Can't place an encapsulated postscript image

[Tony Pritchard]

Hi – I've read and watched discussion boards, manual and videos. Been on this for two days. I am trying to place an encapsulated postscript file into a rectangle picture box. The files are greyed out and I can't select them. I have performed the same task in Adobe InDesign and it works as per normal. Attached is a screenshot. Thanks Tony 

[loukash]

Do they have the *.eps suffix?
Looking at the modification dates, those could be old Mac Illustrator documents which were also based on EPS, but without the suffix which wasn't required on Classic Mac OS.

Can you open them with Publisher? Publisher and Designer can open and interpret EPS. You can then simply copy the content as native Affinity objects into your layout.

[Tony Pritchard]

2 minutes ago, loukash said:

Do they have the *.eps suffix?
Looking at the modification dates, those could be old Mac Illustrator documents which were also based on EPS, but without the suffix which wasn't required on Classic Mac OS.

Can you open them with Publisher? Publisher and Designer can open and interpret EPS. You can then simply copy the content as native Affinity objects into your layout.

Hi loukash – thanks for your reply. The files don't have a suffix. It says encapsulated postscript under kind in the folder. I'm on a Mac. When I open the files they open into Apple preview. When open here they have a .PDF suffix. In the inspector it says it is a PDF document. The files are photographic images of various artwork like book covers. They are not illustrator files. They don't open/place in Publisher. They open/place in Adobe InDesign and Illustrator. So within Adobe they operate like normal. Some of the files are jpegs and PDFs and those open fine. It is these eps/PDF files that won't open in Publisher like you'd expect. Ultimately they are for a book which is going to be printed so I need to do the right thing with them.

[loukash]

1 minute ago, Tony Pritchard said:

The files don't have a suffix.

As I have expected…  

1 minute ago, Tony Pritchard said:

It says encapsulated postscript under kind in the folder.

That's because Finder still can interpret the "olden days" File Type attribute – which was why Macs didn't need file suffixes.

3 minutes ago, Tony Pritchard said:

When I open the files they open into Apple preview. When open here they have a .PDF suffix. In the inspector it says it is a PDF document.

That's the expected behavior.
By the way, the Preview app is a pretty good EPS-to-PDF converter. I've been using it as that literally since decades by now.

4 minutes ago, Tony Pritchard said:

The files are photographic images of various artwork like book covers. They are not illustrator files.

In that case those might be old Photoshop EPS.
Can you please upload a sample file?

8 minutes ago, Tony Pritchard said:

They don't open/place in Publisher.

If they don't have the *.eps suffix, they won't. Simply add the suffix to them.

5 minutes ago, Tony Pritchard said:

Ultimately they are for a book which is going to be printed so I need to do the right thing with them.

Let's hope those are no duotone images. Affinity doesn't natively support those, they will be converted to RGB on import.

(A while ago I experimented with duotone workarounds in Affinity. It's possible to emulate but it's a p.i.t.a.)

[loukash]

7 minutes ago, loukash said:

the "olden days" File Type attribute

As a side note, here's some info on that: livecode.byu.edu/helps/file-creatorcodes.php

[Tony Pritchard]

47 minutes ago, loukash said:

If they don't have the *.eps suffix, they won't. Simply add the suffix to them.

• That's worked. Thank you lots!

• The images should be CMYK and not duotone. I assume when I export to PDF or Publisher version of InDesign's package I'll be able to get it print ready for the printer and hopefully they can take a look to ensure everything is correct.

• Now onto cropping. I assume place in Picture Frame Rectangle. Then refine crop with Vector Crop Tool to pull individual sides in. 

THANKS AGAIN!

[loukash]

2 minutes ago, Tony Pritchard said:

The images should be CMYK and not duotone. I assume when I export to PDF or Publisher version of InDesign's package I'll be able to get it print ready for the printer and hopefully they can take a look to ensure everything is correct.

Be aware that the Affinity color workflow is not necessarily as intuitive and foolproof as Adobe's.
You may want to search the forums for CMYK PDF export and similar keywords. Also, unless exporting PDF/X, you may want to avoid embedding CMYK profiles into PDFs.
Similarly, placing or opening CMYK document may convert the CMYK values even if you don't want it.
It's a complex thing…  

1 minute ago, Tony Pritchard said:

Then refine crop with Vector Crop Tool to pull individual sides in. 

Not necessary at all. The picture frame can do all the cropping you need.
Essentially, any object can act as a crop, even pixel layers. The Affinity concept is extremely flexible here. So the Picture Frame type of object is also just a shape with some extra functionality that is specifically useful for placed images.

[Tony Pritchard]

13 minutes ago, loukash said:

Not necessary at all. The picture frame can do all the cropping you need.
Essentially, any object can act as a crop, even pixel layers. The Affinity concept is extremely flexible here. So the Picture Frame type of object is also just a shape with some extra functionality that is specifically useful for placed images.

That's fine if the picture box fits to the perimeters of the image. A lot of the images have a strange background. Like there is a book on an odd shape black background. So I want to get rid of the black background. The four sides of the picture frame don't operate independently. They seem to scale horizontally and vertically or diagonally. So I can adjust top and bottom of the picture frame but when I want to crop from the sides the whole image starts to scale again. Image attached as an example. AS soon as I grab that right side the scale starts all over.

[loukash]

27 minutes ago, Tony Pritchard said:

The four sides of the picture frame don't operate independently. They seem to scale horizontally and vertically or diagonally.

First you have to tell the picture frame what you want it to do. There are many options available on the context toolbar. Particularly the Properties options.
This tutorial might be helpful: 

 

[Tony Pritchard]

Ah yes – I've seen that video. I watched it again and noted towards the end the person presenting used the vector crop to drag in the right edge of the picture frame which is similar to my example above. Yes the context toolbar and properties are great. Usually I like to draw the picture frame, place the mage and then have the picture frame fit to the image. That's my simplest go to approach. 

[loukash]

35 minutes ago, Tony Pritchard said:

the person presenting used the vector crop to drag in the right edge of the picture frame

He wasn't cropping a picture frame, that was just the "blank" image layer which is uncropable by itself. 
If your image is already in a picture frame, then the frame alone can crop it. You may need to enable the "Lock Children" button at the right hand side of the toolbar. (May be hidden on smaller displays like my MacBook 15".)

[Tony Pritchard]

25 minutes ago, loukash said:

He wasn't cropping a picture frame, that was just the "blank" image layer which is uncropable by itself. 
If your image is already in a picture frame, then the frame alone can crop it. You may need to enable the "Lock Children" button at the right hand side of the toolbar. (May be hidden on smaller displays like my MacBook 15".)

Ah! Brilliant! LOL at 'Lock Children'. Today I am going into zoom mode. BTW I checked your profile / website. I'm in your age range – a bit older. I'm a retired design educator and didn't want to pay Adobe rent so I made the decision to come over to Affinity. Particularly with the pre-Xmas deal. I'm working on a book of post-war II Modernist Graphic Design in Britain. Quite a few émigrés, including Romek Marber who accepted me onto a course when I was a student. The Swiss are known for their Modernist design. The Americans were good at commercialising this. Those working in Britain were a little off the radar as a collective group, so we wanted to put that knowledge together. 

[loukash]

13 minutes ago, Tony Pritchard said:

didn't want to pay Adobe rent so I made the decision to come over to Affinity.

Yeah, I stopped giving them money at CS5.5, and it still works because usually I'm booting my MacBook from an El Capitan partition. I fully switched my workflow to Affinity only 2 years ago. But Affinity v2 didn't impress me enough yet to make me switch to Catalina as the primary partition, particularly because Catalina lacks compatibility with my "obsolete" external Firewire audio devices which I need for my audio work. So at the moment I'm using Affinity v2 on Catalina more for "toying", also on iPad.
At least, just last week I found out that a nice guy has hacked old Wacom tablet drivers to make them run on Catalina and above. So at least I can keep using my old Wacom with Affinity 2.

[Tony Pritchard]

22 minutes ago, loukash said:

Yeah, I stopped giving them money at CS5.5, and it still works because usually I'm booting my MacBook from an El Capitan partition. I fully switched my workflow to Affinity only 2 years ago. But Affinity v2 didn't impress me enough yet to make me switch to Catalina as the primary partition, particularly because Catalina lacks compatibility with my "obsolete" external Firewire audio devices which I need for my audio work. So at the moment I'm using Affinity v2 on Catalina more for "toying", also on iPad.
At least, just last week I found out that a nice guy has hacked old Wacom tablet drivers to make them run on Catalina and above. So at least I can keep using my old Wacom with Affinity 2.

I dread upgrades, so the move to Affinity 2 required an Apple OS upgrade. Fortunately I have former colleagues and students who know more than me and the advice was to check a few things like the thing to do with 32/64. Fortunately most of mine are 64. Then not to jump too far up the upgrades so I went with Big Sur and that worked out well. Nothing major went wrong. Also Adobe not supporting Type 1 fonts whilst Affinity said they were continuing to do so. 

 

[loukash]

1 minute ago, Tony Pritchard said:

not to jump too far up the upgrades so I went with Big Sur and that worked out well.

That's a good strategy. My mid-2012 MacBook Pro is too "obsolete" to even run Big Sur…  But it has a matte display. And a DVD-R drive. Can't do without either.

Heck, I only upgraded from Mountain Lion to El Capitan in 2019, also because the then new Publisher didn't run on Mountain Lion at all, unlike Designer and Photo from the Mac App Store. Already that "upgrade" required me to find hacked drivers for my Firewire audio devices and to "hack" the Wacom tablet driver myself.

I like technology, but when something "just works", then I don't like to change just for the sake of it. (Even my Technics turntable that I bought new in 1983 still "just works". That's quality technology.)

Anyway.

In any case, it takes quite some time to get accustomed to the Affinity workflows when coming from Adobe. The key thing to remember: Not everything needs to be done the "Adobe way". In Affinity there are many other possible workflows which you can't even accomplish that easy in Adobe apps. The Affinity "killer feature" definitely being the seamless interoperability between the three apps. Which is because under the hood, Affinity is technically just one app and one document format.
All the bugs notwithstanding, haha. That's why we're trying to document them here in the forums as deep as possible, including workarounds etc.

~~~

To come back to your original post:

The issue you had with not being able to open your EPS file definitely isn't a "bug" because Affinity apps simply cannot read the obsolete Mac OS file type codes. Being multiplatform, Affinity apps rely on file suffixes to open a file. That's "by design", so to speak.

In that very sense, you can for example easily define the default Affinity app to open an Affinity document simply by changing its suffix:
If you want an *.afdesign document to always open with Publisher, simply change its suffix to *.afpub. That's all.