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by mistercow 4705 days ago
>Adobe has never produced an easy way for developers to work with the format.

That's not entirely fair. Adobe has openly released a comprehensive description of the format which is, as far as I know, accurate. The problem is that the format itself is a heap of features piled on year after year with apparently no regard for doing things consistently.
3 comments
meltingice 4705 days ago
The file spec released by Adobe (http://www.adobe.com/devnet-apps/photoshop/fileformatashtml/) is actually outdated, wrong in some places, and can be incredibly vague at times.
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Zev 4705 days ago
I can't speak to its accuracy, but, June 2013 wasn't yesterday. It isn't that old -- and it isn't like there's been a release of Photoshop in the past month and a half, so, it seems pretty recently updated.
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ricardobeat 4705 days ago
recent publish date != up-to-date content
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ejstronge 4705 days ago
A bit off-topic, but is there a spec for Illustrator files? It seems the only one I see on Google is from an old version of AI...
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TheZenPsycho 4704 days ago
As noted, newer illustrator files are just PDF's (perhaps with extra data for editing).

Older illustrator files are in fact, EPS files. This is somewhat tricky since, an EPS is not actually so much a data format as it is a turing complete programming language. Sooo... yeah, who knows what black magic they did to pull off reliably reading and writing it.

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gcr 4702 days ago
You can read an EPS file by interpreting it and remembering the shapes it renders on the page.

You can write an EPS file by emitting your list of shapes without using the turing-complete features of the language.

Not that hard, at least conceptually.

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TheZenPsycho 4701 days ago
That's all fine and good at least up until you have to kern a line of text. Then what?
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kellysutton 4705 days ago
Not yet, but there's always next week...
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scardine 4705 days ago
Some AI files can read as PDF (try to rename them and see if your reader can open it).
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6ren 4705 days ago
joke: Legal wanted to open-source it, but was vetoed by Engineering.

But seriously, this kind of back-compatibility horror is the hallmark of success, where success means enduring.

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bluedino 4705 days ago
Similar to a Word .doc? Who's worked with both, is it Better, or worse?
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