Help: Illegal Operand error. File will not open.

Jessica Allen

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Dec 2, 2002, 2:44:01 PM12/2/02

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Error Reads:

"Can’t open the Illustration. The illustration contains an illegal operand.

Offending operator: “M”
Context:

%
0 A
0 R
0.749 0.6784 0.6706 0.902 0 0 0 XA
0 1 0 0 0 Xy
0 J 0 j 6 w -- M
"

I saw a thread with a similar error, but didn't solve this in particular. Has anyone else encountered this one and have advice to recover the file?

Philip Peterson

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Dec 2, 2002, 4:06:44 PM12/2/02

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Sometimes you can use a text editor and do a search for the offending operator and delete the line without incurring too much problems.

Teri Pettit

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Dec 2, 2002, 5:08:22 PM12/2/02

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"M" is the miter limit operator, and the -- preceding it means "unspecified" (it stands for the numerical value that gets displayed as blank in a palette when you have objects of different values selected, such as two objects of different stroke widths or different font sizes.)

In a saved file, this value is only legal within "graph style change records", where it records that the user selected multiple graph components of different miter limits, and changed something that did not affect the miter limit, such as giving them all a stroke weight of 6 pts. (Which is what the "6 w" before the "-- M" means.)

On an actual object, it is illegal for attributes to have this "unspecified" value. (Objects with illegal attribute values generally get created in one of two ways: by bugs in the graph code, or by importing files generated by other software.)

To fix the file, you could open it in a text editor, and change the "--" to a legal value, such as the default value of 4, or simply delete the "-- M", and the object will inherit the miter limit from the previous object.

If you cannot open the file in a text editor because it is compressed, then first follow the steps described in these two threads:

Mordy Golding "Recovering Corrupt Files" 12/17/01 1:06pm </cgi-bin/webx?50@@.ef5b7af>

Teri Pettit "Recovering Corrupt Files In Illustrator 9.0" 9/28/02 10:45am </cgi-bin/webx?13@@.1de5ee82/0>

Jessica Allen

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Dec 3, 2002, 10:32:18 AM12/3/02

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Hi Teri,

I am able to open the file in notepad, but when I did a search to find "--", nothing came up with the "M" following it. I also tried to search "-- M" and found nothing at all. Is there something else I have missed or am not doing correctly?

Thanks,
Jessica

Jessica Allen

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Dec 3, 2002, 11:00:44 AM12/3/02

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Another question Teri...

I opened the AIPrefs with the text editor and also could not find "enableContentRecovery". I am using Illustrator 9.0. Is that why I cannot find any of the code you have listed?

Teri Pettit

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Dec 3, 2002, 2:17:30 PM12/3/02

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Jessica,

The "Context" section in an error dialog is taken verbatim from the file being opened, so if you can't find the "-- M", perhaps it is a different flavor of dash. Try searching for some other nearby text such as the "0 J 0 j 6 w".

I thought the enableContentRecovery Preference was in Illustrator 9, but I just checked and it was new for AI 10. But if you are able to open the Illustrator file in Notepad and it looks like decent text, it shouldn't matter anyway.

If you have a copy of AI 10 available, you can also open this file in AI 10 without doing anything at all to it. In AI 10 many of the illegal operand values, including miter limit, just get replaced with the default values when they are encountered on file Open, instead of causing an error.