A strange problem when exporting curves..

[true_blue1878]

Tried exporting this "converted to curve" text to SVG, PDF and just plain copy and pasting between programs but for some bizarre reason, these 3 letters just kept losing their path structure and always in that same spot. The e's and the b were easy to fix, but that w was a nightmare. Somehow, the inside path got joined to the outside path at the top right of the letter.

Using font "chiller".

I even removed the sort of "spatter" marks as you can see, but it didn't help and the curves still got messed up in exactly the same place. Strangely, 3 e's on the bottom part of the text were messed up, but one e from the top half of the text was fine (circled, although that snippet was after removing the spatter bits). 

I reshaped the letters with use of scissors and pen in AI. But it was truly a PITA for me being brand new to AI. 

But I checked the paths in Affinity and it just didn't look broken in any way. I even dragged each node around to see if they had doubled up somehow, but the path looked fine before export! 

How can I avoid this happening in future? Sadly, AI can't achieve the same type of text effects that Affinity can. That would be too easy wouldn't it? So I am painstakingly having to transfer each letter over as curves, then duplicating them to use as a whitespot. And the amount of layers AI splits everything into is just ridiculous. Ugh.

Cheers!

[Hangman]

Hi @true_blue1878,

Having just tried this using the same font, I'm not experiencing any issues...

Are you able to upload a sample Affinity file so we can take a look at what may be causing the issue for you?

[Paul Mc]

I tried as well and it seems to work fine for me. Here's an overlay on your samples:

 

Of course we might not have exactly the same font files and that might be the cause.

 

[true_blue1878]

9 hours ago, Hangman said:

Hi @true_blue1878,

Having just tried this using the same font, I'm not experiencing any issues...

Are you able to upload a sample Affinity file so we can take a look at what may be causing the issue for you?

Attached an aphoto/SVG fileforum file.zip.  It's a bit big but since I have little idea what most of it means, I didn't know what options to select, so I thought it was best to deselect anything that sounded like it would interfere with the quality. 

 

9 hours ago, Paul Mc said:

I tried as well and it seems to work fine for me. Here's an overlay on your samples:

 

Of course we might not have exactly the same font files and that might be the cause.

 

Thanks I appreciate you guys helping here. Bare in mind though, that I had the stroke set to 6 and set as "align to outside", and that the text was filled with a PNG before I converted it. So maybe one of those could be the reason you're getting different results?

Anyway here is the aphoto file and SVGforum file.zip, also for some reason Inkscape is also the only program that keeps the glitter image resolution intact. AI and Affinity both pixelate it while it's in SVG form.

I should also mention that when importing it into AI, I get this error but I am unsure what it means :

Cheers guys!

[true_blue1878]

Update: I edited my last comment to include the aphoto file as well as the SVG. 

I also noticed that it exported the kiss-cut contour path with a 1px stroke as a 1px solid shape! So had to fix that as well by deleting the outer path and removing fill, setting stroke.

I am also trying to unscrew the mess AI has made of the layers. Not sure why it's done all this crazy separation and excessive grouping, or why it's created spare black text shapes! (they're not the white spot shapes either, they're on a lower group).

I also don't know why some are called path and some are called compound path. There doesn't seem to be any pattern to that either.

Question: Will the printer care if some are compound paths??

Having an absolute nightmare.. I need to find a printer who uses Affinity for next time, because I'm not doing this again in my next project, and AI is utter rubbish in my humble, unbiased opinion. I couldn't even add an outside stroke to my text in there. I could only achieve center stroke in AI. Which is why I had to export it all as curves from Affinity. I begrudge the £25 for one month just to get bogged down with all this lunacy it's created  rant over lol

[lacerto]

11 hours ago, true_blue1878 said:

I am also trying to unscrew the mess AI has made of the layers. Not sure why it's done all this crazy separation and excessive grouping, or why it's created spare black text shapes! (they're not the white spot shapes either, they're on a lower group).

I think that this issue was cursorily discussed in another post you made. The main thing to understand is that there is basically no vector file format that can fully transfer complex native features and document structures (something like grouping, or "Layer" layers of Affinity Designer and Publisher documents) into another (competing) app. 

Some apps, like CorelDRAW and Illustrator, have mutually shared code to support importing and exporting of certain versions of each others' native file formats, but this is at best very limited, so if you need to be able to open, save, import and export Adobe Illustrator compatible PDF, EPS or AI, you simply just need to use Adobe Illustrator. By default, when you save from Illustrator using AI, PDF and EPS file formats, additional Illustrator-only specific code that uses native data that is not readily available to another apps, is also included in the save file.

Also, whenever other apps can save in PDF, EPS and AI formats, it does not mean that the equivalent native features of these apps would be included (typically not even embedded to be reused by these originating apps), and even if they were, they could (and basically would) not be interpreted by Illustrator when opening or importing these file formats.

EPS format produced by Affinity apps is mediocre and inadequate for professional sharing of print data even if useful in some limited scope, and generic PDF was not created for exchange of editable information so any extended capabilities included (similar as saved by Illustrator) are basically only available to the originating app (and to apps that can reasonably well reverse engineer these features, like Xara). PDF layers, which Affinity apps, too, can create from specific layer types labelled as "Layer", are not identical with native layers of AI and InDesign.

Document structure can be shared between different apps to some extent when saving to SVG file format but this format is RGB-only and is pretty elementary in context of print production.

So if you expect that Affinity Designer native layers would be saved when you export to PDF, or EPS, your assumption is probably based on behavior in Illustrator where this kind of saving of native data by default happens, and accordingly this information is retrievable when reading back that file using Illustrator. But very few other apps can interpret and convert these features to native properties accurately. 

It is probably correct to assume that there are deliberate acts involved in making exchange of fully editable vector based information difficult, but Adobe certainly is not the only "guilty" party here. I do not think that it would be impossible for competing apps to do something similar as Adobe, that is, extend PDF, EPS and native file formats in a way that allows embedding at least some native editing capabilities in these file formats and making them available (public) even for other apps. Affinity apps have done this in a very limited scope when they read back the PDF layers they themselves export (layers of type "Layer", which are so called PDF or OCG layers, though not document-wide like when created by other apps but page-wide). in versions 1 of Affinity apps the document Layer layer structure was flattened to the root level when PDF was read back but layer names and content were retained, but in versions 2 nested layer structure is supported (at least to 3rd level). This is an interesting and welcome improvement, but unfortunately not well supported by other apps, so even if e.g. Adobe Acrobat shows correctly the nested layer structure, most apps do what Illustrator (at least CS6) does when opening such PDFs: ignore the OCG layers (even ones created by Adobe apps) and just flatten everything to root level without retaining any layer grouping. VectorStyler and Inkscape do this, while CorelDRAW and Xara do pretty much the same as Affinity v1 apps did so retain layer names and contents but flatten them to root level. 

But more generally the only well-working solution is really do what you mentioned and find a print-shop that directly supports Affinity apps and can open native file formats for editing (that pretty much applies to any vector graphics app).

[true_blue1878]

On 6/17/2023 at 6:59 AM, lacerto said:

I think that this issue was cursorily discussed in another post you made. The main thing to understand is that there is basically no vector file format that can fully transfer complex native features and document structures (something like grouping, or "Layer" layers of Affinity Designer and Publisher documents) into another (competing) app. 

Some apps, like CorelDRAW and Illustrator, have mutually shared code to support importing and exporting of certain versions of each others' native file formats, but this is at best very limited, so if you need to be able to open, save, import and export Adobe Illustrator compatible PDF, EPS or AI, you simply just need to use Adobe Illustrator. By default, when you save from Illustrator using AI, PDF and EPS file formats, additional Illustrator-only specific code that uses native data that is not readily available to another apps, is also included in the save file.

Also, whenever other apps can save in PDF, EPS and AI formats, it does not mean that the equivalent native features of these apps would be included (typically not even embedded to be reused by these originating apps), and even if they were, they could (and basically would) not be interpreted by Illustrator when opening or importing these file formats.

EPS format produced by Affinity apps is mediocre and inadequate for professional sharing of print data even if useful in some limited scope, and generic PDF was not created for exchange of editable information so any extended capabilities included (similar as saved by Illustrator) are basically only available to the originating app (and to apps that can reasonably well reverse engineer these features, like Xara). PDF layers, which Affinity apps, too, can create from specific layer types labelled as "Layer", are not identical with native layers of AI and InDesign.

Document structure can be shared between different apps to some extent when saving to SVG file format but this format is RGB-only and is pretty elementary in context of print production.

So if you expect that Affinity Designer native layers would be saved when you export to PDF, or EPS, your assumption is probably based on behavior in Illustrator where this kind of saving of native data by default happens, and accordingly this information is retrievable when reading back that file using Illustrator. But very few other apps can interpret and convert these features to native properties accurately. 

It is probably correct to assume that there are deliberate acts involved in making exchange of fully editable vector based information difficult, but Adobe certainly is not the only "guilty" party here. I do not think that it would be impossible for competing apps to do something similar as Adobe, that is, extend PDF, EPS and native file formats in a way that allows embedding at least some native editing capabilities in these file formats and making them available (public) even for other apps. Affinity apps have done this in a very limited scope when they read back the PDF layers they themselves export (layers of type "Layer", which are so called PDF or OCG layers, though not document-wide like when created by other apps but page-wide). in versions 1 of Affinity apps the document Layer layer structure was flattened to the root level when PDF was read back but layer names and content were retained, but in versions 2 nested layer structure is supported (at least to 3rd level). This is an interesting and welcome improvement, but unfortunately not well supported by other apps, so even if e.g. Adobe Acrobat shows correctly the nested layer structure, most apps do what Illustrator (at least CS6) does when opening such PDFs: ignore the OCG layers (even ones created by Adobe apps) and just flatten everything to root level without retaining any layer grouping. VectorStyler and Inkscape do this, while CorelDRAW and Xara do pretty much the same as Affinity v1 apps did so retain layer names and contents but flatten them to root level. 

But more generally the only well-working solution is really do what you mentioned and find a print-shop that directly supports Affinity apps and can open native file formats for editing (that pretty much applies to any vector graphics app).

Thanks for your in-depth explanation! I really hope more printers start to support Affinity, because Illustrator just isn't good enough. Everything that seems simple and logical that I like in Affinity is painstakingly complicated in Illustrator. (The lack of outside stroke for text for instance)..  there is a way around it, but its just a ridiculous process and probably actually a program "glitch" in order to get it done. If anyone is interested, you basically have to use the appearance panel to apply a new stroke and fill, then drag the stroke to be underneath the fill. Which only works sometimes. I still haven't figured out why or how. Or even if it'll open up that way after exporting. So I decided to just stick with converting text to curves to be safe. But atleast now, I can create the text in AI so I avoid that strange issue above. More here: AI forum post

Only small issue now is the text spacing just doesn't have the same look to it as it did in Affinity, and playing with the character settings I can't seem to emulate the right look! There also isn't a option for "mitre" % so you get 3 basic options of jagged, round and bevel or something like that. I'll have to just settle for just as close to it as I can get. 

Hotkeys in AI are all wrong to me, as if they've designed it specifically to be unnatural to a windows user. You also can't right-click anything.. it all has to be done with hotkeys. It's such a ball ache, I don't know why people hype it so much lol. But unfortunately this printer I've chosen only uses AI and at first, I thought it would be a simple task of just exporting to PDF for them, but nope.. that didn't work and I couldn't understand why so I went and paid for a month of AI just to see the mess he was getting. Then I have spent this last week trying to un-screw the project from an AI perspective. 

So let this hopefully be a warning to anyone who thinks they can send their Affinity designs to a printer.. you will likely run into the same problems and have to redo the entire project in AI unless they happen to support Affinity. I haven't seen anyone who does though, so far!

If anyone has recommendations of an Affinity-friendly printer please let me know! 

Thanks all!