http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/932487/gis1.png

On 10/24/09, gosha-necr wrote:

Hi friends! I don't know, is this right mailing list, but i think it is related to developers. I'm download icons from here http://iconeden.com/download/26/Bright.eps.zip and there are in .ai file. But with inkscape 0.46 on FreeBSD 7.2 i386 it cannot open this file.

Dear Гоша,

There are two reasons why Inkscape starting with 0.46 cannot open some AI files:

1. AI files were save by/for Adobe Illustrator v8 and older. 2. AI files were save with PDF compatibility checkbox off.

My advice would be to install UniConvertor and use it to convert AI to SVG.

Inkscape used to be able to open AI v8 and below files, but it doesn't because its extension system is not flexible enough to use two different handlers for the same file extension, and our AI import filter is based on poppler library which only deals with AI v9 and above.

Inkscape will probably never handle AI v9+ files saved without PDF compatibility, because AI uses closed proprietary file format which nobody cared to reverse engineer so far.

Alexandre