Using Illustrator .ai files in a Cocoa application [closed]

Question

I have a client inquiring about developing a Cocoa application that would open Illustrator files. How viable is this in your opinion? How closed is the format? I can't seem to find any useful information on Adobe's site.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Modern ai files are PDF files (CS3 thru CS5) with application specific comments. Adobe Illustrator will ignore the actual PDF data when opening an ai file and just use the comments it inserted when writing it.

Answer 2

Simply to open it? Quite viable. NSImage will load it as a rasterized image without blinking an eye. Treat it as any other supported image file when creating an NSImage instance.

If you want to be able to examine its internals (like layers, paths, etc.) and possibly edit, then I don't know of any open-source Objective-C libraries for doing this.