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Affinity export text as SVG, import in PSD


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Hey guys,

Does anyone know if Photoshop 2017 can open svg text as editable text? I really hate Photoshop, I really love Affinity, but I still need some way to provide psd files to some of my clients.

 

So I noticed that if I export text as SVG from Affinity, I can keep it as text, and if I inspect it in any browser, I will get the exact info of the font ( font family, size, color, weight, style, line heights, everything). Can I import such a SVG containing text into Photoshop 2017 and see it as editable text in Photoshop? Did anyone try this? I would pay like an idiot for a Photoshop license monthly just for that, and that will make me hate Photoshop even more :D

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@chris.bannu Yes they tell "Text will be converted to shapes on export". Also for import then "Advanced styling, tspan, and textPath are not supported", pretty the same crap as AD does here, which also doesn't support these things. :(

SVG import/export is pretty bad on most vector drawing tools, many SVG elements aren't recognized and adapted correctly during parsing and thus are often not supported at all here. The only exception maybe might be SVG based tools like Inkscape and webbrowsers here, which do support most stuff of the SVG specs.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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@v_kyr Yeah I'm waiting anxiously for the AD to PSD editable text export update. Anyway, I think that on the long run, more and more people are going to switch from Adobe to Affinity, and not just because of the small price, but because it's far better. But man I hope that this year this update will be live. I don't wanna have to use another software for graphics, I'm getting along to well with Affinity.

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Well even in Illustrator it seems not to be this straight forward to save as editable PSD files. - Related to AD time will show, the Adobe products are very feature rich and it will get hard to come close to all that stuff that these tools do nowadays offer here. Add to that, that they sadly also best know to read/write their established and overall in the industry used and shared file formats. So I have some scepticism here that things will change that soon. All in all I think most people do switch more due to their cloud based distribution and leasing model costs here, which isn't that great for the lone fighters and -even many people won't admit it- also due to the said overall pricing here.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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@v_kyr I'm talking only as a ui designer, and I have to say I don't use Photoshop simply because the UX is bad. To me nothing makes sense. For example, I usually learn 80% of a software without the help file, just by playing around in it. When I stumble upon something that I can't learn without the help file, I hate it from the start, because it's not intuitive :) Except for Flash, for which I had to use the help file, but only because it was a bit more complex and new to me, since it's got all sorts of stuff, like animations, coding etc, Photoshop was the only software that made me feel like I'm scratching my nose with my feet. Everything is weird, and to me it doesn't make sense. For example, changing the X/Y coordinates of a shape: select shape tool, click right, select Free Transform, and then the X/Y coordinates appear in the properties panel :D WHY? Why not just click on the object and the X/Y coordinates appear instantly? Why several selection tools? :D It just doesn't have a logic. And for me, if an app isn't fun to work with, it's not worth working with. This is the only reason I don't wanna use Photoshop, I would be willing to pay their ridiculous fees if I actually enjoyed working with their app. But I don't. 

 

So, I don't know about Affinity Photo, I don't do print design/photo manipulation, I only work with shapes and text for websites and apps, and from my point of view, Affinity is by far the best tool I've ever used. And I'll advocate for its use whenever I get the chance, on forums, discussions etc. I feel very excited that I found it, and, even if it's not perfect, overall I haven't used anything better, and I really enjoy working with it :)

 

It's still a very very young app, but I think that it will gain more and more popularity.

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Well personally I use PS/PSE mainly for bitmap manipulations, aka photo retuching and such things, sometimes also for flyers, posters, adverts, making web buttons and banners etc. I also tend to use it a lot for custom actions and scripting purposes, so to say to automate often needed repetitive photo tasks. But I don't use PS for vector based things, I also don't use Illustrator here. - There are other tools which I'm more comfortable with and more used to related to vector drawing, though I use these other tools mostly on Windows.

If you are long time used to something and know how it works and how to get the results you are looking after with that, then you use that tool. It's pretty much common usage then for you, since you know most of it's tools and shortcuts still while sleeping, you learned all this over time. - Every software's UI is also a matter of habit, the more you use it and work with it the more it get's into flesh and blood here.

 

 

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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Why not consider other file formats to export to for your Photoshop clients such as EPS or PDF?

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9  
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10 hours ago, v_kyr said:

All in all I think most people do switch more due to their cloud based distribution and leasing model costs here, which isn't that great for the lone fighters and -even many people won't admit it- also due to the said overall pricing here.

Except for in the distant past, my only experience with Photoshop has been with several older versions of Photoshop Elements, which of course is not subscription based. There are several reasons I disliked using it, which considered together made it a no-brainer to buy Affinity Photo & (finally!) banish all trace of PSE from my Macs. Among them:

 

• PSE (& I assume PS) are resource hogs, requiring large amounts of installed RAM to maintain acceptable performance & rely far too much on VM & scratch disks, particularly when I am running several apps concurrently.

• Adobe apps install tons of support files, many of them in obscure or unusual locations, that I have no use for. At least for PSE, there is an 'auto-repair' feature that maddeningly won't let me delete the files I don't need & just run the app without them.

• Adobe relies too much on its own code, much of it originally developed decades ago to simplify cross-platform compatibility, when there are more efficient OS-specific alternatives it could be using instead.

• Despite that, or maybe because of it, every so often the old version of PSE would break after installing an upgraded Mac OS version, so I had to buy a newer version of it to keep using it.

• Adobe relies too much on modal dialogs, I think another consequence of all the old code.

• Based on past experience, I do not trust Adobe to maintain support for services they no longer find profitable but once touted as 'must haves' to users.

• The UI is not really very user-friendly or intuitive. Users just accept it as such after they get enough experience with it.

• Customer support is indifferent at best.

 

I know not all these things apply equally well to the current cloud based stuff, but enough do that I am unlikely ever to buy into the Adobe universe ever again.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
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1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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@v_kyr I do agree about the habit to a certain extent. People can get used to any sort of crap, but it's still a crap :P Personally I never got passed the newbie stage at Photoshop, simply because it's a program that to me doesn't make sense, it's the most unintuitive and fuzzy program I've ever used. Not to mention that it's heavy and expensive. But I could overlook those last two.

 

@firstdefence Well, all clients (absolutely all) ask for the PSD files. I make designs for websites and apps, so using PDF or EPS is a no-no :) In print it's ok, but in ui design, not so much. Plus I would lose all my clients if I couldn't provide PSD files.

 

@R C-R Yes, I feel the same way to about Adobe. Plus, I'll never forgive them for killing Fireworks. But I have to say, I like Affinity a lot better than Fireworks.

 

@MEB Thanks for the answer. Is there anything Photoshop can do? :D So Adobe killed the only good program that could export to psd, including text (Fireworks). Well done Adobe.

 

 

I did find a workaround for exporting text from Affinity to Photoshop and keeping it editable. It's a stupid workaround, but it's probably the only one that exists. I export the text as pdf, then I open it with Illustrator, then save it as .AI, then open it with Fireworks, make the necessary adjustments, and there are quite a few adjustments (adding the line heights, recreating text fields that have more than one line, since the pdf will divide the text field into lines), and then finally export as PSD, and copy the text from the PSD file to the PSD file containing the graphics. Crazy days, huh :D And all that just to NOT use Photoshop. I pray for the update Affinity promised about export text as editable to PSD.

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@R C-R Those are mostly personal matter of opinions and how comfortable everybody feels by using a certain software.

Many things you named aren't IMO that good solved in AP here too. Their UI is also very crippled and some things are difficult to find at all, also not intuitive, if not to say often hidden deeply somewhere inside under unusual places. Performance isn't better either, so also not the overall gleaming gold here, it doesn't behave better or more efficient than for example PSE here for me. Especially when switching platforms vice-versa (Mac to Win) AP is sometimes a nightmare there to use for these performance and behavior related terms (...one reason I don't use any Affinity product actually under Win at all). PS/PSE in contrast here at least behaves much better no matter if I use it on Win or Mac, it behaves pretty much the same for me on both platforms, which is important if you work in both worlds. - Also I tend to use some to me important third party plugins, which all work fine right out of the box in PS and PSE for Win/Mac. Well under AP plugins are actually sadly more or less a joke, the plugin interface there in it's actual state is pretty useless and IMO crap. Honestly I often wonder that the Affinity marketing department is not ashamed to advertise that Photoshop-Plugins API at all. Macros are also another theme here, many things are still not possible to do here with those, which I hope will possibly change in future.

In short, a lot of functionality is still right not there, missing or not error free usable in a more daily working based context for the advertised professional usage. So there is a lot of room for improvements and bug fixes here for the software in order to get a strong contender in this domain. - So it always depends from what perspective you look at it.

 

 

 

 

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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17 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

@R C-R So there is a lot of room for improvements and bug fixes here for the software in order to get a strong contender in this domain. - So it always depends from what perspective you look at it.

 

 

 

 

 

I definitely agree with that, but for what I need, and comparing what other programs have, I'll stay with Affinity. It's not perfect (what is?...), it still has a lot of things that need improvement, but I feel that it's going in the right direction. Affinity for me (Windows) is far faster than Photoshop CS6 btw. It's still a bit laggy sometimes, but nowhere near as slow as PS.

 

But like I said, I'm not a AP user, I don't work with images and stuff like that, I design for the web, so I only use geometry, text and effects, nothing else :) Also, of course I might be biased, I've been a Fireworks user for years, and Affinity actually has a lot in common with Fireworks, as far as workflow. It's basically a much improved version of Fireworks in a way. Much much improved.

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Fireworks was a good one for quick rapid vector and pixel webdesign graphics, though it's additional PNG format data chunks sadly weren't that (re)usable at all by other apps. In past times used Macromedia Freehand and Fireworks a lot, those days much preferable over the Adobe solutions.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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2 hours ago, v_kyr said:

Fireworks was a good one for quick rapid vector and pixel webdesign graphics, though it's additional PNG format data chunks sadly weren't that (re)usable at all by other apps. In past times used Macromedia Freehand and Fireworks a lot, those days much preferable over the Adobe solutions.

Shouldn't these programs have "Ye Olde" before them ;)

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9  
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2 hours ago, firstdefence said:

Shouldn't these programs have "Ye Olde" before them ;)

Presumably, though a lot from those has influenced and been taken over to other apps here.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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4 hours ago, v_kyr said:

R C-R Those are mostly personal matter of opinions and how comfortable everybody feels by using a certain software.

Some are just a matter of my personal preferences but others are based on my hands-on experience with several different versions of PSE that I have run on many different versions of the Mac OS on mostly low end Macs without a lot of installed RAM, on how many times I was forced to buy an upgraded version to keep using the app, on how difficult it was to find & remove all the support files that Adobe's uninstaller left behind (some in system level locations long since deprecated by Apple & no longer supported), & so on.

 

I have no idea what it would have been like if I had been a Windows user or used Macs with two or three times more RAM installed but PSE was never very responsive on any of my Macs; frequently caused the fans to spin up noisily; provided nothing even vaguely close to realtime previews of effects, layer blend modes, or filters; was incapable of smoothly & quickly doing pans or zooms on documents of any size or layer complexity; & in general was annoyingly slow doing almost everything that Affinity Photo can do much more quickly & fluidly that I routinely want to do with that kind of app.

 

I know much of that would be different for other users with different needs but for mine AP is a much better choice. Price is just a small part of it, which is all I wanted to say.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
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59 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I know much of that would be different for other users with different needs but for mine AP is a much better choice. Price is just a small part of it, which is all I wanted to say.

As I said before it always depends on individual needs which vary here. - Price wise it's a bargain compared to full blown PS and overall quite similar to PSE/PRE here which do come as Win & Mac bundle and for Affinity since I would have to buy extra Win & Mac licenses.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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PSE came with a dual platform license that restricted its use to a maximum of two computers at a time. To enforce this restriction, a background process ran on all computers it was installed on so during the launch process it could query all the other computers on the LAN to test for that. This did not always work smoothly, particularly if the network included devices that did not  respond to these queries immediately. This could result in oddly long launch times or occasional mysterious brief stalls on other networked computers. If nothing else, it mean that if it had been installed on several other computers on the LAN, you had to remember to quit it when it wasn't being used to prevent an annoying search for the one that was blocking the launch on the computer you wanted to use it on because you (or another user) forgot to do that on the others.

 

Regarding costs, even with the rebates Adobe offered for users upgrading PSE to the later version compatible with the then current OS, I spent several times more on the initial purchase & those upgrades over a five or six year period than I have spent to date on AP. With AP I avoid the hassle of having to send in any rebate forms to get a refund (which on one occasion Adobe disallowed for reasons it never made clear) or the fiction that the PSE "upgrades" were really little more than a version updated to fix the OS incompatibilities.

 

I suppose it could be said these are among the things that fall into the realm of personal preferences, but for me they are as much about my preference for fair & honest business practices as anything else.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
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Works fine here for PSE on both platforms (usage at the same time in parallel) in the working net, don't know what your problems are with this on your setups. - Related to costs you then made probably something wrong buying at Adobe and didn't informed yourself well, I recall that some now longer time ago we already talked about that theme and as I said then, there are other software reseller third party software bundes available, which do offer these much more on a bargain (...I remember I also showed you an actual advertisment then, though my bundle was bought earlier and cheaper). I got the PSE/PRE (Win/Mac) bundle together with an Wacom tablet for less than 2x Affinity with 20% reduce would cost. - So honestly I can't complain about PSE software prices here.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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Regarding my LAN setup, there was never any indication I or anyone else could find that there was anything wrong or unusual about it, other than that the background process installed as part of the PSE installation (& hidden from normal view with a file name starting with a period in a system level location that no other app ever wrote anything to) did in fact try to query every other device on the network at launch time, & until that process completed, the app would not launch. Beyond that, several kinds of diagnostic tests were performed that, while admittedly none were 100% definitive, all of them pointed to that background process as by far the most likely cause of the issues I reported.

 

Regarding what I did when buying upgrades for PSE, none were bought as part of a third party software bundle; all were registered without difficulties at Adobe using the included product S/N's; the refund requests were all mailed to Adobe well within the refund offer period with all the required original sales slips & other proof of purchase items; & so on. The several times I contacted the the dedicated support method provided with the rebate offer (but not too surprisingly not actually handled by Adobe but by a third party company that handled rebates for Adobe & several other companies) all resulted in what amounted to 'we have no idea why you have not received your refund,' even after sending them photocopies of everything I sent in, which they acknowledged receiving.

 

Basically, it was an exercise in futility, with nobody willing even to say if the refund was actually disallowed, they did not receive it, or what.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
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Hmm sounds strange, but the overall handling with buying and refunding software costs might also be different among countries here, as the laws for buyer protection and rights etc. will be too. In the USA and here in Europe things are probably different in this regard.

I only once bought something directly from Adobe here and that was more a platform switching related update. I still had a NeXT FrameMaker version flying around and wanted to upgrade that to a newer Windows version. After some bla bla with them and approving to them (via a fotocopy of the org FrameMaker media disks) that I have indeed an older Unix/NeXTstep version of that one, they send me the newest Windows version for ~200 bucks. Other than that I bought some other Adobe products from other software distribution channels, which are mostly also by far cheaper here than Adobe itself.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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