[Tex/LaTex] Include Adobe Illustrator files (ai) with XeTeX

graphicsillustratorpdfxetex

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

Best Answer

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.

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[Tex/LaTex] pdftex: Embedded pdf graphics not printed or partially printed

Something seems to have gone wrong with the export to eps. According to Encapsulated Postscript files, the first line should just be a version comment such as

%!PS-Adobe-2.0 EPSF-2.0

but in both of your files there is some trash preceding this. Open the files in a text editor and delete the trash. There is also a very large amount of trash at the end of your files. Everything that follows

%%EOF

can (and should) be deleted. If this doesn't fix the problem, I suggest eliminating Adobe Illustrator from your workflow. It is the work of Satan. You could convert the bitmaps to jpg or png format, include them directly in your LaTeX file, and use the picture environment to add labels as in this answer. This method has the advantage that the font used for the labels will automatically be the same as the font used in the rest of your document.

[Tex/LaTex] a good way to export part of an Adobe Illustrator illustration into latex

This answer is an Illustrator answer since I understand that is at least partially where your problems lie.

In illustrator you can set the so-called Artboard size. When you set the artboard size, everything inside the artboard "box" will be visible in resulting files. If you want a PDF of what is in the artboard box then simply "save as" PDF as usual. This way you can move your artboard box around and save each partial figure as a separate PDF-file for inclusion in your LaTeX document.

You can also save bitmap based graphics (e.g. PNG) using the "Save for web & devices" but when doing so you need to specify the output width/height in terms of pixels. The artboard box provides the same function in this case.

I should add I use CS5 but as far as I recall there should not be any significant differences.

Best Answer

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[Tex/LaTex] a good way to export part of an Adobe Illustrator illustration into latex

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