Eps export.

[tom d]

Buckle in, this is going to be complicated.

I have an issue with a logo that was created using illustrator. It has gradient fills masked by outline of letters. The logo wasn't created by me but I did use it for a job. I used adobe Indesign and illustrator to do the finished layouts and saved them as eps files.

The logo construction is a mess.No-one would do it this way now. The original eps of the logo displays correctly in preview but drops the Graduation and mask for designer.GLONLC.EPS. I believe that it will open and display OK on illustrator but I don't have that app anymore. But for affinity designer I reconstructed it, reducing the complexity and generally cleaned up the untidiness of itGLONLC.afdesign. But affinity designer still drops the masks when reopening after exporting to eps. Preview still displays it correctly and inscapes opens it and displays and exports it correctly so that it can be opened in designer without the issue of dropping masks. GLONLCink.eps 

I think this is a bug. Or I am missing an option when exporting?

[Old Bruce]

Far too much extraneous stuff in the files (good that you included them, helped me start to see your problem) for me to try and sort out what may be causing the problem.

<OLD MAN RANT> I do wonder why you (and so many others) wish to reopen the eps file in Designer though. EPS is a finished file format, like PDF it is not designed as something to be opened and edited then reopened and edited again and again. </OLD MAN RANT> 

[tom d]

Thanks Old Bruce,

These files are 2 decades old (we are both old). And to tell the truth they never reliably worked. There'd be discoloured banding that looked awful, parts of the the graduation would disappear, showing the red background colour and this would happen randomly. I even remember rejecting proofs because of this and then checking the logo and wondering why the designer chose to do everything the hard way. It's like he chose not to do it elegantly.

The tech might have been new to him.

I wanted to maintain the integrity of the original format because that's how it was imported to the layouts that were originally Quark Xpress files that were then converted to Indesign. I don't want to open and edit them. I want it to place it in a document without dropping the masked graduations. Affinity suite won't play but everything else will now that I've cleaned them up.

[tom d]

I figured it out. The eps option needs to rasterise the graduations. This has to be set in the more menu under rasterise unsupported properties. The pdf setting had that, eps export didn't. I recreated the logo with the same colours and similar typeface capital style remake.afdesign  and then exported to eps capital style remake.eps. 

I also used Inkscape for the same process and this seems to be just how eps files deal with graduations. so there is nothing wrong with affinity designer. It was a missed option all along.