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New Member requestiong help


Britt

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Hello brilliant people. I have almost zero knowledge on what this forum presents. I hope to find a person whom can help me with a very big problem. I haven't a clue where to start, so I guess telling my story would be the best place.

My name is Britt. I make hand made all natural skin care products. I use my own computer generated labels for my products. My Husband always made my labels for me on his MAC, printed them out for me to cut and apply to my products. There are approximately 200 different labels on his computer, printed back and front. They also have my logo on them.

Well, he passed away almost 3 weeks ago. I have never touched his MAC before, only use my own little laptop myself. I found all my labels on his computer made in Adobe Illustrator, but can't for the life of me figure out how to open them. He did them in HTf files. I've tried about all the programs in the *open with* options. Plus he was a MAC geek and it appears he has multiple MACs or versions of them, hooked to a single monitor. He has 2 Apple towers connected to it for sure.

I live on top of a mountain in a very rural area, there is no one around I can ask for help. If I was looking for help on how to skin a deer, plenty of help with that. But, not computers.

I need to keep my little cottage business going, and all my labels are sitting there, but I can't open them. Please help me, if you can. I'm sorry I bring no knowledge of my own to your forums.

Thank you for taking the time to read my introduction.

Britt
 

IamSam

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Hello Britt and welcome to PSG.

First off, my condolences on your husbands passing. This is a unique request and I hope one of our members can step up and give you a hand. It may take a while to get some answers/help, so hang in there!
 

Tom Mann

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My condolences, as well. I'm sure this is a tough time for you and your family, and the last thing you need right now is having to deal with a technical problem like this.

I am not a Mac guy, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I Googled {htf file type} and found very, very few hits, none of which sounded likely.

This suggests that you may have found some files whose names might be the same as your products, but they were not the files you actually need. Perhaps they were some sort of intermediate / working version that he used.

Since you know he used Adobe Illustrator to make your labels, you might get lucky if you simply open AI on the computer he used the most, and then click on "open recent files" under the file menu. You may find some relevant sounding file names. If you do, click on one to open it. If it is relevant to your labels, to find out where this file is stored, click on "Save as" (again, under the file menu). This will show you the path to the location of the file and the file format he preferred to use (eg, *.AI, *.pdf, *.eps, *.svg, etc.) to save your files. Write down this information, and than click "cancel" to get out of the "save as" dialog box without making any inadvertent changes.

Next, navigate to that location, and see if you can find the rest of your files somewhere nearby.

This approach is a bit of a long shot, but if it works, it should lead you almost immediately to the mother load, LOL.

There is a chance the above procedure the above procedure led you to a temporary working directory, and when he was done, he moved files from the working directory to a permanent storage location. If you suspect this is the case, enter the same file name in the search box in "Finder". After a possibly long wait, this will tell you if there are any other instances of that file on the computer. One of these locations may lead you to the "mother load" of files in a format that can be read by AI.

Please let us know how this worked.

Best regards, and again, I'm sorry for your loss.

Tom M
 
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Tom Mann

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Hi Larry - Yup, I also found that link, but even if her husband did use FileViewPro to manage his images, and this is a file from that system, say, a thumnail, unfortunately, it still doesn't help the OP. That's exactly why I said, "...you may have found some files whose names might be the same as your products, but they were not the files you actually need...".

If the "open recents" method that I suggested doesn't work and she really gets stuck, she can always do a brute force search in Finder for each of the common Illustrator file types. I'm sure that one of them will be the type her husband favored and she'll find a whole cluster of files in that format. If she gets lucky, he might have saved them all as PDFs which wouldn't even require her to learn how to print from AI -- she could just print from Adobe Reader. Hopefully, he put more than one label on each page.

Best regards,

Tom
 

ALB68

Dear Departed Guru and PSG Staff Member
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As I said. Tom, I don't even see an option in Ai to save as, import,export or open that file format. It is logical that he first saved his work as an ai file or one of the other few formats that Ai can save. Since I don't use a Mac and only have knowledge about PC's I am at a loss. If it were a PC I would suggest using the old DOS wildcard characters (*.*) and do some searches for all ai files or other and see if anything rings a bell. But, this method probably doesn't work with a Mac so is of no help if that's the case.

Hi Larry - Yup, I also found that link, but even if her husband did use FileViewPro to manage his images, and this is a file from that system, say, a thumnail, unfortunately, it still doesn't help the OP. That's exactly why I said, "...you may have found some files whose names might be the same as your products, but they were not the files you actually need...".

If the "open recents" method that I suggested doesn't work and she really gets stuck, she can always do a brute force search in Finder for each of the common Illustrator file types. I'm sure that one of them will be the type her husband favored and she'll find a whole cluster of files in that format. If she gets lucky, he might have saved them all as PDFs which wouldn't even require her to learn how to print from AI -- she could just print from Adobe Reader. Hopefully, he put more than one label on each page.

Best regards,

Tom
 

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