Daily Archives: 3rd September 2010

Adobe Illustrator CS2 [pt.1]

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So, you’re finding that Adobe Illustrator and OSX 10.4.7 or .8 on an INTEL Mac just don’t live well together. Here are a few things to help that difficult situation:

NOTE: Always have a complete backup before you do any of this!

1/ Turn off Appearance in the Window Menu.

2/ Delete your Illustrator Preferences by:

The first step in troubleshooting most any problem is deleting your Illustrator Preferences file.

The Preferences file is created or updated every time you use Illustrator, and it can often become a hidden source of problems. To delete this file and force Illustrator to create a new one, follow these steps:

Make sure you have the serial numbers for any third party plugins for Illustrator – the numbers will need to be re-entered after deleting prefs

Quit Illustrator

Find the Illustrator Preferences file using the following steps:

i) If you are running Mac OS X, you should delete your preferences folder from your particular user account. You can find the Illustrator preferences in this folder, using the “Go to Folder…” command in the Finder: ~/xxxxx/Library/Preferences/Adobe Illustrator CS2 Settings

ii) Delete the Illustrator Preferences file for the version of Illustrator that is causing problems.

Launch Illustrator, entering any necessary plug-in serial numbers.

iii) Immediately quit Illustrator without opening any documents. Documents can often times be the culprits for corrupting the preferences, especially since Illustrator does not write out new preferences until quit.

iv)Restart Illustrator.

3/ Close the Paths Window, permanently.

You can work around the crashing by not ever opening the appearance palette, or at least by always closing it before you quit, so it won’t be open on the next launch.

WINDOW MENU APPEARANCE or Shift F6

4/ Use Font Fingler and clean all your font Caches:

Font Finagler

5/ Close any fonts not required for each job, using your font management application; Extensis Suitcase, FontDoctor, Font Manager or LinoType FontExplorerX:

https://www.linotype.com/fontexplorerX
https://www.extensis.com
https://www.extensis.com
https://www.apple.com/macosx/features/fontbook/

6/ Also ensure you DO NOT have the following ticked in the Illustrator Preferences for:

File handling & Clipboard:
Untick – Enable Version Cue
Untick – Copy as PDF
Quit Illustrator and Restart

7/ Repair permissions on your Mac using the Disk Utility application the Restart you Mac again.

/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility

8/ On iMacs, Mac Pro and MacBooks we have found that many of the problems seem to be with Ram access. Though most of this hardware has a maximum memory of 2 Gig, even this amount of Ram makes no difference as the memory does not appear to ‘purge’ correctly for some Adobe applications. Only a full restart seems to clear the memory buffers. Perhaps this is a Rosetta problem at the moment?

9/ Clean out your System Caches. Here some a good utility apps to do that:

Tiger Cache Cleaner: https://www.northernsoftworks.com/
Cocktail: https://www.maintain.se/cocktail/

Finally, if you have upgraded to 10.4.8, like we did (and many others), you will get less crashing if you downgrade to 10.4.7 by doing a complete Archive and Install.

It will not stop the crashing but it will lessen the amount of times Illustrator crashes, if that’s any help. You will of course have to do all the OS X Software Updates to 10.4.7 and update your Applications again if needed.

OS X Server – WebDAV SetUp

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WebDAV can be great, not just for shared OS X iCAL Calendars, but (with OS X) as a virtual directory that users can use all over the world. Like having an AppleShare volume on your Desktop that you can drag and drop, delete and rename files and Mac OS X Server can help.

My investigations started when a client asked “how can we share a folder between multiple offices?”.

My first thought was FTP, but this was going to involve too much additional software and the upload /download practice was not what they (or their skill base) wanted. They wanted, essentially, an AppleShare volume on their desk when they were out of the office, anywhere in the world.
Ultimately a VPN over a DSL line would be great! But we have a budget to deal with here and leased lines, VPN routers and the Admin is not available in this clients request.

My second thought as a solution was a single .Mac account where users could login to the same .Mac account. But so far this does not seem possible, .Mac is for a single user (I believe, correct me if you found otherwise).

Not that you could easily find an answer! The OS X Server manual, Helper app or Forum did not have the answer for novices. Apple has some Tech notes here:https://www.apple.com/support/macosxserver/webtechnologies/ But this was not really in ‘novice speak’.

So, finally, WebDAV seemed to be the solution, and here’s how we did it with OS X Servers easy to use interface as detailed by Apple.

01/ Launch the Server Admin application.
02/ Select Web Service.
03/ Click Settings.
04/ Click Sites.
05/ Double-click the website definition you want to edit.
06/ Click Options.
07/ Be sure the checkbox for “Enable WebDAV” is selected.
08/ Click Realms.
09/ Create a new Realm by clicking on the plus (+) button.
10/ Add users to the new Realm.
11/ Be sure the “Can Author” checkbox is selected.
12/ Save the changes.
13/ Restart Web Service.
Note: Check the permissions on the document root for your web site or on the folder(s) in question. The user “www” must have read and write permissions for Owner and Group for the WebDAV connection to work properly. Update the permissions if necessary.

Some of the logic that we learned along the way…

1/ WebDAV serves ‘documents’ over port 80 on your web site, so, you need to have your web site setup and working first (I’ll cover that in another blogg) and ensure that WebDAV is turned on.

2/ Each folder that you WebDAV share on your web site will be a Realm. You can simply accept that ‘Realm’ means ‘Folder’. So make a Realm in your web site and give it a folder to protect.

3/ You need to set users or groups who can access this ‘Realm’ or ‘Folder’.

4/ It’s really an OS X version of .htaccess meets FTP.