Selection fields red?

[Rick]

Hello everyone! I'm new here and figured this might be a really great forum....I've got a question and I hope it's an easy one! I'm running on an XP here at work, ( My Mac is at home) and I finished up some simple line work and fills and saved the work then went home. Opened up the file this morning and started to work more on this project and when I selected a line segment to work on all the selection points and fill outlines turned a kinda of brick red instead of the normal blue color! This has happened before so I'd just delete the work and start over....well I can't keep doing that and need to figure out what's the problem. Now I'm not saying the colored fills and art work themselves turned red just the selection points and outlines. I'm using Illustrator 9 at this time. I've even tried shutting down the computer but that didn't do any good. Oh yes, some of the line art turned to really big pixels....so it looks funny. :mad:

[kazbear]

The color od the points and construction lines is determined by the layer options. Different layers can have different colors to help distinguish between them.

This is not a problem, but if you want to change it, go to that layer's options in the Fly-Out menu on the Layer Palette...

[Rick]

Kazbear, thanks for the help but I wasn't able to change the color. Everytime I'd open the layer pallet the computer would lock up. Now what is showing in the layer box is this.....it says Layer 2 but doesn't show a Layer 1. I tried to open up layer 2 to see what might be there but computer locks up everytime.

Another thing that I noticed about the art now is that there seems to be grouped areas that I didn't group lastnight and in every grouped area the line work and text is really pixel chopped looking. I was able to redo all the screwed up .ai so only lost around 14 hours if that. I saved a good copy to disk just incase tomorrow morning turns out the same.

[Rick]

Ok guys, I found out some thing else about these fields I happen across.....I did some work on another piece of art and saved it and it was fine. Then I opened it back up later to find that it grouped everything and I had all these linked blocks everywhere! Inside everyone of those linked boxes the art work and text is messed up to where I can't even do anything with it. I thought I could unlink these blocks but I can't get the unlink option to highlight.

I checked my preferences and but the linking option to Manual and maybe that will help in future works. Anyone with an idea on this let me know.

[kazbear]

Are you using Illustrator 9 in both cases, work and home?

[Rick]

Morning Kazbear, I'm using 9 in both places. I do have 8 still maybe 9 is the problem?

[kazbear]

I was just thinking if you needed to go from one version to another, sometimes artwork would have to be "Flattened" or simplified to the lowest common options. This was a real problem when AI 10 come out, since they changed the text engine.

But if you are not changing versions, then that should not be an issue. But you are going between Mac and Windows? I don't have enough experience with that to know if that could be causing any issues...