Problem when opening 3rd party .eps files

[pburki]

Hello,

I have downloaded a few .eps backgrounds. When I open the files with Affinity Designer, I see that there are lines as if the shapes where not completely aligned.

Any idea where the problem can be ?

Thanks

Philippe

210.eps

[Paul Mudditt]

26 minutes ago, pburki said:

Hello,

I have downloaded a few .eps backgrounds. When I open the files with Affinity Designer, I see that there are lines as if the shapes where not completely aligned.

 

 

Yes I see the lines in all versions of Affinity.

However I see the lines in Inkscape as well. I don't see the lines in Gimp but the image suffers from other pixelation artefacts when I open it instead.

[BBYY]

Open in Adobe Illustrator, copy everything and just paste in Designer — that's how I always do. Designer can't handle .eps properly

[loukash]

On 12/17/2022 at 4:45 PM, pburki said:

Any idea where the problem can be ?

Small "rounding errors" from vector masks. Essentially these are "hairlines", i.e. no matter how much you zoom in, they will always remain one device pixel/unit wide.
Usually that's a non-issue in print.

However, if you want to export the image to bitmap, unfortunately by default Affinity will attempt to antialias these hairlines.
To fix that globally, select the parent layer, click the Blend Options cog icon and set Antialiasing to Force Off:

Voilà.
In some scenarios you may rather want to disable antialiasing for the offending individual items only, though.

3 hours ago, BBYY said:

Open in Adobe Illustrator

Haha. Yeah. Right.
As long as you have the exact AI version that created the EPS, or newer. 
Not paying for "%%Creator: Adobe Illustrator(R) 19.0"?
Bad luck, huh.  

In such cases, either Preview.app – or Affinity, of course – to the rescue. 

Oh, and attempting to crack open the EPS in VectorStyler (latest version) crashes the latter.
Aaand it crashes Photoshop CS5.1 as well.

So…
Hey, good job, Serif!  

[loukash]

1 hour ago, loukash said:

To fix that globally, select the parent layer, click the Blend Options cog icon and set Antialiasing to Force Off

Forgot to note:
Of course, that will turn all antialiasing for all its children off…
Because the default setting is Inherit.
Hence you may also need to:

1. turn on View > View Mode > Pixel to see what gets antialiased and what doesn't
2. travel through the layer hierarchy and change all objects that you want to be antialiased to Force On…

Yes, it may take quite some time to clean it all up.
You may want to make use of the layer color tags to mark objects/layers based on antialiasing on or off for easy global selection via the Select menu.

[pburki]

Thanks for your answer. This is really helpful, but let to another issue. I have followed your steps to remove the unwanted lines and got a clean document in Affinity Designer, which I saved as .afdesign file. I have imported the file in Affinity Publisher to finish my publication. The image looks good, but when I export it as PDF, the lines appear again...

Exported PDF:

Affinity Publisher doc:

Unfortunately, the lines also appear in the printed document.

Thanks

Philippe

[loukash]

32 minutes ago, pburki said:

I saved as .afdesign file. I have imported the file in Affinity Publisher

Why not just paste the graphic natively directly into your afpub document?

[loukash]

35 minutes ago, pburki said:

Unfortunately, the lines also appear in the printed document.

Are you printing yourself on a home printer?

[pburki]

On 12/20/2022 at 12:42 PM, loukash said:

Why not just paste the graphic natively directly into your afpub document?

No particular reasons. Would this be better to copy and paste? Does this make any difference ?

[pburki]

On 12/20/2022 at 12:45 PM, loukash said:

Are you printing yourself on a home printer?

Yes indeed.

[loukash]

6 minutes ago, pburki said:

Would this be better to copy and paste? Does this make any difference ?

A linked document is useful if you intend to update its content later and have been already placing it into multiple other documents. 

Whereas if it's a one-off layout/design anyway, then you could just as well place all content into one "monolithic" document. It's up to you.

Keep in mind that the Affinity document format is universal, i.e. the file extension only defines the default app to open it. (As in: if you need a document with multiple pages, you can set it up in Publisher, but then you can change its suffix to *.afphoto to work on it as a "multiphoto" document.)

14 minutes ago, pburki said:

Yes indeed.

Hm… hi-res ink printers are less "forgiving" than offset print, or even home laser printers, for that matter.
I have switched to a laser printer in 2005 and never looked back. With the exception of an old inkjet I inherited 15 years ago that can print on CDR/DVDR surface, something a laser printer can't do.

[Sean P]

Hi pburki,

The issue is that many of the EPS files supplied by Stock websites are essentially AI files in disguise.

When a file is saved in Illustrator it is saved with two streams: PDF and the native Illustrator parts. When we import AI files we have to rely on the PDF stream, because we cannot read Adobe's native Illustrator stream of data.

Likewise when Illustrator saves an EPS - it saves a regular EPS version alongside an embedded AI file. So when other versions of Illustrator open it you get the full file, but because we cannot read native AI files we have to rely on the native EPS, which lacks the support for many of Illustrators features, particularly mesh fills/gradients. In this case you end up getting the aliasing issues you see where sections have been split up.

Unfortunately there isn't anything we can do about this with regards to the format.