Adobe Illustrator AI file support (see also PDF)

[Bug Importer]

Hi pals
currently there is no support for AI files. being able to export and import
such a format would be of great help for whom would like to migrate to
InkScape and has a huge library in AI format

[Horkana-users (horkana-users)]

Originator: NO

Please try to avoid filing anonymous requests so we can more easily gather
follow up information if required.

see also comments in the duplicate report
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1613022&group_id=93438&atid=604309

> currently there is no support for AI files

there are some extensions which indirectly allow export to adobe
Illustrator formats. Since Adobe Illustrator 10 all AI files are a
special type of PDF. It is very likely that AI support will come out of
the new native PDF export so your help testing that work would benefit you
and other inkscape users.

please check through the tracker and help make sure this request is not
already covered by existing reports (beyond the fact that it should be
covered by the existing PDF work)

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Originator: NO

Upping priority on this one. We really need to have a better solution to
this than we currently have.

[Horkana-users (horkana-users)]

Originator: NO

We are increasingly seeing some of the downsides I warned of with this
extensions based approach (none of which were worth not doing it, just
knowing the downsides showed the need to be cautious and not oversell the
features). On the techincal side the approach is somewhat brittle but more
importantly people all too easily get unrealistic expecations, particularly
those well meaning evangelists who promote inkscape as having "support for
$FORMAT" without realising or simply not mentioning the many caveats (and
we have seen windows users expect features unavailable on their platform).

clearer disclaimers and perhaps encouragement to use particular
distributions which offer the best out-of-the-box experience could help a
lot (and maybe more users on our preferred development platforms will
encourage more developers/plugin writers/documentation
writers/contributors?)

this might be a duplicate report. this request asks for support but
without specifing either import or export, and ordinary users cannot
reasonably be expect to know AI < PDF and I dont even know quite how far
the relationship goes.
I didn't have time to check it as thoroughly as I might like, and
duplicating the new PDF output only with the file extension changed to .ai
might actually work (Microsoft Word largely ignores file extensions and I'd
try the same trick with Adobe Illustrator only I dont have a copy around).

Asking inkscape users to run a few tests could provide some very useful
insights.

[bbyak (buliabyak)]

ai and pdf are imported by 0.46

[Rygle (rygle)]

It's been a while, but I found the 0.46 ai import worked quite well.

Lots of formats currently can be imported using external dependencies, but this is not unique to one platform. I have seen lots of Linux users asking how to import formats because of dependencies too. Let's keep this discussion at a helpful level. I have had to learn that myself.

[Alex (alexf1man)]

The version of 0.47 I have isn't accepting .ai files