[Affinity Publisher] Illustrator .ai file places as monochrome white instead of full colour

[IvanOz]

Hello, hoping someone might suggest why an Illustrator CS5 native file, when placed into Affinity Publisher would display as a monochrome white image instead of in full CMYK colour. The screen grab attached shows the original file opened in Illustrator on the right side, while on the left is shown the file placed on an Affinity Publisher page, on the page alone and also on a solid magenta panel. Thanks in advance for any help provided.

 

Affinity Feather Test.ai

[iaing]

I opened your .ai file and it looks like each piece of the feather is a gradient mesh. Affinity understands .ai files as they're basically pdfs (I believe?) but can't cope with the gradient mesh part so it's turning the fills to white instead. Looks like exporting as an svg from illustrator brings it in to Publisher OK, but I haven't looked too closely.

[IvanOz]

Thanks so much for your prompt reply iaing. The feather illustration is not mine (wish I had the talent and patience) and I have very little experience with gradient mesh. I appreciate how complex the file will be and your explanation makes a lot of sense. I've tried placing an SVG but it appears to be losing some fine detail. I opened the .ai file in Photoshop then re-saved it as a .psd file. That looks fine in Publisher and seems to be the best solution at this stage. I don't yet have Affinity Designer to test that route for the native file. Do you think Affinity Publisher will develop to a stage where it can handle files like this without any tinkering? Thanks again.

[Alfred]

19 hours ago, iaing said:

Affinity understands .ai files as they're basically pdfs (I believe?) but can't cope with the gradient mesh part so it's turning the fills to white instead.

The Affinity apps can’t read the proprietary AI format. When you save a file from Adobe Illustrator, by default it uses the ‘Save as PDF-compatible file’ option which includes a PDF stream: Affinity only reads the PDF stream, so anything missing from that stream will be missing from the imported version of the file.