Include Adobe Illustrator files (ai) with XeTeX

Question

Adobe Illustrator files are PDF compatible. That is a regular PDF reader, ex. Sumatra-pdf, can open and view them. I was hoping it would be possible to have xetex (with xelatex) and graphicx to include Adobe Illustrator files directly without having to go into Illustrator and save as a PDF manually. This would simplify my workflow and make it much quicker to make changes to figures in Illustrator and then compile the xetex document to see how it looks in the text.

Does anyone know if this is possible?

What versions of PDF are supported (is this determined by the graphicx package)? Are there other PDF importing methods?

Edit: in the .log there isn't much information:

File: image.pdf Graphic file (type QTm)
 <use  "image.pdf" >

I renamed it to .pdf from .ai, otherwise it won't work at all, however, the image doesn't appear in the document.

Edit 2: Here is an .ai file from the latest illustrator version (CS5) if anyone wants to play around: link removed

Answer 1

While it may be possible to trick XeTeX into accepting .ai-files from Illustrator I would recommend against it. The in the .ai-file embedded pdf document is using a higher pdf version than the standard version of pdfTeX in most distributions but you can adjust this using \pdfminoversion. Additionally the file is much larger and I am not sure if XeTeX would be able to throw out the unnecessary parts, so that your final document would also wasting lots of space.

Exporting it from Illustrator as a PDF/X files has worked nicely for me with many documents and helps you to achieve a final document which is close to PDF/X and won't give you any troubles with printing or different readers.

Answer 2

Just try the following lines. It tells Latex to treat files with .ai extensions like pdf files. My ai file calendar.ai was created with Adobe Illustrator CS3 and is PDF-1.5.

Update: I did a mistake. I tested it with pdflatex and lualatex not with xelatex. With xelatex it doesn't work.

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{graphicx}

\DeclareGraphicsRule{.ai}{pdf}{.ai}{}

\begin{document}
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics{calendar.ai}
\end{figure}
\end{document} 

Answer 3

I would try to use inkscape to convert ai to pdf -- something like this:

inkscape --export-pdf=file.pdf file.ai

If it'd succeed (it should, but "it may depend"), I would try to write a graphics rule, see here, for example: Convert gif image to png on the fly.

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

With the example file provided by s0rce, I get the same result in pdfLaTeX, LuaLaTeX and XeLaTeX by doing the following trick:

\documentclass[a4paper]{book}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{ifxetex}

\ifxetex
  \DeclareGraphicsRule{.ai}{QTm}{QTm}{#1}
\else
  \DeclareGraphicsRule{.ai}{pdf}{.ai}{}
\fi

\begin{document}
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics{example.ai}
\end{figure}
\end{document}

---

Note. The line \DeclareGraphicsRule{.ai}{QTm}{QTm}{#1} has been kindly suggested by David Carlisle instead of the more complicated

\makeatletter
\@namedef{Gin@rule@.ai}#1{{QTm}{QTm}{#1}}
\makeatother