Over at #Inkscape, we are currently reverse-engineering the file format of Adobe #Illustrator so that we can natively read those files. We’re making good progress, but let me tell you…
.ai files are by a wide margin the most convoluted, confusing, redundant mess I have had the displeasure of working with.
But that‘s what you get when you have 40 years of historical cruft, with no conscious effort of maintaining consistency. We should not make the same mistake with our additions to #SVG.
Today‘s favorite discovery: it is mathematically impossible to place a radial gradient exactly at the corner of a rectangle in Illustrator.
The gradient is defined by its position (x,y) and its length l. But that’s not actually the radius of the gradient. To get that, you have to transform the rectangle to a 1x1 square centered at the origin, then measure the distance between (x,y) and the nearest corner and multiply with l to get the radius (then transform back).
Is the format Turing complete?
It seems most old formats have so much cruft added they get to that stage even if it's not intended 🫤
@simonzerafa the format was based on PostScript initially. It still looks like that superficially, but a regular PostScript parser would give up quickly.
So the answer to your question is probably yes, but luckily Illustrator doesn‘t use that functionality 😅
Ah! I was wondering! 😁
Good luck with your mapping the nether regions of that file format 🙂👍
@dflxh sure! I recently added support for HPGL, CGM, Afdesign (with Manpreet) and we haves new contributor which contributed an early version of a Vectornator / Curve import which we‘ll release with 1.4.1.
.ai support might be around for 1.4.2.
As always, do report all issues you find with those compatibility layers :)
@joneuhauser you might be familiar with this legendary comment about psd, or not, sharing it in case.
https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/master/XeePhotoshopLoader.m#L108
Jonathan Neuhauser
Nicco Kunzmann
Melroy van den Berg
Simon Zerafa
MostlyTato
Aleksandr Prokudin
Gabriel Pettier
📄 Mehdi.doc
mL
Ben Pfaff