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I have a generated SVG file which for some reason won't open in Adobe Illustrator when I serve the file content from my ASP.net application, but if I were to write this generated file directly to the file system from my ASP.net application, the file opens fine!

I've put a zip of the two files here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1761973/Files.zip

The zip has two files:

  • Map.svg
  • Test.svg

Map.svg doesn't open in Illustrator, it shows up a Text Import Options dialog, and upon clicking OK, will show the XML content of the file.

Test.svg opens fine in Illustrator.

Doing a comparison of the two files yields NO DIFFERENCES whatsoever!

There must be something different in these two files (caused by downloading the generated SVG from the web browser), but I have no idea what?

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2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

One has an .svg extension, and the other is .SVG. Could be as simple as that.

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Believe it or not, that was the problem! So Adobe Illustrator can't handle uppercase file extensions! I've seen some stupid things before, but this takes the cake! –  user32707 Mar 30 '10 at 3:17
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In case anyone else comes across this, I was having a similar, but different problem where an uppercase extension caused it to import as text, but a lowercase extension caused the svg file to not load at all - no error message or anything.

In my case, I was loading a svg file created in Illustrator CS3 into Illustrator CS2. Opening the SVG file in a text editor revealed a bunch of CDATA blocks after the main data. Removing this data and saving the file again fixed the problem and Illustrator now loads the file.

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