Being able to work with Adobe Illustrator files in Inkscape (workaround)
Hello, I would like to share something that I have found extremely helpful,
before I migrated completely to linux I had adobe illustrator and photoshop etc. But then I left window because of all its problems and now I use linux exclusively.
The problem that I had faced in the past was whenever I had to use drawings I had made in adobe illustrator cs and obviously because of format differences I couldn't open them with inkscape. Well today I was excited to have found a workaround to this problem.
before I continue you will need to have the program called GIMP installed in addition to Inkscape
Here is my solution:
1) Go to the folder where you have your adobe illustrator file 2) Right click on the adobe Illustrator file and choose to open it with GIMP, this will cause GIMP to load 3)GIMP will ask you a few things via a new window you, if you know what you are doing feel free to modify them if not you can just click ok 4) Once the file loads in GIMP you can go to file-->Save AS, then type the name that you want and change the extension of the file to JPEG. After you do that click OK 5) when you click ok GIMP will notify you that it needs to export the drawing, go ahead and slide the quality to 100% and click ok 6) after your drawing has been converted to JPEG open up Inkscape and go to --->File-->Import bitmap, then browse to the folder where the JPEG file is stored and click open. This will then place your drawing in the INKSCAPE program. 7)When you have the drawing there you can use the Pen tool in Inkscape to trace over your artwork once you are done you can discard the imported JPEG and save your file as native inkscape file.
As you can see this solution requires some work to be done but hey, at least you are able to use your Adobe Illustrator files and not panic about not being able to open them like what happened to me in the past.
I hope this helps, if some one else has an easier solution feel free to let me know.
Also maybe the developers of Inkscape can ask the ones who develop GIMP to see what sort of converter they use to be able to open Adobe Illustrator files.
On 2007-July-10 , at 23:18 , chacmool wrote:
[...] I hope this helps, if some one else has an easier solution feel free to let me know.
Also maybe the developers of Inkscape can ask the ones who develop GIMP to see what sort of converter they use to be able to open Adobe Illustrator files.
Illustrator files are basically PDF files with some extra stuff for editing (a bit like Inkscape SVG files are SVG files with some extra stuff for editing). Therefore, any PDF converter should be able to process at least some of it. I tried some files with pstoedit and some went through quite well. Furthermore, Inkscape has an AI import filter which should allow you to open at least some AI files. The extension is written in Perl so you need perl on your system (but you probably have it already). There is even a python replacement in the patch tracker if I remember well. All this should allow you to get the information in vector form directly, rather than retracing over your old drawing. Another solution your your purpose is to install use Illustrator via wine or any other windows virtualization software on linux and to save all your AI files to svg for futher use in Inkscape. A quick one- liner terminal command to locate all of them: find /home -name *.ai
I hope this helps.
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/
On Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:06:39 +0200, jiho wrote:
Furthermore, Inkscape has an AI import filter which should allow you to open at least some AI files.
Personally, I've not had good luck with it. Unfortunately, the files themselves are internal-use only files, so I can't share them to improve the filter (which bugs me no end), but I believe all of them are either AI 10.0 (which I run under VMware when I need to) or CS3.
Jim
Ok, I appreciate everyone's reply to my posting, I am getting some good ideas here as to how to make things more efficient for me. I have tried using the ai.svg filter to import Adobe Illustrator files before but I havent had any good luck with that. Some one told me that importing adobe illustrator 8 and under files was much easier and they didnt lose their attributes (layers etc.), but after AI 8 adobe started using a pdf type file format and that made converting alot less efficient.
Jim Henderson-4 wrote:
On Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:06:39 +0200, jiho wrote:
Furthermore, Inkscape has an AI import filter which should allow you to open at least some AI files.
Personally, I've not had good luck with it. Unfortunately, the files themselves are internal-use only files, so I can't share them to improve the filter (which bugs me no end), but I believe all of them are either AI 10.0 (which I run under VMware when I need to) or CS3.
Jim
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On 7/10/07, jiho <jo.irisson@...155...> wrote:
Illustrator files are basically PDF files with some extra stuff for editing (a bit like Inkscape SVG files are SVG files with some extra stuff for editing). Therefore, any PDF converter should be able to process at least some of it.
In fact, I expect that our PDF importer, currently in the works based on libpoppler, will import _most_ of modern AI files (CS, CS2 etc). They are standard PDF as far as I know. The libpoppler library grows out of xpdf, so you can just install xpdf and try it on your AI files. In my testing, it was able to display all of the PDF-based AI files I have without any problem. And this means these files will soon be directly importable into Inkscape.
some went through quite well. Furthermore, Inkscape has an AI import filter which should allow you to open at least some AI files.
That filter only works on very old PS-based AI files (up to version 7 I think). Also it is very limited, unmaintained, and probably broken. I think we'll just drop it as soon as we can import modern PDF-based AI files via libpoppler.
Hi,
I think the best way to migrate from Illustrator to Inkscape is to save the artwork as SVG in Adobe Illustrator (if you still have access to Illustrator). Make sure you export to plain SVG without the Adobe extensions.
The way you describe using Gimp with transforming your vectors to a raster and then vectorize it again sounds a bit complicated and you certainly also loose the structure of your file (layers, groups) which is preserved using the SVG way.
Inkscape also has an ai.svg import filter. I haven't tried that, maybe it helps to preserve even more of the original file structure?
Andreas
Hello, I would like to share something that I have found extremely helpful,
before I migrated completely to linux I had adobe illustrator and photoshop etc. But then I left window because of all its problems and now I use linux exclusively.
The problem that I had faced in the past was whenever I had to use drawings I had made in adobe illustrator cs and obviously because of format differences I couldn't open them with inkscape. Well today I was excited to have found a workaround to this problem.
before I continue you will need to have the program called GIMP installed in addition to Inkscape
Here is my solution:
- Go to the folder where you have your adobe illustrator file
- Right click on the adobe Illustrator file and choose to open it with
GIMP, this will cause GIMP to load 3)GIMP will ask you a few things via a new window you, if you know what you are doing feel free to modify them if not you can just click ok 4) Once the file loads in GIMP you can go to file-->Save AS, then type the name that you want and change the extension of the file to JPEG. After you do that click OK 5) when you click ok GIMP will notify you that it needs to export the drawing, go ahead and slide the quality to 100% and click ok 6) after your drawing has been converted to JPEG open up Inkscape and go to --->File-->Import bitmap, then browse to the folder where the JPEG file is stored and click open. This will then place your drawing in the INKSCAPE program. 7)When you have the drawing there you can use the Pen tool in Inkscape to trace over your artwork once you are done you can discard the imported JPEG and save your file as native inkscape file.
As you can see this solution requires some work to be done but hey, at least you are able to use your Adobe Illustrator files and not panic about not being able to open them like what happened to me in the past.
I hope this helps, if some one else has an easier solution feel free to let me know.
Also maybe the developers of Inkscape can ask the ones who develop GIMP to see what sort of converter they use to be able to open Adobe Illustrator files.
-- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Being-able-to-work-with-Adobe-Illustrator-files-in-Ink... Sent from the Inkscape - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
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On Wed, Jul 11, 2007 at 08:02:05AM +0200, Andreas Neumann wrote:
Hi,
I think the best way to migrate from Illustrator to Inkscape is to save the artwork as SVG in Adobe Illustrator (if you still have access to Illustrator). Make sure you export to plain SVG without the Adobe extensions.
This has worked best for me. Illustrator does a horrible job on complicated files, but anything is better than trying to re-vectorize. Using GIMP to save to JPEG, even at "100%" quality is a very bad idea, as even at that level, you are getting files larger than a PNG, and still wasting time with a lossy compression.
Jeff
participants (6)
-
Andreas Neumann -
bulia byak -
chacmool -
Jeffrey Brent McBeth -
jiho -
Jim Henderson