Working with esp files, help needed

[ArthurN]

Hello,

I’m new to Affinity Designer, bought it for my iPad. On my PC I have Adobe Illustrator installed and I’m not a professional user, so I will explain every step I take.

Very often for my business presentations infographics I use commercial esp files from depositephotos.com that have multiple images on a single page, like the one that I attached below. I would usually open this esp file in Adobe Illustrator, select the image, click object-ungroup, click outside the image. Now I can select any object by clicking on it. Typically I would then copy and paste this object onto a new page and assemble the infographic illustration for my presentation.

I thought I would be able to do exactly the same thing on my iPad while traveling with Affinity Designer and I was excited by this thought. But I can’t. If I ungroup (or ungroup all) the image, it is broken to basic elements and I can’t select all of them to have a complete object that I can then use.

I read this forum and there was a similar question, but the solution doesn’t work for me. Basically it recommended to move all object on a single layer, so that all of the object elements can be selected and then select the object and group. This doesn’t work for me however- the object might be selected by other objects and elements and I can’t select just what I want. 

I’m sure there’s a solution for this. This would make my life a lot easier. In fact, this is the only reason why I purchased Affinity Designer.

Thank you in advance.

8_MTUwMy5pMDM5LjAyNQ.eps

[DM1]

Hi Arthur,

Loading your file and looking at the layers it appears that the individual objects have not been grouped, or more likely AD has not honoured the original groupings. The whole project is basically just a collection of many hundreds of individual curves. For example to copy a. House object you need to select all the curves associated with that House object (they are not conveniently grouped as 'House'). Clearly not practical and not what you want it to do.

Maybe this is a (another) bug? Hopefully the moderators can clarify further.

[ArthurN]

Hello,

Thank you for your answer. Yes, I didn’t see any object groupings in AD, in fact. But that’s how all esp files come from depositphotos.com These files with collections of objects are meant to be reused in deigns, I personally, not being good at making designs myself, use them for my presentations at work. In Adobe Illustrator I can select each object individually. I was dreaming about using AD during my trips for this.

[Alfred]

17 minutes ago, ArthurN said:

that’s how all esp files come from depositphotos.com

I think you meant EPS, but you’re by no means the first user to mistype it here!

 

[ArthurN]

Of course, I meant EPS, sorry:)

[Dan C]

Hi ArthurN 

Welcome to the forums

I suspect the file you are opening was created in AI and exported as an EPS file, which will also store a copy of the .ai file in the EPS.  When you open that in AI, you are seeing the AI file, which contains the groups and not the actual EPS file.  When you open the same file in Designer, we open the EPS file which is why the items are no longer in groups.

Unfortunately there's not much of a workaround here, outside of manually selecting objects to be copied to another document, my apologies. 

[ArthurN]

Hello,

Thank you for your answer. Now everything seems to be clear. While there’s no easy solution to my issue, at least I know the reason why.