One of the things that "made" the Mac was the early adoption and intentional facilitating of PostScript and vector graphic programs in close cooperation with Adobe. Early Mac printers were essentially PostScript based, and the early Adobe graphics programs that were available for Mac computers gave them "vector graphic" tools not readily available to PC users.

The few "vector graphic capable(?)" programs available for PCs essentially had to convert everything to "bitmap" or other "raster graphics" fromats in order to print. Most PC programers took the easy way out and provided a skeletal conversion from vector to raster formats, but used raster/bitmap formats as the "native languages" for their programs. Exceptions were "expensive" by PC users' standards.

In extremely crude terms, on a Mac you could "draw a line or a curve" while on a PC the best you could do was "paint a row of adjacent bits." The difference is perhaps a bit subtle, but it gave early Macs a very real advantage in graphics - and especially in "artistic" graphics.

Early PC versions of programs that Adobe developed originally for Macs and "ported over" to PC were more or less successful for PC users, but the emphasis probably should remain on the "less" side unitl fairly recently.

Recent versions of core Adobe programs have been pretty much rewritten for PCs, so that there now is very little difference in functionality between the two platforms. In some cases the PC versions appear to offer a bit more than the Macs can get, although familiarity with the system an individual chooses can pretty much wipe out any arguable superiority on one side or the other.

Adobe Illustrator appears to be one program that carried a lot of Mac code over, with add-on interpreters/translators (known technically as "Band-Aids") in the PC version(s). It may someday get a "ground up" rewrite for PCs, or that may have pretty much been done in the latest PC version(s); but PC versions I've seen thus far are a bit "clunky" on a PC. AI was never intended as a general purpose graphics editing program, and should be used with the rest of the Adobe arsenal or with appropriate other programs unless you are a "one method artist" and the limited range (and usability) of products it produces are all you need.

All personal opinion, of course.

The inverted AI images, with normal .jpg, suggests an Input/Output driver/.dll may be corrupted or missing in AI. Separate utilities, essentially like printer drivers, are used for each exportable format in some programs, or a single I/O routine may call different .dll scripts depending on which format you ask for. An unexpected result for one format, when other formats are normal, suggests this kind of problem....

If you actually have a .jpg of the image you want, AI probably isn't the "program of choice" for adjusting it. You might be able to get resizing, cropping, and some brightness/contrast/color fixes out of the multipurpose printer/scanner's bundled software more easily than from AI.(?). Personally, I'd probably use Photoshop Elements for anything of this kind.

John