After a major Mac upgrade (Tiger to Mtn Lion, G4 to i7), on a techie friend's suggestion, I downloaded & installed Inkscape.

I saw a note that said xQuartz was also required, which I downloaded & installed, but there was NO CLEAR INSTRUCTIONS exactly how to link the two apps that I can find anywhere. (I'm not even sure I put xQuartz in a proper location!)

Over & over, I tried to launch Inkscape; it would START to launch & in a few seconds it would quit. I'm NOT that technically savvy, so no idea what to do. Fortunately, for reasons I can't begin to explain, Inkscape launched fine today, & it automatically launched xQuartz as well!

So I tried opening old Illustrator v5 files with Inkscape. It can't recognize the files & open them, no matter what I do, but they will open fine in Illustrator (running Classic OS on my Mac Mini). I tried a search for "Illustrator v5" here, but got over 1100 listings.

I'm completely stuck. Help? (Please!)

clueless wrote:for reasons I can't begin to explain, Inkscape launched fine today, & it automatically launched xQuartz as well!

Likely because you finally rebooted the system (or had logged out and back in), as is required to properly finish the installation of XQuartz (also described in the Inkscape FAQ).

clueless wrote:So I tried opening old Illustrator v5 files with Inkscape. It can't recognize the files & open them, no matter what I do, but they will open fine in Illustrator (running Classic OS on my Mac Mini).

As far as I understand these are older, PostScript-based versions of AI files. See this earlier topic for a solution to open 'Adobe Illustrator 8.0 and below (*.ai)' files on OS X: Re: cannot open .ai file on Mac

~suv, I'm *pretty* sure I rebooted several times over several attempts to get Inkscape to launch (I had other reasons to reboot, coming back repeatedly to trying to open older Illustrator copies with Inkscape).

Thanks for the reference to UniConvertor. I'm leery of getting into code with Terminal, which is apparently required to make this work.

I did just launch Inkscape, selected Open, found the drop down that listed .ai version 8 & earlier, but it didn't display my Illustrator files. So it seems I must have UniConvertor to access these files, or pay someone else to mess with my files for me. (I was never any good or quick with Illustrator, but did on rare occasion tweak some files someone else made for me.)

Thanks!