Question about Illustrator APIs

[goins073]

Context: I'm looking at this page: https://developer.adobe.com/illustrator/

I'm not an Adobe developer but I'm attempting to determine how or if it is possible to use the Adobe APIs with our project.

We have an app in development that is basically a document editing app. Users sign up, upload an .ai / Illustrator file. It's reformatted into an XML file, then an editor is presented to the user on the frontend so that they can edit designated text areas of the document (formerly a .ai file, now an XML doc).

Does anyone know if something like this is possible with Adobe products or services? (APIs, scripting, etc) or at least who or where to look? We're considering reaching out to knowledgeable Adobe developers for consulting, but we're researching the problem first.

[Rick E Johnson]

Are you intending to parse the AI document without running Adobe Illustrator? You can use c++ in a plugin or JavaScript to communicate with Illustrator whle that file is open, but I know of no way to use it, say, a PHP environment.

[A. Patterson]

Reading an Illustrator document is quite difficult. There are no public
APIs for doing so available from Adobe. Three is a free library that can do
it, but does not support versions newer than nearly twenty years ago. They
was a proprietary library that could do the job about fifteen years ago but
I don't know if it still exists, and even if it does, it was very
exprensive ($25k/year).

Bottom line is that using the Illustrator format as a payload is very
dicey, maybe not even possible.

[Manan Joshi]

Well as already mentioned if the task is to convert ai document into XML without using the Illustrator app, then the task is very difficult because the format is proprietary. However, if you intend to use Illustrator for this task then you would be better suited to use the scripting SDK and you should be able to achieve much of what you want, for cases that you are not able to handle you can go the C++ plugin route as mentioned by @Rick E Johnson.

Another thing to keep in mind is that if the product is envisoned to be an automated solution where an ai document upload to a website etc would trigger the converion to XML automatically then I think you would be in violation of the terms of subscription. InDesign surely does not allow this type of automation and requires one to buy InDesign Server. So please clarify this point as well before commiting to the solution.

-Manan

[hhas01]

As others have noted, the .ai file format is proprietary and nasty, and the AI licensing terms do not allow running it on a public-facing server.

A further concern: it sounds like you’re reinventing InCopy.

https://www.adobe.com/products/incopy.html

If you can share some details of your product, perhaps we can offer more useful advice.