—With this being the case, why does copy/pasting an object from Adobe Illustrator into Affinity Designer (mostly) work?
My experience:
Tried opening an EPS file from iStock. The illustration is of multiple items on a desk. Affinity turned some parts of the image into bitmap. Also, the whole layer organization became a total disorganized mess when opened in Affinity.
But, inside of Adobe Illustrator (free trial), I selected a group (illustration of eyeglasses), copied it (Command-C), and pasted it into Affinity.
It worked!
The one difference I notice between the eyeglasses opened in AI versus the eyeglasses copy/pasted into Affinity:
There is a shadow on the eyeglasses, which was created with multiple copies of the eyeglass frames, where each shadow-copy of the frame is shifted a little bit, and each copy is successively lighter in color—the look is akin to opening a book which makes the pages slightly stick out one from each other—only the pages get darker in color from one page to the next. Also, these shadow-objects each have a transparency of 50% inside of Ai. However—and this is the difference—when copy/pasted into Affinity, the transparency in these shadow-objects becomes 100% opaque.
In contrast, the lens of the eyeglasses retains transparency when copy/pasted into Affinity.
If copy/pasting works (mostly), why is Affinity not able to open the file (mostly) correctly?