Illustrator (.ai) files not showing in Speedgrader window

Until now, whenever students would submit Adobe Illustrator files, the SpeedGrader document viewer would read and show the files that students submitted. That currently doesn't seem to be the case anymore? This speeds up grading simple visual assignments tremendously, instead of having to download every submission and wait for Adobe to decide to open.

Was there a recent update that broke compatibility with Illustrator?

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Accepted answers

Kristin Lundstrum

Hi @GabeOtteson @emlarson and @chriscas -

Many Canvas users reported this issue regarding various file types, and our engineering team was able to deploy a fix today. If you still experience issues, please reach out to Canvas Support. How do I contact Canvas Support?

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Chris

Hi @GabeOtteson,

I know a few people have reported issues in the past couple weeks with text-based files that used to work but no longer do, so there must have been some sort of change to DocViewer (the name of the tool which generates the document previews in content and SpeedGrader). With that being said, I don't recall .ai files ever being explicitly supported. The What types of files can be previewed in Canvas? - Instructure Community - 607 guide does not list .ai files as supported either. I wonder if you had a browser that was able to render those files somehow independent of Canvas and that's broken now? You could contact Canvas support to ask about .ai support in case they may know something that's undocumented.

I hope this answer helps a bit, even if it doesn't get the functionality that you wanted back again.

-Chris

GabeOtteson

I understand that .ai files aren't explicitly listed on the list (which was the extent of Canvas Support's help on the matter), but the fact is that for several years the DocViewer did in fact display ai files. What's changed now is that now the screen is completely blank (below left), not even loading the toolbar at the top and link to the submitted file that I see in instances where students submit file types that are definitely not supported, like .prproj files for example (below right). This difference is what's giving me a clue that something it off.

SpeedGrader DocViewer when seeing an .ai fileSpeedGrader DocViewer when viewing another unsupported filetype

emlarson

The thread that seems to be the most comprehensive in covering this problem is https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Question-Forum/Speed-Grader-not-allowing-annotations/m-p/596239 and it has two related issues conflated in it: Sometimes "unsupported" things don't show up at all anymore, and sometimes they do but neither they nor explicitly-defined .TXT files can be commented like they once could. (You wouldn't be commenting on an Illustrator file rendered inside DocViewer, but for things like chunks of programming code that were merely text files under a different extension, that was a useful feature and at this point instructors' previous comments have now been lost to students.)

My guess was that someone changed a tiny bit of code logic for security reasons and the DocViewer behavior switched from "when in doubt, do your best to render or at least provide the document for download" to an explicitly defined list of permissible documents and we're now discovering exceptions that make sense in teaching but didn't make the cut. I'm not sure where/if a change that fundamental was documented in the release notes from last week, so maybe it truly is a bug?

Kristin Lundstrum

Hi @GabeOtteson @emlarson and @chriscas -

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