Why affinity designer rasterize layers with transparency when exporting in .eps ?

[Asyle]

Hello all, I don’t know if this was already posted but I have a problem when I export my vector file in eps, all the shapes that are not in full opacity are rasterized.

Right now I’m putting full opacity for those layers, open the document in adobe illustrator, decrease opacity where i want to and export it again as .eps. It works but I wish I could only use the affinity designer app. 

Does anyone else have this problem ? Am I missing something in the export options ? 

Thank you ! 

[Dan C]

Hi Asyle,

Welcome to the forums

Unfortunately the EPS format doesn't support any kind of transparency. Illustrator is only able to do it because Adobe embeds an Ai file inside the EPS which retains the transparency. 

I recommend using another format that supports transparency, such as PDF. I hope this helps!

[8BitCerberus]

Adobe always does their own thing to break standard/open formats and make them only work with their programs. They do the same with svg and even tiff. It’s been a source of great frustration for me the past couple decades as a graphic designer and web designer working with them and trying to integrate standards compliant software/technology.

[hengkidh]

On 2/8/2020 at 1:01 AM, 8BitCerberus said:

Adobe always does their own thing to break standard/open formats and make them only work with their programs. They do the same with svg and even tiff. It’s been a source of great frustration for me the past couple decades as a graphic designer and web designer working with them and trying to integrate standards compliant software/technology.

😂 I see. I hope that the transparency problem while exporting to .EPS will be solved soon. This is the only downside after the shape-builder.

[walt.farrell]

1 minute ago, hengkidh said:

😂 I see. I hope that the transparency problem while exporting to .EPS will be solved soon. This is the only downside after the shape-builder.

It's not something to be solved. The standard EPS format simply does not support transparency.  It's a very old, largely obsolete format. If you want transparency, try PDF.

[Seizmic]

On 4/10/2020 at 8:33 AM, walt.farrell said:

It's not something to be solved. The standard EPS format simply does not support transparency.  It's a very old, largely obsolete format. If you want transparency, try PDF.

Crazy I didn't know this about .eps after like 20yrs of doing graphics! I'm dealing with an outfit right now that accepts ONLY .eps files. So weird. 

[befehr]

I made a bit of a discovery today. I started an illustration in Designer with the intention of exporting to eps and finishing in Illustrator, but and got carried away and took it to far...too many gradients, transparencies, etc. Illustrator of course rasterized a bunch of elements so I decided to try opening the eps file in CorelDRAW 2020 and what do ya know, it opened without converting objects to raster, and removed any transparencies I had to solid colors which are easy to recreate.

Not that we all happen to have CorelDRAW on our machines, and I still need to prove this out to make sure it reliable, but there is a possible alternative.

 

[Dazmondo77]

14 hours ago, befehr said:

I made a bit of a discovery today. I started an illustration in Designer with the intention of exporting to eps and finishing in Illustrator, but and got carried away and took it to far...too many gradients, transparencies, etc. Illustrator of course rasterized a bunch of elements so I decided to try opening the eps file in CorelDRAW 2020 and what do ya know, it opened without converting objects to raster, and removed any transparencies I had to solid colors which are easy to recreate.

I usually copy and paste between Affinity and Illustrator which retains gradients and transparency both ways - as stated above eps is pretty much obsolete, I only find it useful for having the ability to open old stuff and re-save as PDF or Affinity formats

[befehr]

3 hours ago, Dazmondo77 said:

I usually copy and paste between Affinity and Illustrator which retains gradients and transparency both ways - as stated above eps is pretty much obsolete, I only find it useful for having the ability to open old stuff and re-save as PDF or Affinity formats

Yeah, I do the copy/paste dance for simple illustrations but dealing with multiple layers can be time consuming. I guess my point was, which is something I always seem to miss on my original posts, is that it is interesting that DRAW can open EPSs seemingly more reliably than Illustrator. That is about the only thing I like about Corel these days, especially since the price has really gone up.

Sadly, EPS is still required for sites stock sites that sell vector files.