GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 311990
Adobe Illustrator (.ai) PDF support issues
Last modified: 2017-09-28 04:01:52 UTC
previously discussed with Bryan Clark on IRC Adobe Illustrator format (.ai) Drawings use PDF internally since Adobe Illustrator 10 (at least) and older versions used an EPS based file format. If you try to open an AI document in Evince you will probably get a message telling you this document was not saved with PDF compatibility information or standard boilerplate instructions to that effect. Essentially Evince has already done most of what it should do. Only a few very minor tweaks are needed like making sure .ai files are not excluded from the file chooser list. There isn't anything else I can think of really at the moment but if anyone asks if Evince can open Illustrator file it will be nice to be able to say "Yes, ... well um sort of ..." :)
Yes. Xpdf can show illustrator files just fine, so there should be support for this somewhere. Is this perhaps a poppler request? KPDF doesn't do illustrator files either. Or should it be EOG that opens illustrator files? As a sidenote - GIMP opens .ai files just fine, but renders them to pixels. Not sure how useful that code would be, just figured I'd mention it while I was sending out this spam anyway ;-)
At the moment all I'm really asking for is a file type entry in the file chooser for "Adobe Illustrator".
Well, me - I'd like full support of the Illustrator file format(s). But yeah, getting the basic things like opening PDFs referred to as AIs in first is a good thing too!
Are you really sure we need to add entry "Adobe Ilustrator" to file chooser drop down list? Probably just add application/illustrator to pdf format mime types?
not sure what you mean but this feature needs to be visible, it needs to be clear to users that Adobe Illustrator PDF files (.ai) can be opened in Evince.
*** Bug 551993 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I've downloaded a test file from here: http://www.freepik.com/index.php?goto=2&k=illustrator&isCat=1&isKeyword=1&type=1&vars=1&is_selection=1 called "Watercolor-butterflies-background". The only hard bit in handling Illustrator files is that the files, with the same suffix, are either EPS files or PDF files depending on the version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Illustrator_Artwork And those use different backends. So some creativity will be needed to add the support, but it should be pretty straight forward.
Created attachment 355989 [details] [review] backends: Add support for Adobe Illustrator Add the application/illustrator mime-type as supported if both the PDF and the EPS backends are available. If the appdata information for the backends is used to split off the plugins, we'll recommend using the PDF backend, as it's the one supporting the most current, post-2000, format.
To test out both the old and the new formats, rename the .eps file mentioned in comment 7 to ".ai". Both could be opened when launched by nautilus, though I've not tested the thumbnailer due to my current development environment.
Just to keep in mind: if evince migrates to Meson, an update should be needed. Nacho has a wip branch somewhere ready to be used, AFAIK.
(In reply to Germán Poo-Caamaño from comment #10) > Just to keep in mind: if evince migrates to Meson, an update should be > needed. > > Nacho has a wip branch somewhere ready to be used, AFAIK. I'm pretty sure this change is smaller than porting to meson, meaning that I would expect him to add this feature to the meson build, rather than me waiting for the meson port to land...
I agree. I did not mean to wait until the meson build lands nor that you should fix something that has not landed yet. I meant just as a note to not forget, but better is adding Nacho to the Cc :-)
(In reply to Germán Poo-Caamaño from comment #12) > I agree. I did not mean to wait until the meson build lands nor that you > should fix something that has not landed yet. > > I meant just as a note to not forget, but better is adding Nacho to the Cc > :-) Definitely ;) Thanks!
I have not worked on evince at all, I ported libgxps to meson and that is on master already. If you need any change on libgxps then I am the guy otherwise check with Carlos.
Review of attachment 355989 [details] [review]: Ok
Attachment 355989 [details] pushed as 6de5bfd - backends: Add support for Adobe Illustrator
*** Bug 548767 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***