait until CS5?
There seems to be several issues online with CS4. I have had problems with illustrator. It opens but crashes when you try to open a file. AE just won't open. A lot of people can't get Photoshop to work right, but mine works fine. Its my Ai and AE...I wonder what the problem is. I've tried almost everything.
Since Leopard introduced Spaces I have split up all my applications into their respective "space". Illustrator and all my other CS3 items are in Space 4. Flicking between Applications now will not take me onto an Illustrator Space 4, it will just keep the window in Space 1.
Sadly let down by this as the ability to flick within seconds to other space was fantastic when there is lots going on. Can't believe this ability has gone wrong. It's fine with all the other apps (as they are tested I guess and work fine)
Another VERY annoying issue I've just come across using Snow Leopard and Adobe CS3: In addition to Illustrator .eps files opening in Preview from the Finder... when an .eps file is placed into InDesign, you are able to click on the pencil icon in the Links palette, which jumps automatically to opening the selected .eps file in Illustrator. This allowed for quick, "real-time" updates to the file. Once you re-saved the changes in Illustrator, when you went back to the InDesign document, the image updated automatically (as opposed to having to manually update the link in the Links palette). Major time saver.
Now, when I follow these steps, the .eps opens in Preview, which does me no good. I have to manually locate the file in the Finder, open it in Illustrator, make the changes, then manually update the link each time in InDesign. When working with a document with tens or hundreds of images, this is a MAJOR time consuming task.
Please fix this!
NOTE: The process above works the same way with native .psd files, and apparently has not been affected by Snow Leopard. .psd files still open in Photoshop as they should, from InDesign. It's only the .eps/.ai files that are seemingly affected.
Well Dan, according to Apple, this is the way it is supposed to work and not something that Adobe (or Apple) should fix. There is a workaround that should work for you - locate the eps in the finder and do Get Info. Under Open With, choose Adobe Illustrator and click the button Change All... Now Snow Leopard knows that you want to open eps with Illustrator, and hopefully the whole workflow should happen the way you want.
Hey, IR, that's a great workaround, I just did it, and see that the .eps icons in the Finder are now Illustrator icons...
However, I'm skeptical about the "this is way it's supposed to work, according to Apple" thing... First of all, when I did the workaround you suggested, I got this prompt:
"Are you sure you want to change all your Adobe Illustrator CS3 documents to open with the application “Adobe Illustrator CS3”?"
Uh, yeah, why WOULDN'T I want a file created with a particular program to open with that program? Sure, sometimes there are exceptions, but most often, I want the file's native app to open it. I'd think this would be the default.
Secondly (and maybe this is less Apple than Adobe, but I dunno)... the 'pencil' button in the Links palette loses about 50% of it's usefulness, if Illustrator files aren't going to open in Illustrator... I just don't get why that wouldn't be an "automatic", with Apple and Adobe working so closely together.
But, regardless, I"m just bitching needlessly now. I MUCH appreciate your tip, IR! Very helpful. Cheers!
We've recently transitioned from G5s to Intel Macs, and unfortunately we're forced to run Illustrator CS4 in Rosetta mode. Turns out that Host-Based Separations act differently between PowerPC and Intel. Here's what I've found:
Create an RGB document. Add a shape and fill it with a spot color (say, Pantone 123). Next, add another shape element and give it a fill of RGB 255,255,255 (pure white).
Here's where the problem comes in. On a G5 Mac, go to the Print dialog and select Host-Based Separations. Below, you'll see that only Pantone 123 will be output.
On an Intel Mac, the output will include CMYK as well, even though there are no elements that will separate out to CMYK.
You can eliminate this problem by running Illustrator CS4 on an Intel Mac using Rosetta PowerPC emulation, but obviously this is not ideal. I'm hoping that there is a fix for this, because it's a show stopper for our workflow.
For all the talk about CS4 and SL issues, there are at least two improvements in Snow Leopard and CS4:
-built in quicklook support for .ai files. which I really appreciate. In Leopard you needed to buy a plugin from a third party to get this.
- Spaces works with application frames turned on. In Leopard, if you wanted to use the (infamous) CS4 application frame and assign a CS4 app to a specific Space... well, it was ugly. If you were in a different space then the one assigned to the application Spaces would switch back and forth between the space you were in and the assigned one endlessly. Now: it works.
@tartansparkle: In the Spaces system preferences there's a checkbox to "switch to a space with open windows for the application". Have you unchecked that? Because Spaces switches for me.
I am annoyed with Snow Leopard & Adobe in that the "Print to PDF" function was taken away in CS4. Now I have to go through many more hoops to get a multiple page PDF.
Is there any chance this will be corrected?
I had never experienced CS4 crashing until I installed Snow Leopard - now it crashes all the time.
My big question is for us hold outs - the impoverished ones that are still managing our work load with CS2...are the CS2 apps going to crash if we move to Snow Leopard...or is so old that no one cares...but me?
I read all sorts of threads about issues with compatibility, but I rarely see anything mentioned about the problem like the person above. I too have issues with crashing, when I am just opening a small graphic file (perhaps an online banner) that I created on my 10.5.8 system the other day. I am now running 10.6 on my new Mac Pro that arrived yesterday (clean install of CS3) and Illustrator crashes all the time when opening a JPG file. It gets very frustrating, especially when Adobe says there is nothing wrong, and this same issue happened on my iMac that I upgraded to 10.6 the same day it came out. :(
The following is copied directly from Adobe's own site. Yet using "save as", a habit I acquired back in the days of Illustrator 88 save file bloat, and the save fails in a from time to time way!!! How can the following comment be trusted if the most important function of the software, saving a file, fails. My work around is to save frequently, more frequently than under any other version of Illustrator that I have used. I have Illustrator CS4, CS2 and Illustrator 9 because my users range over all these versions. I have never liked how the CS versions have created their "legacy" versions of my ai and pdf files. (they number nearly a thousand maps) I fell that my comments will be ignored like most of the comments I have read in blogs about Apple SL and Adobe issues. I needed to rant somewhere and this is the place I ended up. Angus
Do Adobe Creative Suite 3 products support Snow Leopard?
Adobe has worked closely with Apple throughout the Snow Leopard development and testing process. Adobe has conducted its own additional testing of CS3 software on Snow Leopard and is confident that our CS3 applications will function as expected with Snow Leopard. Adobe did uncover some noncritical issues, which are documented in a Knowledgebase article.
We're still on CS3—just too bloody expensive to step up for five macs at the moment—and I got Snow Leopard thinking it might clean things up a bit. Had to reinstall Xpress (7.5—trying to go to ID before forced to Xpress 8), but this problem with EPS files opening in Preview is the greatest pain. I changed it so it opens them in Illustrator, but it doesn't appear to be able to differentiate between Illustrator EPSF and Photoshop EPSF, meaning you have to go to the finder to manually open them. It's incredibly retrogressive and one I can't understand why beta testing didn't resolve.