Affinity Designer | Opening Adobe Illustrator files | Document unit pixel point | Bug

[BBG3]

I'm opening many ai files. The unit of the ai files are pixels. But when I open them in Affinity Designer the unit changes from pixels to points.

My 730 pixels artboard turns to 1070.7 points! If I change my Document Units from Points to Pixel, the artboard size becomes 1070.7 px.

I need my artboards to be the same size as the original file.  (*Not all my Adobe Illustrator artboards are the same size.)

How do you guys solve this problem?

[NathanC]

Hi @BBG3,

When .AI files are opened in Designer only the PDF data stream is read, the proprietary .AI data is omitted, which is why .AI files need to be saved out of illustrator with PDF compatibility enabled. Because of this they are imported using Points unit of measurement which is the standard measurement for PDF files, you can freely change this after importing the file in Document Setup.

After importing an .AI file containing two 730x730px artboards at 72DPI into Designer, both artboards have been imported in at 730x730pt/px as expected, could you perhaps provide the .AI file you referenced in your example which imported at 1070.7pt/px?

Many thanks!

[BBG3]

Hi @NathanC

Thanks for your reply.

Here is the file, but I deleted the content so I can share it.

It is very weird that sometimes this problem happens. I couldn't figure out when and why. Today, my 730pt turned to 3333.xx px in Affinity Designer after changing PT to PX, I wanted to screenshot everything from the beginning, but everything went well without any problems!!! 🤔

 

Testing Afinity Designer - changing the sizes pt to px.ai

[Hangman]

Hi @BBG3,

This sounds like a document resolution conversion, e.g., while 730pt = 72px @72dpi, 730pt = 3041px @300dpi.

Do all your Illustrator files use the same resolution or do they use differing resolutions?

[NathanC]

Hi @BBG3,

Thanks for sending over your file,

In this specific example prior to opening the file in Designer, I opened it in illustrator and found that it consisted of two artboards, 'Artboard 61' which when edited in the Artboard panel was 13046x8800.96px:

and a secondary artboard '01' which was 2205x1240.

Since the .AI file is saved out with PDF compatibility these artboards are interpreted in the PDF data stream as pages, since we're opening the file in Designer, PDF pages are converted to artboards. When i've imported the .AI file into Designer at the default 72DPI and then checked the artboard dimensions after converting my document unit of measurement to pixels, these then match up with the dimensions shown in Illustrator:

Page 1 = 'Artboard 61':

Page 2 = '01':

It's important that the .AI file is imported into Designer at 72DPI to maintain the same pixel values that were shown in Illustrator, if you leave the PDF import options on 'Estimate' it may import at a different DPI value skewing the pixel resolution, like in Hangman's example above.

 

[BBG3]

13 hours ago, Hangman said:

Do all your Illustrator files use the same resolution or do they use differing resolutions?

Hi @Hangman, All are the same size. 

[BBG3]

Hi @NathanC, thanks for checking my file. I check everything when I want to open ai files with AD. I don't know why sometimes that problem happens.

Today, I opened the file more than 5 times and I haven't found any issue.

Thank you so much for checking. ❤️