Can't reopen Illustrator made PDFs

[rogeezer]

I've been saving PDFs with 'Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities' for years. Now when I do it, it's flattening the PDFs and not allowing editing at all. The PDF can just be imported.

It has totally ruined some of my complex files and I've lost hours of work.

Illustrator CC 2018 22.1, MacOS High Sierra 10.13.5, Saved on Harddrive

[Monika Gause]

Which file system do you have installed on your High Sierra?

Are you saving to a synched folder?

It looks like your files get corrupted when saving.

Please contact support, someone needs to have a look inside your system.

Contact Customer Care

You might also want to check your harddrive for issues.

[rogeezer]

I am syncing to a dropbox folder.

Customer Chat told me that I can only open the Illustrator PDFs in Acrobat.

My harddrive ist working fine, the same problem exists on my second computer.

[Monika Gause]

Please save to a non-synched folder.

There have been issues with Dropbox and other synching services.

[jane-e]

Illustrator was never meant to be an editor for PDFs.

Do you still have the original Illustrator files? Edit those in Illustrator. If you need to edit the PDF, the best editor is Adobe Acrobat.

[rogeezer]

If I would have the original Illustrator files, I wouldn't make such a fuss.

And since this is very new problem, I have to revisit lots of files from before.

[jane-e]

Hi rogeezer​

Please read this from Dov Isaacs​, written in February of this year. He explains the issue in this thread:

Re: Pdf vs Ai

[rogeezer]

Hi Jane

Well, I knew most of what Dov said.

The problem I have is, that I can't reopen a Illustrator PDF (which I saved with the «Illustrator editing capabilities»),

and which I made yesterday. All I can do with it, is importing a flattened pdf into Illustrator again, where it is not editable at all.

Maybe it was because I was saving it to Dropbox or maybe it was something else. I still don't know.

All I know is, that I have to rebuild the whole thing because of an fling somewhere.

[Monika Gause]

rogeezer  schrieb

Maybe it was because I was saving it to Dropbox or maybe it was something else. I still don't know.

All I know is, that I have to rebuild the whole thing because of an fling somewhere.

Please try saving to a folder that is not synched.

[Monika Gause]

jane-e  schrieb

Illustrator was never meant to be an editor for PDFs.

If the files have been saved with "Illustrator editing capabilities", then Illustrator should of course be able to fully edit them.