Exported SVG Stroke Rendered too Wide?

[sheri]

I'm new to Affinity Designer, I'm learning it as I go along.

 

I've done some artwork that is going to a manufacturer. The manufacturer's designer only uses Adobe Illustrator. I know there are no plans to support Export to AI (which would solve my problem) ... I've tried sending PSD, PDF and SVG files. Their designer said they open for him as images, and they can't do the pre-press work, and they need an AI file.

 

So I bought 1 month of Illustrator to see if I can import the Affinity Designer files into AI.

 

First I tried AD > Export PSD > Place in AI. This is awful. It comes in as mostly rasterized images, rather than text and some lines. All of the fonts look very low resolution. I suppose I could increase the resolution of my AD document, but that is still rasterizing text.

 

Next, I tried AD > Export SVG > Place in AI. This works surprisingly well. It brings over all the groups, and the individual objects seem to be mostly intact. Paragraphs of text are brought over as individual letters, which is a bit of a pain as I explain in a moment.

 

The biggest problem with the AD > Export SVG > Place in AI workflow is that objects and text with strokes on them are not the right size in AI. I use (abuse?) strokes on certain shapes and Art Text and individual words in a Text Frame to bold up (embolden?) a font that has no heavier weight. I also used it on curves on an imported EAN-13 barcode (mainly just the numbers).

 

If I re-open the exported SVG in AD, it looks fine. If I open the SVG in Safari or Chrome the *strokes* look fine, but the text in both art text and text frames are mis-positioned kerning/tracking-wise. Some letters overlap. But only w/in the line. Also some fonts do not render 100% correctly in Safari/Chrome ... one font, apple berry, looks hand-drawn and the missing bits go missing when viewed as an SVG.

 

Are there any options that I can tweak on SVG export to get better fidelity for editing in AI? I'd prefer to not have to redo the artwork in AI, but I may be faced with that if I can't figure this out.

[Paul Bravery]

I'm new to Affinity Designer, I'm learning it as I go along.

 

I've done some artwork that is going to a manufacturer. The manufacturer's designer only uses Adobe Illustrator. I know there are no plans to support Export to AI (which would solve my problem) ... I've tried sending PSD, PDF and SVG files. Their designer said they open for him as images, and they can't do the pre-press work, and they need an AI file.

 

So I bought 1 month of Illustrator to see if I can import the Affinity Designer files into AI.

 

First I tried AD > Export PSD > Place in AI. This is awful. It comes in as mostly rasterized images, rather than text and some lines. All of the fonts look very low resolution. I suppose I could increase the resolution of my AD document, but that is still rasterizing text.

 

Next, I tried AD > Export SVG > Place in AI. This works surprisingly well. It brings over all the groups, and the individual objects seem to be mostly intact. Paragraphs of text are brought over as individual letters, which is a bit of a pain as I explain in a moment.

 

The biggest problem with the AD > Export SVG > Place in AI workflow is that objects and text with strokes on them are not the right size in AI. I use (abuse?) strokes on certain shapes and Art Text and individual words in a Text Frame to bold up (embolden?) a font that has no heavier weight. I also used it on curves on an imported EAN-13 barcode (mainly just the numbers).

 

If I re-open the exported SVG in AD, it looks fine. If I open the SVG in Safari or Chrome the *strokes* look fine, but the text in both art text and text frames are mis-positioned kerning/tracking-wise. Some letters overlap. But only w/in the line. Also some fonts do not render 100% correctly in Safari/Chrome ... one font, apple berry, looks hand-drawn and the missing bits go missing when viewed as an SVG.

 

Are there any options that I can tweak on SVG export to get better fidelity for editing in AI? I'd prefer to not have to redo the artwork in AI, but I may be faced with that if I can't figure this out.

Hi sheri, welcome to Affinity Forum.

 

I am a graphic designer with a strong pre-press background.

 

Would you be able to upload the AD file you are needing to export?

 

Without actually seeing how your file is constructed, I'll assume that there are no special 'effects' in it that might rasterise when exported.

 

For text frames & art text, it pays to convert them to curves prior to export.

 

I work with Adobe Creative Suite, CS5 for my employer - InDesign, Photoshop & Illustrator.

I have found that the best way to retain the vector paths in AD, when exporting for Illustrator, is to export to PDF.

Having said that, if I have applied any raster filters, shadows, bitmap fills, the vector shapes end up being rasterised!

 

Best regards,

Paul.

[sheri]

Hi sheri, welcome to Affinity Forum.

 

I am a graphic designer with a strong pre-press background.

 

Would you be able to upload the AD file you are needing to export?

 

Without actually seeing how your file is constructed, I'll assume that there are no special 'effects' in it that might rasterise when exported.

 

For text frames & art text, it pays to convert them to curves prior to export.

 

I work with Adobe Creative Suite, CS5 for my employer - InDesign, Photoshop & Illustrator.

I have found that the best way to retain the vector paths in AD, when exporting for Illustrator, is to export to PDF.

Having said that, if I have applied any raster filters, shadows, bitmap fills, the vector shapes end up being rasterised!

 

Hi Paul, thanks for replying, and the suggestions.

 

I have exported the AD file as PDF, PSD and SVG. PDF does keep the fidelity of the original AD file, but only if I export text as curves ... and then the resulting import is not really editable. None of the structure comes across unlike the SVG export. 

 

If I open the AD Exported PDF file w/ text as text, then I get a warning:

 

The document contains PDF objects that have been reinterpreted:

To preserve appearance, some text has been outlined.

 

 

 

When I look at the resulting file, again none of the structure has been preserved making it difficult to edit. But all the stroke widths are roughly 4x their AD size. For example, I have a 3pt stroke on text in AD, and that results in a 12.5 pt stroke in Illustrator. Another Art Text object went from a 1pt stroke to a 4.167 stroke in Illustrator. And yet another increased the AD stroke from 0.65pt to 2.708pt in Illustrator.

 

This 4.167 multiplier is actually what is happening to the AD exported SVG as imported by Illustrator.

 

I can upload or make available my AD file. But I am not doing any special effects that I am aware of. Basically the AD file is very simple and looks like:

 

3 "top-level" groups that comprise sections of a folded insert

Each group contains Art Text, or Text Frames. The text is normally just text, although individual letters may be colored, or have tracking/kerning or horizontal/vertical scaling applied. Some %age of the text has a Stroke Width applied (typically 0.15, 0.65, 1 or 3pt).

 

There are some vector brush curves. A few pen-tool objects (with fill).

 

Things that *might* rasterize ... I have an EAN-13 barcode PDF object that I imported. I have 1 bitmap object I brought over from Photoshop.

 

None of my objects have special effects applied (inner/outer glows, shadows, patterns, partial opacity, etc.)

 

It looks like there is something that AD Export (of PDF and SVG) that Illustrator doesn't like regarding Strokes that is increasing them by 4.167x. 

[MEB]

Hi sheri,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

There was some considerable improvements to our import/export code since the latest Mac App Store update. I advise you to try the latest Beta and see if you still have trouble with your files. If there's still issues, can you please posts a sample file here (you can remove everything except the problematic objects) so we can check out what's going on?

If you prefer you can send it to support@seriflabs.com along with a small explanation of the issues and a link to this thread.

All files will be deleted after being inspected.

Thanks.

[sheri]

Hi sheri,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

There was some considerable improvements to our import/export code since the latest Mac App Store update. I advise you to try the latest Beta and see if you still have trouble with your files. If there's still issues, can you please posts a sample file here (you can remove everything except the problematic objects) so we can check out what's going on?

If you prefer you can send it to support@seriflabs.com along with a small explanation of the issues and a link to this thread.

All files will be deleted after being inspected.

Thanks.

 

Hi MEB,

 

I just tried the 5-June-15 Beta linked above. The first thing I noticed after importing my document is that the Beta does not render the strokes on objects that are causing me problems. (See attached photos of MAS Affinity Designer and Affinity Designer Beta). If I just select the object, and then touch the stroke control as if to change it, it then immediately renders it correctly in the Beta.

 

Once I exported to PDF and opened in Illustrator, the 4.167 multiplication of stroke widths still seems to be happening (see attached screen shot).

 

Attached is the AD file that I'm working from. Any suggestions are welcome at this point.

 

My document as rendered in the MAS Affinity Designer

 

My document as rendered in the Affinity Designer Beta. Note that the words Wonder Chalk, Liquid Chalk Markers, the nib description (6mm reversible), yellow and orange text frame text, and italicized text, as well as the URL and "Made in China" text all are missing the stroke width.

 

Error received when I try to import the PDF into Adobe Illustrator. Assuming this has to do w/ my stroked elements.

 

Notice the Stroke outline width of 12.5pt—it's 3pt in AD so it has been multiplied by 4.167x on export/import. Only the top Wonder Chalk was "fixed" by selecting and adjusting the stroke width w/in AD Beta. The other untouched items render fine here on the export. But they don't have the stroke width applied that I want.

 

WC Neon 10-pack Insert r3.afdesign

This is the file I'm working from.

[Dave Harris]

Hi MEB,

 

The first thing I noticed after importing my document is that the Beta does not render the strokes on objects that are causing me problems.

 

Ah. I can explain that. It's because the stroke has a width but no fill. In the MAS version, we render with the main text fill instead. Later we decided that was wrong - it's different to how rectangles and other shapes behave - so we changed it. We should have made sure the appearance of old documents weren't affected. That got overlooked, for which I can only apologise. We'll fix it ASAP.

 

 

Notice the Stroke outline width of 12.5pt—it's 3pt in AD so it has been multiplied by 4.167x on export/import.

 

This appears to be a Illustrator bug. The PDF I export looks correct in Acrobat Pro, and in Safari, Inkscape, InDesign and Photoshop; Illustrator is the only app I've found that draws it differently. The preview you get doing File > Open in Illustrator shows it correctly. I would take Acrobat to be definitive on how it should look. I'll see if we can work around this; meanwhile you might want to report it to Adobe.

 

 

 

Error received when I try to import the PDF into Adobe Illustrator. Assuming this has to do w/ my stroked elements.

 

It looks like the warning is due to the TM character. If I hide both of them, export to PDF, the PDF loads without a warning into Illustrator. I don't know why Illustrator warns about it.

[Dave Harris]

Text strokes not rendering will be fixed in the next beta. I'm sorry again for the inconvenience.

 

I've had a look at how we export the stroke width, to see if we could work around Illustrator's problem, and I'm afraid in the short-term we can't. Currently our PDF export is based on Apple's Core Graphics library, and it seems to be a quirk of that. However, we are in the process of rewriting PDF export with a different library, and we should be able to fix it with that, probably in the next few months.

[sheri]

Text strokes not rendering will be fixed in the next beta. I'm sorry again for the inconvenience.

 

I've had a look at how we export the stroke width, to see if we could work around Illustrator's problem, and I'm afraid in the short-term we can't. Currently our PDF export is based on Apple's Core Graphics library, and it seems to be a quirk of that. However, we are in the process of rewriting PDF export with a different library, and we should be able to fix it with that, probably in the next few months.

 

Thanks, Dave. Looking forward both to the next beta, and the PDF export library rewrite. I assume that will be after AP is released.

[Dave Harris]

Yes, the PDF export changes won't make the Photo launch.

[ashf]

This problem still exists in V2.
need to be fixed.