Wow!
PDF and AI import works perfectly. (You need to rename *.ai to *.pdf, for now). Very impressive. I imported several complex book covers and other stuff. Everything looks as it should. Granted I don't have complex AI files with fancy features like gradient meshes, so it needs more testing, but for my simple files it works excellent - or at least the result _looks_ excellent.
It even reproduces all text in the original font... although not as text. Each letter is a clone of a path sitting in <defs>. So it's not editable as text - but still it's vector, and it looks absolutely flawless. I think we should preserve this as an option even after we add a more correct text handling (converting it to <text> using SVG fonts embedded in the document).
Now, Inkscape is officially no longer a toy application. This opens up huge perspectives. Now all we need is the equally good PDF export... (Hi cairo :)
Some problems:
- It indeed crashes when you try to open a *,pdf file from command line. From Open or Import dialogs, however, it works.
- It only imports the first page of PDF files. That's reasonable, but ideally I would like to see an "import options" dialog where I could select the page
- PDF files are not listed in the open dialog when you select "All images"
- It imports gradients as a stack of many overlapping shapes. Again, this _looks_ correct, but I would much prefer to see that converted to regular SVG gradients. Unlike fonts, Inkscape's gradient support is quite good. (Although, of course, this only applies to regular gradients; gradient meshes will still need to be represented by small tiles).