Use of non-standard file extentions

[sylvisaker]

I am revising a script to perform a conversion of EPS files to SVG. It works great as long as the file extension is .eps. However, we use a different extention, both for scripting and individual graphic instance development. Is there a way to tell AI CS3 to recognize a non-standard file extension (like .snp) and treat it as it would a .eps.

[Larry G. Schneider]

You are probably going to have to make the files into EPS from the source program or print them to a .ps file for Illustrator to open. You will then be able to output them as desired.

[sylvisaker]

Larry - thanks. That provides insight. Actually, we are in general having trouble because it seems CS3 is determining the file type based on the file extension rather than by reading the file itself. This is problematic for our new SVG files as well as our legacy EPS. Do you know if there is a setting that somehow causes CS3 illustrator to recognize a file to be SVG even if it has a different extention. In our case we will want to use .ill.

[Larry G. Schneider]

It's an OS thing now. The OS and the applications all now read the extension to figure which application deals with a given file type. Have you tried to use Get Info on one of you SVG files with the .ill extension and setting Illustrator as the app to open this file type? You could this setting to tell the OS to open all files of this type in a certain application. The same might be true of the EPS files.

[storm371]

Steve:

As you can see the problems you're having I would highly discourage you from pursuing this course of action. (Especially if you vend files outside your company.) Why not just suffix your filename before the extension like "StevesFile_ILL.eps"?

[sylvisaker]

Jim - thanks for the advice. And we are thinking that we may need to implement a work around similar to your suggestion. Our problem is that we are part of a large organization with an IT department that needs to standardize things like file extensions. If we let the OS determine the application to associate with a given file extension we can have our little group of 100 users unable to do their work after an IT update that resets the owning application in error. For example instead of CS3 opening .svg files, all of a sudden it can be Firefox. Our preference is to not use extensions at all (as we do in the UNIX environment) but given that windows applications seem to rely on this method we have gone to non-standard extensions to lessen the chance of being inadvertantly stepped on. Not a big deal - just another Windows shortcoming. Before we "give in" I wanted to make sure that CS3 really could only determine it was working on an SVG file by looking at the extension (and ignoring the doctype definition etc).