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Support for Adobe Illustrator files

Dave Van Brunt

I was asked by someone if XPP supports native Adobe Illustrator files.  After looking at the documentation and not seeing .AI files as a supported graphic type, I had told the person no XPP doesn't support them.  A couple of days later I get an email from him saying just for fun he tried to enter an .AI file and that it appeared to work just fine.  To my surprise indeed it did show up!  

In looking at the job folder, it appears the AI file got converted similar to how SVG graphics do?   

So my questions....

  • What's SDL's official stance on this?
  • Are AI files officially supported?
  • Is it OK to begin using them as new content is authored?
  • Are there any dangers going down this path?
  • Should the XPP Documentation be updated?  

Thanks everyone.

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    Hello Dave,

    I think I will be able to answer your questions as far as the XPP product itself.

    XPP does not really care what filename extension is used for an image file being used with XPP.

    XPP does not go by what the file extension is when determining the type of image file. XPP "peeks" at the beginning of the file contents to determine what type of image it is and then handles it according to that determination.

    If you look closer at the XPP documentation, I think you'll see that it doesn't talk much about image filename extensions but talks about "types" of images that are supported.

    I'm not familiar myself at all with the Adobe Illustrator .AI files, but if these Adobe Illustrator files are (always) a "valid" SVG image that satisfies the XPP requirements and limitations for SVG images then they should work fine with XPP. But I myself don't know whether that is always the case with these Adobe Illustrator files.

    And given all of that I don't think that there is any XPP documentation that needs to be updated for this.

    Hopefully that answers your questions and concerns.

    Jonathan Dagresta
    RWS Group/    XPP Development

  • 0 in reply to Jonathan Dagresta

    This is what wikipedia has to say about the .ai format:

    Adobe Illustrator Artwork (AI) is a proprietary file format developed by Adobe Systems for representing single-page vector-based drawings in either the EPS or PDF formats. The .ai filename extension is used by Adobe Illustrator.

    The AI file format was originally a native format called PGF. PDF compatibility is achieved by embedding a complete copy of the PGF data within the saved PDF format file. This format is not related to .pgf using the same name Progressive Graphics Format.[5]

    The same “dual path” approach as for PGF is used when saving EPS-compatible files in recent versions of Illustrator. Early versions of the AI file format are true EPS files with a restricted, compact syntax, with additional semantics represented by Illustrator-specific DSC comments that conform to DSC's Open Structuring Conventions. These files are identical to their corresponding Illustrator EPS counterparts, but with the EPS procsets (procedure sets) omitted from the file and instead externally referenced using %%Include directives.
  • 0 in reply to Bart Terryn

    I  went to the trouble of creating and saving a illustrator file (using CS6) and here is the option box you get when you hit the save as ai format:

    Note that you can save with or without the option "Create PDF compatible file".

    In both cases you AI will be a PDF file.
    So if you look underneath the hood at the saved file you will see the following header:

    %PDF-1.5
%âãÏÓ
1 0 obj

     And as Jonathan explained, XPP does not look at the extension but it will look at the file header, so things will get imported as a PDF file
    (which is correct as an .ai file is a PDF file).

    Also nice to know is that if you change the .ai extension to .pdf, you will get a normal PDF file that you can open with Acrobat Reader for example.
    (well more or less normal pdf file as it contains the illustrator info as meta information inside the PDF).

    And if you do this with an .ai file that is saved without the PDF compatible option, you get the a PDF with the following content: