Can Affinity open Adobe Illustrator CS6 files?

[Studio Ryan Coover]

I'm an old school Adobe CS6 suites user on an iMac 27" High Sierra macOS 10.13.6 OS system.  I have years of adobe illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop files, that I will still need to access moving forward.  I am looking to buy a new IMac 27" and it will have Big Sur macOS 11.0.x, which will not run my Adobe CS6 software.

I was told by an apply sale person that Affinity could open these files and I would be able to continue to use them as I did in Adobe.

From past computer upgrades, I have found that this is not always the case from software to software.  I am hoping that Affinity or someone in this community has gone through a similar transition.  I would love to hear what happened, and hoping that it's true that I can open us use my old Adobe CS6 Files in Affinity!

Thank you so much for your input and knowledge to help me more forward in this transition. 

Ryan Coover

[Fixx]

Affinity can open the PDF part of AI-file. That is, if you have saved with "Create PDF compatible file" you can open it with Affinity. It is not though guaranteed that everything is like you set it in AI, layers setup may be lost, text blocks may be broken to lines, some grad types do not transfer clearly etc.

[h_d]

Hi @Stuido Ryan Coover and welcome! You can also export InDesign documents as .idml files and import these into Affinity Publisher. Again, it's never going to be a perfect process and there are bound to be rough edges. You certainly can't open InDesign docs directly in Publisher, and any apply sales person who says you can is fibbing.

[Alfred]

There are trial versions of all three Affinity apps:

https://affin.co/designertrial

https://affin.co/publishertrial

https://affin.co/phototrial

Please note that each ten-day trial clock runs continuously from the moment you first launch the app, so you would be well advised to run one trial after the other instead of attempting to run them in parallel. The shared file format ensures that any files saved from the first or second trial can be opened in the remaining app/s.

[fjunk]

Doesn't look like it.  I'm running Mac / BigSur.  Got a freebie for CS6 - AI / EPS and PNG.  The PNG files are mockups with text on them.  The AI files mostly don't work.  Might be specific to gradients.  A few of the EPS files don't load either, either outright or comparable gradient problem.  They're nice enough and big enough that if I just had PNG or TIFF that would be fine.  But, the only bitmaps are mockups with text.  

I'm not interested in Adobe products.  Between subscriptions and "In App Purchases" there's a racket going on there more intended to broke people than value for the money.  That's why I'm Affinity bound.

Maybe they're paranoid about selling bitmaps of the vectors because they're more easily transferable.

But, what good is a "free" graphic that locks into a specific software.  Not brushes or stamps or patterns, but just a good image graphic?

 

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, fjunk said:

Doesn't look like it. 

The .ai files must be saved in compatibility mode, so they include a PDF version of the design. The Affinity apps require that because the native AI file format is in a proprietary firm that Affinity can't understand.

Perhaps your .ai files weren't saved that way.