As I mentioned almost exactly one year ago, Adobe approved a request to open source my Ai->Canvas Illustrator plug-in. Since the initial release of the plug-in in 2010, it has always been my intent to release the source code, but the Illustrator SDK EULA (and my time commitments at Juicy Bits) prevented me from doing so. I’d like to re-thank Tom Krcha, Anubhav Rohatgi, Rajesh Budhiraja, and Vincent Hardy (and everyone else behind-the-scenes at Adobe) for their help.
You can find projects for both PC (Win32 and x64) and Mac at the Ai2Canvas repository on GitHub.
While Ai->Canvas exports HTML5 canvas JavaScript commands, it’s also an excellent starting point for any kind of data that needs to be exported from Adobe Illustrator. My own XAML plug-in is out-of-date and incompatible with current SDKs, but this codebase provides a very strong foundation for a new version of that plug-in, if someone wanted to create it.
Unlike most sample code, Ai->Canvas deals with a majority of the internal Illustrator types (vector art, symbols, bitmaps, fonts, colors, gradients, transformations, etc.), and this fact alone means that there is a lot of reusable code hiding in there.
Finally, as a testament to its versatility, I’ve used an internal derivative of the Ai->Canvas plug-in (mentioned in a prior post on vector images) to export Objective-C Quartz2D code for my Halftone and Halftone 2 apps since 2010, though if you wanted to do something like this today, I’d just point you to Paintcode.
I hope that the release of this source code is useful to someone out there, and I’d love to hear what you’re able to do with it. Most of all, thank you for your patience.
Enjoy!
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