I’m running into a frustrating issue with .ai (lllustrator) files that I export via Grasshopper using the Pancake plugin. I use Pancake beacuse I have a few hundred files that are then automatically exported within a given frame/scale/position to be used for an animation later on.
While my worlflows is basically doing what I want and need the problem is that the exported .ai files only open perfectly fine in Adobe Illustrator but that’s it. They seem to be incompatible with virtually every other tool I’ve tried.
Here’s what I’ve attempted so far:
- Inkscape: Fails to open the
.aifiles, even though it should absolutely support Illustrator files. - ImageMagick with Ghostscript backend: Throws errors about unsupported PostScript commands.
- Ghostscript directly: Also fails to process the
.aifiles, with similar PostScript-related errors. - Other Tools: They also fail to open and be used in After Effects, Photoshop, … directly making the
.aifile depeding on at least an Illustrator Batch process - which is my current workaround, but super slow.
So to sum it up I have to at least save them all once again via Adobe Illustrator (with the suffix [converted] to make the further pipeline work. There are just a few lines in each file and they only have a few kB in size so complexity should definitely not be the issue here!
Long story short, how can I get rid of my bottleneck? Afaik Pancake is solely using the native Rhino export/save functionality so I am raising this question to everyone who is using an .ai workflow with Rhino.
Any experiences on how to improve my workflow?