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Posted

I have clients who not only need artwork but in the end of the project they require the AI files as this is the industry standard and even if the pdf serves the same purpose, try explaining that to people across the globe who don't understand or don't want to understand. Not worth it to burn relationships.

I have been using Affinity Designer to create the artwork, and I share the progress and results via jpg and pdf, but many times, the client requires AI files. Whats the point of using Affinity Designer if I still need an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription just so I can open the final Designer files as a PDF and then export them as AI? this is a big time and expense waster

Affinity Photo can export PSD files, why can't Designer export AI files? this is required for mass adoption.

let me know if this is in the works and when we will have this

thanks

Rob

 

Posted

If I’m not mistaken, the only reason there is PSD support is because some court ordered Adobe to release the specifications of the format, and that has not been the case with AI. However, I am curious on how complicated your artwork is because you could cheat a little by renamin a PDF file extension to AI.

Best regards!

P. S.: Some apps do export to AI but it’s never sonething that can be done to a 100% quality.

Posted
4 minutes ago, RobKlein said:

even if the pdf serves the same purpose, try explaining that to people

Just commenting to share your lament. I've managed to get most of my clients/vendors on board by including something along the lines of "The PDF is sufficient!!! But if you must, you can open it in AI." And then I just have to make sure I've outlined all fonts and removed any weird effects.

Posted

Prophet, Thanks and agreed, Ive outlined all fonts and there are no special effects....this time...but something tells me this is fine anyway...the client may think they will be able to do easy tweaks and changes without getting the designer involved to save some money, but once everything is expanded into outlines, the objects are harder to manipulate, and then to add insult to injury once the Affinity Designer file is exported as a PDF, the layers are destroyed so it becomes a logistical nightmare for the uninitiated to manage that....

Posted
5 minutes ago, RobKlein said:

the client may think they will be able to do easy tweaks and changes without getting the designer involved to save some money

Ha! Indeed. Have had a few clients where I wish I had seen their faces when they tried to monkey with a finished file before coming back to me to ask for revisions.

Posted

Mithferion,

well that's interesting, about Photoshop and the court...

As you mentioned, I did rename the file extension, but the file didn't come through properly and Illustrator gave me a dirty little message..."An unknown imaging construct was encountered."

the file opened but several objects were missing their outlines....and those objects weren't weird in any way, just some letter shapes in a logo - outlines, not the editable font.

thanks for the insights!

and they will have to contend with an AI file without layers/organization.

 

Posted
17 minutes ago, prophet said:

Ha! Indeed. Have had a few clients where I wish I had seen their faces when they tried to monkey with a finished file before coming back to me to ask for revisions.

that's too funny...especially as they have probably hired a newbie who has no idea what to do or how to do it, so now they have the file and the tools to really mess things up!

everyone wants to pay less...quite often, paying less costs more

Posted
34 minutes ago, RobKlein said:

As you mentioned, I did rename the file extension, but the file didn't come through properly and Illustrator gave me a dirty little message..."An unknown imaging construct was encountered."

It would seem that "flat" vectors could be adecuate for this king of purpose, sadly.

Best regards!

Posted

Adobe is the axis of evil.
They do not disclose file format specification with knowing their format is being used widely in the industry.
Serif has been reverse engineering PSD for decades that's why Affinity can read/write PSD, still not perfect.
Corel has been reverse engineering AI for decades that's why CorelDraw can read AI, still not perfect.

Start reverse engineering AI from now is wasting time and money. it doesn't pay for itself.

AI 8 or older could be implemented because the specification is disclosed.
But not sure if its worth to implement such old format.

Posted
14 minutes ago, ashf said:

Adobe is the axis of evil.
They do not disclose file format specification with knowing their format is being used widely in the industry.

Well sadly others do the same for their proprietary file formats too. And to be honest, Affinity (even not such a big industry player like Adobe) is also no exception here from this!

18 minutes ago, ashf said:

AI 8 or older could be implemented because the specification is disclosed.
But not sure if its worth to implement such old format.

I doubt it's worth, too much has changed since then, the AI 8 format was AFAI recall used ~1990.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

Posted
10 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Well sadly others do the same for their proprietary file formats too. And to be honest, Affinity (even not such a big industry player like Adobe) is also no exception here from this!

Right, but nobody cares about if Affinity format specification is disclosed.
Adobe format is being treated as the standard format in the industry, and that gives users inconvenience.
Same goes for MS Office format. but eventually they disclosed it due to consequence of competition with ODF as you may know.

Posted

Honestly, if Serif wanted to disrupt the industry opening their formats, and allowing others to build upon them, would be a good start. Who knows, maybe in a few years time they might even become the new standard?

Posted
1 minute ago, Bryan Rieger said:

Honestly, if Serif wanted to disrupt the industry opening their formats, and allowing others to build upon them, would be a good start.

I hope true standard format will be created by teaming up anti-Adobe federation.
Like glTF in 3D industry against Autodesk.
SVG could be the one but it's still too weak as editable vector format. PDF is not suitable for editing.

Posted

I believe an issue preventing this, beyond the control issues of companies wanting to own the standard, is that if a company innovates with a special effect, feature, etc, the file standard may not be able to capture that detail. So then, the more unique the applications are, the less likely a standard file type could be achieved, even if the various companies wanted to do this. Still, the standard file could "expand" the effect, to dumb it down, like a pdf loses the layers, so that at least it could be opened in other applications without detail loss.

Posted
10 minutes ago, RobKlein said:

I believe an issue preventing this, beyond the control issues of companies wanting to own the standard, is that if a company innovates with a special effect, feature, etc, the file standard may not be able to capture that detail. So then, the more unique the applications are, the less likely a standard file type could be achieved, even if the various companies wanted to do this. Still, the standard file could "expand" the effect, to dumb it down, like a pdf loses the layers, so that at least it could be opened in other applications without detail loss.

PDF is fairly close to the standard but it has some critical problems such as not capable of keeping layer structure.
So something like hybrid of PDF and SVG would be viable for the standard...
It does not need to be able to keep every single one of unique features in all apps.

Posted
1 hour ago, RobKlein said:

I believe an issue preventing this … is that if a company innovates with a special effect, feature, etc, the file standard may not be able to capture that detail. So then, the more unique the applications are, the less likely a standard file type could be achieved, even if the various companies wanted to do this.

Much like the PDF standard has different flavours (all of which can be opened by any application supporting PDF, but not all of the features required by a PDF may be supported), there's no reason an open 'Affinity' standard couldn't have different versions, each supporting different specific use cases and/or features that may not be supported everywhere. Throwing a prompt upon opening stating that 'this is a Affinity2022a/x file, and the following features are currently unsupported in this application:…' would be a great start.

As we learned with HTML5, a standard need not be fixed in time, but rather a living standard that evolves over time to meet the needs of everyone[1] within an ever changing environment.

[1] everyone being everyone who is committed to ensuring that the standard remains working for them.

Posted
1 hour ago, Bryan Rieger said:

Honestly, if Serif wanted to disrupt the industry opening their formats, and allowing others to build upon them, would be a good start. Who knows, maybe in a few years time they might even become the new standard?

The way the world works is that someone uses the Affinity file format to make and market extremely cheep software. Now who will pay $50 when they can pay $5? The Affinity file format becomes the industry standard and Affinity the company is in bankruptcy.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.6 
Affinity Designer 2.5.7 | Affinity Photo 2.5.7 | Affinity Publisher 2.5.7 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

Posted
1 hour ago, Old Bruce said:

The way the world works is that someone uses the Affinity file format to make and market extremely cheep software. Now who will pay $50 when they can pay $5? The Affinity file format becomes the industry standard and Affinity the company is in bankruptcy.

It's possible, but with all of the free/cheap alternative PDF viewers/editors available today Adobe should be seeing the Acrobat side of its business failing (it's not). Lots of text editors can now edit Word docs, but AFAIK Microsoft is still doing fine with Office. Sketch opened their format, and I believe they're still doing just fine.

I don't think it's the $5 app you would need to worry about, but rather the possibility that Microsoft or Google might come along and release a free version (ahem, VS Code and every $$$ IDE out there) that matches or exceeds Serif's apps abilities (they could do this even without an open Affinity format). That said, it's more likely they would choose to work with you in order to help develop a larger ecosystem (look at similar relationships with Blink/WebKit, Blender, Godot, etc) in which everyone would benefit.

With everything creative increasingly being locked behind various clouds (Canva, Figma, Magma, etc) having an open, standard file format could usher in an era of data portability, interoperability, and compatibility that has been sorely lacking in recent years. Here's to the crazy ones!

FWIW I don't expected Serif to ever do this.

Posted
4 minutes ago, Bryan Rieger said:

It's possible, but with all of the free/cheap alternative PDF viewers/editors available today Adobe should be seeing the Acrobat side of its business failing (it's not). Lots of text editors can now edit Word docs, but AFAIK Microsoft is still doing fine with Office. Sketch opened their format, and I believe they're still doing just fine.

I don't think it's the $5 app you would need to worry about, but rather the possibility that Microsoft or Google might come along and release a free version (ahem, VS Code and every $$$ IDE out there) that matches or exceeds Serif's apps abilities (they could do this even without an open Affinity format). That said, it's more likely they would choose to work with you in order to help develop a larger ecosystem (look at similar relationships with Blink/WebKit, Blender, Godot, etc) in which everyone would benefit.

With everything creative increasingly being locked behind various clouds (Canva, Figma, Magma, etc) having an open, standard file format could usher in an era of data portability, interoperability, and compatibility that has been sorely lacking in recent years. Here's to the crazy ones!

Yes, I agree with Bryan, makes a lot of sense.

Posted
2 hours ago, ashf said:

PDF is fairly close to the standard but it has some critical problems such as not capable of keeping layer structure.
So something like hybrid of PDF and SVG would be viable for the standard...
It does not need to be able to keep every single one of unique features in all apps.

Ashf, That would be great. the hybrid file format could retain a core set of features. Anyway, if the goal is to save the file so its exactly the same in Illustrator or other apps as the file you created in Affinity Designer, then the exported file really does need to be the same...perhaps AD would make it clear which details would export properly and which ones need to be expanded, or somehow resolved so that it exports fully and cleanly. Even if it exports as AI CC Legacy, AI 2020 or a previous AI format.

Posted

Let me add, and even if something is standardized, like for example SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), do not all who make use of that format in their software then do support the whole spectrum of the standardized spec. The later then often can lead to incompatibilities between software for an exchange here.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

Posted

It would be nice if the industry could come together and develop a common open file format/ecosystem similar to how Pixar introduced USD (Universal Scene Description) to the 3D software world, but also for it to be accepted and adopted.

 

  • 6 months later...
Posted
On 11/29/2021 at 12:14 PM, ashf said:

AI 8 or older could be implemented because the specification is disclosed.
But not sure if its worth to implement such old format.

I would say yes.

At work, we have old and new equipment that utilize Adobe Illustrator files.  And AI8 is more than sufficient.  I can use a CS version of Illustrator to convert PDF or EPS files from Designer, but if I could save/export direct from Designer, that would certainly be more efficient.

  • 5 months later...
Posted

I thought I'd give my two cents here as I work with a broad team of other designers and agencies.

 

In my view, the issue is this: when you work with a team and that team uses Adobe, you need to be able to exchange files in a pain-free manner.

 

I would switch to Affinity In a heartbeat if I could confidently share my working files with the other designers I work with.

 

Dear Serif, please provide us with seamless psd and ai integration. We want to jump ship, but we need this first.

Posted
5 minutes ago, WhiteCreative said:

In my view, the issue is this: when you work with a team and that team uses Adobe, you need to be able to exchange files in a pain-free manner.

Sadly the best answer would be to rent the adobe stuff for the duration of the project. There is a lot of stuff in an Illustrator file that is proprietary to Adobe. Serif/Affinity can try to reverse engineer the file format but that is a time and money sink which would give users a pain filled experience.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.6 
Affinity Designer 2.5.7 | Affinity Photo 2.5.7 | Affinity Publisher 2.5.7 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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