Files with .eps extensions - help please

[#1]

Where I work we have a PC with MS Outlook on it.
We get files sent to us which are probably made on a MAC and which have .eps extensions on them. We cannot open them (and ideed have no real need to) and we send them on to another e-mail address, where they have a MAC, and they work on them for us.
Now this all seems very simple, but somewhere along the route they seem to get corrupted. I can only think is is something to do with what we are doing, but as all we do is send them on I am at a loss.
Does anyone know if this is a common problem, and have any ideas??? Sending them direct is one option, of course, but not viable.....(for business reasons!)
Cheers
Philip

[#2]

best way to see if this is really the case is to zip them up first and see if the compressed archive gets corrupt, then you'll definitely know something is getting corrupt somewhere in transit and it's not a software issue.
it could of course be something really obscure like slightly different version or even the different word order between architectures - unlikely but certainly possible.

[#3]

I'm sorry to say this, but PC's can make *.eps files aswell as the Mac.
An eps file is usually created in Adobe Illustrator, which is a graphical design piece of software.
HTH, Spirit

[#4]

The first thing to note is that EPS files are actually just text files.
Macintosh uses carriage-return (CR) characters to terminate lines in text files. UNIX/Linux uses line-feed (LF) characters. And DOS and Windows uses a pair of CR-LF characters.
I know from experience that Microsoft email software has a nasty habit of modifying attached text files to its own format. So my guess is that LF characters are being appended to every line of text.
The best solution, as already indicated, is for the sender to first compress the EPS files so that they become data files and thus not subject to mangling by Microsoft email software. As an added bonus the files will be smaller.
Incidentally you can open EPS files if you have the right software. I use free image processing software called GIMP (www.gimp.org) which works with UNIX/Linux, MacOSX, and Windows.

[#5]

Hi there,
Are you forwarding the messages inline or as an attachment? Might be worth trying each method to see if that makes any difference.

[#6]

EPS format is for PostScript files, basically graphic files using vectors to scale output in PostScript software or print devices. Some fonts are also PostScript, and I recall a graphic designer I worked with having problems with emailing PostScript fonts a few years ago - they were arriving corrupt and unusuable. The solution, as everyone else has pointed out, is to zip the files, or much better to get the originator of the files to zip them.
I think the issue is, as Linux says, some part of the email process stripping or adding different line feeds. If you do compress the files, its also worth checking the preferences in the compression/decompression software, as some older programs (on the mac at least) used to offer options to similarly change line feeds on comp/decomp which would also wreck some files. If there are such settings, just set them to leave the file "as is".

[#7]

Quote from: Bob

Are you forwarding the messages inline or as an attachment? Might be worth trying each method to see if that makes any difference.

In my experience it never made any difference. When emailing text files from one Linux machine to another I always have to compress them to ensure they arrive undamaged.
Even if it did make a difference, you could never rely on any particular behaviour because email software is upgraded and replaced all the time.
I don't know what the email standards say on such matters, but in any case Microsoft are not known for their enthusiasm for others' standards.
As an aside, perhaps using a file transfer mechanism such as FTP would help here. FTP can send files as either text or data. When sending files as text, FTP does correctly translate the line terminations depending on the host operating system. In my experience at least.

[#8]

Another suggestion for you.  Try forwarding one from webmail instead of outlook.  That way you can rule out/in outlook as the problem.
Phil