very poor eps import support

[Greg Wo]

I thought stock .eps vector graphics files downloaded from Freepik are fake, because opened in Affinity Designer they have no layers 😥 (only low res bitmap layer) or there's tons of layers with graphics divided by multiple, strange rectangles and it's almost impossible to select and copy objects with transparency. I thought it would be weird, that all these files are so unusable and today I tried to open them in Adobe Illustrator and wow 😲 - in AI all these eps files are very well editable. It is possible to remove background and get transparency, etc. 🙄🤔 Is it known problem with Affinity Designer? Will it be fixed anytime soon?

[Sean P]

Hi Greg Wo,

Unfortunately there isn't anything we can do about this! The issue here is that the EPS files found on many stock sites are an Illustrator formatted EPS file which means it contains two streams of data: Regular native EPS data and an Embedded AI file. What this means is that when Illustrator opens the EPS it will read the Illustrator stream showing the file exactly as it was saved when created in Illustrator. 

However there will be Illustrator elements in the file that aren't compatible with EPS (for example Mesh Fills) and will get rasterised into pixel data in the EPS stream, when saved. But when opened in AI they appear correctly as vector objects because it is using the AI stream.

When the EPS file is opened in Affinity we are unable to read the AI stream and instead have to open the EPS stream with the rasterised data.

[Greg Wo]

Thanks for explanation.

[Komatös]

You could try to convert the file(s) with an online converter (e.g. https://convertio.co).

Or you use Illustrator to save the file as .ai with pdf.

[ashf]

How about change the file extension to .ai and open in Inkscake?
Then save it to pdf or svg to open in Affinity.