If you want to include any graphics into TeX, a good way of doing so is to draw a picture in METAFONT, so it seems like a single character (there are some resolution limitations, but you still can have 17cm picture at 600dpi). As long it is not so straightforward to draw anything more complex in METAFONT directly, what about creating it in any vector editor and export it to METAFONT?

You're right, it's not bad...

This converter was created just for this task. Given an AdobeIllustrator file (AI, version 4.x prefered (not tested on anything else)), the output is a METAFONT file with one, or, if specified on command line, more characters, together forming the original picture.

Features:

• converts lines, curves, closed paths, fills (grayscale only, of course)
• uniform/random grayscale fills, or all fills in black
• option to treat longest horizontal line in the picture as baseline
• option to export each segment of picture as single character

Limitations:

• AI file must not have any texts, you must convert them into curves first (AI reading routines don't understand text specifications)
• when converting complex pictures, you might have a problem with GFtoPK, which claims that he "ran out of internal memory for row counts"--you can used upgraded GFtoPKx insted of GFtoPK, or convert each segment as single chcaracter (this occurs only under some OSes, like DOS)

• AI reading routines are not complete--they were created just by looking at some AI files (e.g. files with texts (not converted into curves) cause problems)

Download:

• AI2MF v1.5, Pascal source
• AI2MF v1.5, DOS version