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[gwpriester]

There seems some confusion between EPS and PDF.

As Jbruce indicated, his client wanted an EPS file so that his client could edit the file. If Jbruce sent the client an EPS file, the client may have her or his work cut our for him or her.

I created a document with a simple two color gradient fill and a short line of text in Georgia. I exported the document first as an EPS file and then as a PDF file and opened both files in Illustrator CS5.5 It might be different in CS6 but these were my results.

First I attempted to open the EPS file in Designer Pro X. I received the error message shown in the attachments. Xara it would seem is incapable of opening its own EPS file. And as the warning dialog indicates, it is a renderable EPS file and not intended to be edited.

I opened the EPS version in Illustrator and viewed it in Outline view. The text was incorrectly mapped and the simple gradient fill was broken into 256 individual steps. While a client could edit the colors in the gradient fill, it would have to be done one color at a time. If this EPS file were "placed" in a PostScript language application such as Adobe InDesign or Quark XPress, then it would output correctly to a PostScript enabled device. This is what the EPS file format was designed to do.

I closed the EPS and opened the PDF file in Illustrator. The gradient file remained a simple editable two color gradient and the text was the correct size and font and I was able to edit the text.

Conclusion: If you need to provide an editable file to a client, I would strongly suggest PDF, which is the basis for Adobe Illustrator's native file format and meant for a variety of uses including editing.

If my client wanted the image for commercial output, I would still recommend PDF.