@create-design/ai

Headless Adobe Illustrator interchange for create-design. The importer decodes Illustrator's native, revisable source program from modern .ai containers (or reads legacy direct Illustrator PostScript), parses a typed canvas-oriented AST, then lowers it into one validated DesignDocument hierarchy.

import { readFile } from "node:fs/promises"
import { importAdobeIllustrator } from "@create-design/ai"

const imported = importAdobeIllustrator(await readFile("poster.ai"))
if (!imported.ok) console.error(imported.diagnostics)
else console.log(imported.document)

PDF pages embedded in .ai files are previews and are never treated as artwork. If native Illustrator source is absent or corrupt, import fails with an actionable diagnostic instead of clipping or duplicating page presentations.

Architecture and public APIs

• decodeIllustratorPrivateSource extracts contiguous AIPrivateData blocks, supports Illustrator deflate and zstd containers, and accepts direct Illustrator PostScript. Node versions without zstd support receive a precise compatibility diagnostic.
• lexIllustratorSource losslessly tokenizes the complete source, including whitespace, CR/LF/CRLF comments and pseudo-comments, nested strings, names, numbers, hex data, and structural delimiters. Concatenating token raw values reconstructs the original program.
• parseIllustratorSource produces the typed AST: global artboards, layers, groups, compound paths, clipping paths, editable Béziers, process/custom paint, strokes, live text frames, decoded AI11 text resources, source spans, metadata, raw statements, and preserved unknown extensions.
• lowerIllustratorSource performs the explicit Illustrator Y-up to create-design Y-down conversion once. Artboards remain independent export rectangles on the original shared canvas; they never own, clip, translate, or duplicate artwork.

Fidelity boundary

Native paths, compound holes, clipping groups, layer order/visibility/locks, RGB/CMYK/gray and alternate process paint, stroke geometry, artboard positions, bleed, and off-artboard artwork are preserved. AI11 point-like live text content, positions, point size, and PostScript font selection are represented as native text objects. Imported PostScript fonts are external dependencies and must be added to fonts/index.json before build or export; the importer lists every required font in one diagnostic. Character-run paint, paragraph metrics, and threaded, multiframe, area, path, or undo-shadow text structures remain losslessly available in the source AST and produce explicit fidelity warnings.

Placed/raster art, gradients and patterns, opacity/transparency, symbols, brushes, effects, overprint, and newer extension operators remain in the lossless source layer. Named-ink tints retain their authored operands in the AST and lower to a tint-aware process-color approximation. Constructs that affect visible scene lowering are diagnosed rather than silently converted to page-preview artwork.

The decoder and public parser enforce bounded file, compressed-source, decompressed-source, source-character, statement, AI11 text-resource, token, point, and nesting work before materializing their corresponding structures. Private PDF stream blocks require direct bounded lengths and exact PDF object and generation references; duplicate objects, ambiguous descriptors, generation mismatches, and missing or noncontiguous block numbering are rejected.

Supplied-sample verification

The untracked issue samples are read during development but never committed. Current native-source results are:

• biome.ai: 8 original-position artboards, 51 vector objects, 5 clipping groups.
• equip.ai: 1 artboard with 3-point bleed, 22 vector objects, 11 groups, and 5 authored layers with their locks.
• lasertag.ai: all 4 exact artboards, 207 vector objects, 45 structural groups, 111 source compound paths, and 9 active live-text frames (216 native objects).

Committed synthetic fixtures cover the same private-container, shared-canvas, paint, hierarchy, compound, clip, lexer, and direct-source paths.

Trademark

This is an independent interoperability package and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Adobe. Adobe and Adobe Illustrator are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe in the United States and/or other countries.