Opening Illustrator from Mac to PC

An Illustrator file is an Illustrator file. It does not matter which platform it was created or modified on.

If the document contains fonts, just make sure the fonts are installed on both computers.

If you use Illustrator CS for Windows then you'll have the best luck in a cross-platform situation. You should leave your file as a native Illustrator file rather than saving as EPS so that you can keep all your editing options available.

Because you save your file as EPS, this doesn't necessarily mean that it's fully editable in any editor on Windows.

Working back and forth between platforms isn't a good practice unless you have full control over both machines. You'll run into small differences that may or may not be noticeable, but most of all fonts may not translate well between the platforms unless you have compatible Mac and Windows versions.

Hope this helps! bill

1 GHz Powerbook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.4)

Probably your questions are better answered in an Illustrator forum rather than here in a Mac/Windows forum. Adobe's website would be an excellent place to continue your research.

I can say with a reasonable amount of confidence that fonts will probably be your biggest issue. While you may have "Arial" on both your Mac and Windows systems, they may not be identical versions; the metrics for each version may be different because they're from different foundaries or they were produced at different times. This may produce different kerning and lines of text may wrap differently. (While I don't have any experience with OpenType, you should look at this as an option. The same OT font files can be used on both Macs and Windows.)

As far as the files themselves are concerned, you'll find that a "CS" file on Mac is almost (if not exactly) the same as a "CS" file on Windows. You may run into some issues if your versions of Illustrator vary (say from CS on Mac to CS2 on Windows).

Hope this helps! bill

1 GHz Powerbook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.4)