L.S.,
I recently wrote a small script to extract positioning information from
Encapsulated Postscript files exported by Affinity Designer. To be precise, the
script detects occurrences of text strings that start with a period, extracts
the location of the period together with the text string itself, and converts
this to code that can be used in LaTeX so that e.g. mathematical formulas
(typeset in LaTeX) can be overlaid on top of the encapsulated postscript figure.
See
https://github.com/xot/adoverpic
for the script (with more elaborate documentation).
The tool heavily relies on the fact that Affinity Designer, when
exporting Encapsulated Postscript, puts a comment containing the actual text
string in the EPS file before writing the corresponding curve drawing code, the
first line of which contains the coordinates where the first character in the
string must be drawn. My request is simply this: please do not change the way
Affinity Designer exports Encapsulated Postscript!
[A bolder wish would be that Affinity Designer would add a feature that allows
certain object - e.g. text strings - be marked as special. Such special objects
should not be exported to graphics output formats like .eps, .pdf etc., but
instead their coordinates and metadata (eg the text string itself) should be
exported to a text-based document format (json, xml).]
