On 8/20/07, jiho <jo.irisson@...400...> wrote:
As far as I know, recent Illustrator documents are the same: they are PDFs with additional stuff which make them easier to edit in AI.
Not quite. An Adobe AI file is a PDF which stores the page as PDF, but also in custom chunks stores the entire internal representation of the page in AI. The latter is not an enhancement over the former, but simply a second representation of the same data in a different format. If you change the PDF data in an AI file and import it back to AI, your changes will be lost because it will use its own representation from the same file. They call it a "dual path" format.
Same thing with AI-created SVG: they store the entire AI-specific internal representation as a binary PGF chunk.
Apparently, Adobe is not as careful and efficient as Inkscape team!
Certainly. "Dual path" is a terrible idea. On one hand, it's understandable, because there was simply no other way they could make their AI file formats standard-compliant in 2000, with such an old and convoluted piece of software as AI. But on the other hand, all standards in question are also controlled by Adobe, and they certainly could have handled it better if they started trying earlier.
