Quicklook support for AI files

[Joe Workman]

In MacOS Ventura, Apple removed EPS file support in Preview. Sadly this means that MacOS will no longer generate quicklook preview for EPS and AI files. This is starting to really annoy me. I use Affinity Designer but it only supports quicklook for its own files. It would be very much appreciated if Designer could support quicklook preview for AI files. 

[Old Bruce]

Quicklook is, as you point out, an OS function. Nothing Affinity can do to 'support' it.

[loukash]

As long as the *.ai documents contain the embedded PDF stream, MacOS will handle their QuickLook and Icon preview just fine. Without the saved PDF stream there will be no preview at all, and never was. (Unless a 3rd party QL plugins for Adobe apps was able to do it? I used to have a license for one of those many years ago, but it definitely stopped working on El Capitan so I don't even remember its name…)

EPS or "antique" Illustrator docs based on EPS are more of an issue. At least, there's Skim which can (on Ventura at least, don't know about Sonoma) still make use of the still present PostScript framework and convert PS/EPS to PDF just like the Preview app used to do.

32 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Nothing Affinity can do to 'support' it.

They could:
/Applications/Affinity Designer 2.app/Contents/Library/QuickLook/QuickLook.qlgenerator

They just have to add support for parsing of other formats.

[walt.farrell]

31 minutes ago, loukash said:

They [Serif] just have to add support for parsing of other formats.

They can't parse AI files at all, except for locating and using an embedded PDF version if it's present. And as you pointed out, if the PDF is there macOS can provide the QuickLook function, too.

And as they are unlikely (this late in the game) to reverse engineer the AI format so they can parse it, Serif cannot provide QL support for AI files.

[loukash]

Just now, walt.farrell said:

They can't parse AI files at all

I know. I meant it in the EPS context which Aff obviously can parse since it can open EPS natively, albeit with caveats.
I thought the context would be obvious from the text flow of my post?  

[walt.farrell]

40 minutes ago, loukash said:

I thought the context would be obvious from the text flow of my post?

But the context you were responding to (in quoting Old Bruce's response) was about AI.