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I have many user's who work on a sales floor and need to be able to open these files just to view them so that they can confirm that the artwork they are getting from a customer is correct before passing it on.

I do not want to purchase Adobe Creative Suite licenses for these users so that they can simply view these documents. What is the cheapest and best alternative to the Adobe Creative suite that will realistically open all (or at least some) of the files they are likely to receive?

Currently I have tried to use XnView with Ghostscript, Inkscape, and Adobe Acrobat Reader but even with all these combined we still can't open many of the files that we receive.

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I was working at a design/print shop, and generally we would save our files as PDF before sending them to the customer, so perhaps you could get them sent to you in that format. It also cuts down on file size. Otherwise, I know that with AI files if you rename them with a .pdf extension, Acrobat will open them. This might be true of the other Adobe filetypes as well.

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Ghostscript alone is enough to open and view .eps files. This works for me on Windows 10, using the latest Ghostscript 9.20 (website, download page) for Windows 64-bit (AGPL Release).

  1. Download and install GhostScript, it will install to C:\Program Files\gs
  2. Use the Open With option on your .eps file and select Ghostscript from the following directory:

    C:\Program Files\gs\gs9.20\bin\gswin64.exe
    

As for .ai files, current versions of Adobe Reader and Foxit PDF Reader both open .ai files natively.

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The GIMP should be able to open at least psd without major problems. I don't know about the other two, but they're maybe plugins for it.

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    The Gimp is far too bloated to use as an image viewer. If it could actually open all those files then I would still use it. Basically everything in the open source space uses Ghostscript of one form or another to try and handle psd and eps files but they just can't handle all of them reliably and they don't even try to deal with Ai files. Feb 24, 2010 at 13:33
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Apparently it is not currently possible to enable my users to view EPS, PSD, and AI files without the Adobe Creative Suite at this time. If a viable option emerges I will accept it as the answer but for now this is the answer I have come to.

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Irfanview should display all those formats, however it says AI files need a plugin.
Here's the list of supported formats

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