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Convert AI to SVG without the whole workspace


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Hi! I am just testing Affinity Publisher to see if it can fit our purposes.


I have a heap of AI files with some symbols and stuff and i need convert it all to SVG but that does not work as expected. I have spent some time searching for solution and finally I turn to you pro´s!

Today  I have several AI files containing multiple workspaces with different symbols. For instance I have a file called accessories.ai that contains all our accessories in different workspaces in that file. I can open that file in Affinity just fine and even export all these workspaces to SVG but it does not just take the illustration, it takes the whole workspace.

It works if I save the accessories.ai in Illustrator to a file per workspace to .ai and then open those ai files in Affinity one by one and then choosing select all and then exporting and then  selecting Area: Selection only. But as said I have many of these files so doing one by one will take days or even weeks since we have hundreds of symbols.


Attached a image how it looks when the AI is converted to SVG with Affinity as a batch. I get a blue fram around the object and that could be fine but some symbols are huge and the blue frame gets then extremely big.

We are today using Adobe Illustrator but it's not working so great with linked svg´s so we need to find another solution that would do the trick.

Hope I was clear with my problem...

Publisher_dJhMsSEXm4.png

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Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, @Hietaharju. :)

59 minutes ago, Hietaharju said:

Today  I have several AI files containing multiple workspaces with different symbols. For instance I have a file called accessories.ai that contains all our accessories in different workspaces in that file. I can open that file in Affinity just fine and even export all these workspaces to SVG but it does not just take the illustration, it takes the whole workspace.

When you open one of those AI files in Affinity Publisher, how many layers are there on the page (or on each page, if there are multiple pages)?

If you can’t share your APub file here, please at least post a screenshot of the Layers panel, fully expanded to show the structure of the document.

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4 hours ago, Hietaharju said:

... For instance I have a file called accessories.ai that contains all our accessories in different workspaces in that file. I can open that file in Affinity just fine and even export all these workspaces to SVG but it does not just take the illustration, it takes the whole workspace. ...

See this thread here, especially the comments & screenshots for how to setup and tryout exporting only the illustriations then via the Affinity Export Persona. You have to setup the slices from the groups, aka export the layers "B-DWS", "B-SAM", ... etc. from inside/under the Artboards/Workspaces (not the whole Artboards/Workspaces themselves)! - See:

 

Other than that there are also a bunch of Online AI-to-SVG converters (like this one) etc., if you do a "Google search let's say after that topic: ai_to_svg". Though I'm not sure if these online tools do always plain vector based conversions, maybe they rasterize things instead (NOTE that I didn't tried those out, you've to do on your own).

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Sorry if I write stupid stuff here, but do I see it right that only the drawings should be exported?

If so, you could use "Selection area" or "Area only". This would require that each drawing be selected and then written to an SVG file via the export.

image.png.ef632293108765b601f7b0350f21e1bf.png

 

accessories_p1.svg

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Hi all and thank you for your help!
I had a Eureka moment last night. I am so stupid... So this is now solved. How did I solve it? Since we have Adobe Illustrator I was able to make a batch processing of all these files.
I have not yet figured out if batches are possible with Affinity but I know to use Illustrators macro feature. So I exported all hundreds and hundreds of symbols to svg and it worked just fine. Yes it took some time since illustrator still needs to open every file and do it's magic but atleast I could go and drink coffee and socialise with my dear colleagues while illu did the job... :)

I am very impressed with Affinity and it seems like Affinity is the software we need.
Our main problem with Illustrator is that all linked ai files makes the document almost impossible to work with. The worst document haves just now 86 layers and most likely hundreds of linked ai files. 
So our goal with Affinity is to still have many layers but change all linked files to svg instead. So today I will make a document with 86 layers and see if it's workable.

Thank you once again and have a great day!

/Marko

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