On Mon, 2014-05-05 at 11:25 -0700, mathog wrote:

Has anybody ever looked into what it would take to make Illustrator plugins work in Inkscape? Presumably there is some sort of Illustrator plugin API, and depending on what it does, it might be possible to build a compatible API into Inkscape.

I don't think it's possible. The API is a C++ kit which means all existing extensions are written a. for the targeted and specific operating system and b. for adobe illustrator.

If it were a scripting language like the photoshop plugins, it'd be possible to support. But with this sort of plugin architecture, it's really not possible to get for instance a windows illustrator plugin running on an Ubuntu inkscape install. In fact I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work for a windows illustrator install too.

I've only spent about an hour looking into this problem though.

Martin Owens

On Mon, May 5, 2014, at 11:25 AM, mathog wrote:

Has anybody ever looked into what it would take to make Illustrator plugins work in Inkscape? Presumably there is some sort of Illustrator plugin API, and depending on what it does, it might be possible to build a compatible API into Inkscape.

Well, the first issue is that the Illustrator plugin API is designed around Illustrator internals, so conceptually things are very mismatched. Additionally there are several different versions of the API, so supporting common third-party extensions might mean implementing support for several of those.

And finally there are binary compatibility issues. For windows the code needs to be built with very specific versions of MS Developer Studio. On OSX we have a little more freedom in that the required toolchain is not commercial, but there might be some complications.

So at the moment it does not really seem to be a feasible return on investment for implementation. Of course, sometimes in open source such difficulty might be seen by an individual as a challenge, so we can hope that one such person comes along. :-)