file format troubles…

[prisca]

hi,

 

I'm not sure what going wrong - but I cannot get a very simple page correctly opened illustrator, not as PDF, not as SVG, nor EPS.
(I need to go back to AI for some custom borders I created as art brushes)

i created the file in AD - exported in different formats, yet none work well.

I wanted use SVG  - AI tells me I need to verify the SVG as it's invalid.
I tried PDF, same as below
I tried EPS, same as below

 

The background shape consists of shapes, all grouped in AD. Yet when opened in AI - these flat, solid coloured, indiviudal shapes are converted to a single bitmap image?

 

Am I doing anything wrong here?


see this screenshot, very much a work in progress -
EPS open in AI, left 2 windows — original in AD, on the right:

[Dave Harris]

I've no idea about the SVG. We'd need to look at the Designer file.

 

PDF export rasterises objects if it doesn't know a better way to represent them. I can't say what the problem was here without seeing the file, but some kinds of clipping can cause it.

[prisca]

the AD file

 

I'm not doing anything fancy at all… as I could not figure out how to merge the shapes while keeping their integrity, I've merely grouped them.
hope this will tell you something…

 

[prisca]

Time was running out on me in the end and I had to revert back to AI for this one, just to get it done on time…
here's what I was trying to achieve with the illustration ~ you can see the texture fills which are the ones giving me trouble in AD at this point.

 

 

the full page:

 

[for reference, the final piece as PDF]

[MattP]

I'd just actually had a look at this - there were two issues, both of which are things for us to fix, but you can work around them in the meantime...

 

The '&' character was breaking the SVG export - we're obviously not escaping the character at output time so it is treated as a special character in the SVG and makes the file invalid. You can get around this temporarily by just leaving a blank or using 'and' instead

 

The background is rasterised as an image because of the blend mode set on some of the layers in the 'shape' layer. All containers should be set to Passthrough blend mode (the default) or they will cause the composite at present. Simply set them back to Passthrough and it should stop rasterising the shapes :)

 

I'll ask Dave to look at this when he gets back to the office on Tuesday :)

 

Thanks again,

Matt

[prisca]

Thanks, MattP :)

 

Not sure which '&' was breaking the SVG? Inside my text?

Glad you know what caused it :)

 

and thanks for the work-around suggestion - will keep that mind.

[Dave Harris]

The '&' issue is fixed in the next beta.

[prisca]

great news ~ thank you :)

[MaxClass]

Hello,

 

New member here but an Illustrator user since 1987 but no longer will pay their exorbitant price for AI only so was thrilled to find AD.

 

I also use a CAD program called “Turbo CAD” for Mac version 7 and it will export AI format files and does so in the simplest of AI straight ascii text format similar to version 3 of AI. There is no reason I can think of why AD should not be able to open the exported AI format. In 1989 I wrote a program for the Mac Sign Market called “SignPost” that read all AI files and exported them directly to Vinyl Sign Cutting equipment. If I ran into something in the file that I did not supported I simply moved on instead of halting the file read process since you can only “cut” paths.

 

Based upon that I feel that AD should at least use that approach too. Don’t stop reading a file just because you run into one thing you don’t understand. At least the user will be able to open the file and anything missing can be reported to you for further fixing. This way we can narrow down the offending ( or missing) portion of the file rather than simple reporting that it can’t open it with absolutely no exact reason reported to the user. As an Apple software developer of many years I understand the need to know exactly why an error occurred and exactly what is causing it before you can fix it.

 

As someone who has been parsing AI file since 1987 I am fully aware that this can be done quite easily. If you go around any parts that it can not handle and and read in whatever it can then the missing part of the file, once opened, is the offending culprit and leads directly to where the problem is. opening AI Ver 3 files should be the simplest of tasks since there is a bare minimum of header information. Not like pages in later versions.

 

So far I love the overall user interface, pallets and features with contextual and applicable options. Overall a very intuitive process. Please continue the great work on this project.

 

Max

[MattP]

Hi Max,

 

Welcome to the forums! Glad you're enjoying the product so far.

 

Affinity Designer does not attempt to open AI files that do not have the compatibility PDF stream in them - in the same way that Adobe's own InDesign and PhotoShop also require it. We haven't attempted to write an importer for earlier versions of AI files simply because it has not been seen as a large market. This is why your older AI files will fail to read - it's not that we reach one element we can't read and then give up, it's that there is no code to try to open them at all unless they are in the file format we decided to implement. Often you may find that if an application is able to write a very old AI file that it is also able to write a EPS file (which we can open very successfully) or even just print to an EPS/PDF file that we could open, so there are alternatives. As with any development, you have to invest your resources in the areas that will benefit the majority of people :)

 

If you try to load any of the file formats we do support, you will see that we have done exactly as you have described already - i.e. unsupported tags and streams may be skipped so that the user's work is still imported as fully as possible, and then (where appropriate) the user is informed that the file was opened with warnings.

 

Thanks,

Matt

[MaxClass]

Matt,

 

Thanks for the information and your reasonings. Maybe down the road when the release versions is finally out you will be able to add support for some older versions as I am sure that many users have older format files they would love to open up and bring up to current specs.

 

Max



[MattP]

Yes, of course :) We will always listen to users and make sure our product development is answering their needs :)

 

Matt

[MaxClass]

Last question here.

 

Is the file format of AD proprietary?

 

I tried to open a file using “TextWrangler” and it is complete gibberish. Could have something to do with a setting in “Text Wrangler” but Illustrator files always open a pure ascii text.

 

Max



[MattP]

It's a closed file format - we've invested a lot of time and money into the technology in our application including its file format, so we're not planning to open it to other developers at this point. The idea is that with solid import and export it shouldn't matter anyway as you'll be able to get your work out as something you can use in another product - but in the fullness of time we obviously want to be good enough that you'll never need that other product in the first place ;)

[Ben]

I'd like to add to what Matt said.

We decided through our collective experience to write a file format focused on speed and optimal size, and that can efficiently leverage future technologies such as Cloud. For this reason we completely abandoned any idea that a file should be in any way human readable. Parsing large files from human readable forms is always slow, and the files are always larger that their raw binary equivalent. It makes more sense to store data in the rawest form so that you don't have to convert the entire contents using complicate parsing. I have seen many examples of where XML has been used for files. Fine for small test files, but when you start getting significantly large documents, the whole thing starts to grind, and 99% of the time it was later accepted to be a bad choice.

 

To see how our file format helps. Import a very large PSD file into AD, save it out as our file format, then close and reopen the file. I am confident that our file format will load in a fraction of the time.

[japtor]

Matt,

 

Thanks for the information and your reasonings. Maybe down the road when the release versions is finally out you will be able to add support for some older versions as I am sure that many users have older format files they would love to open up and bring up to current specs.

 

Max



  

Yes, of course :) We will always listen to users and make sure our product development is answering their needs :)

 

Matt

Good to know, cause I'm one of those folks with some really old AI files around. I haven't had a real vector drawing app in years so I bought AD to finally fill that hole, then got disappointed when I still couldn't open a lot of the stuff I had. Some of it was from way way back, others I think I downloaded off the web not that long ago. I realize it's not a huge pressing issue but it'd be really nice to have, I could see the latter situation in particular (with older stuff just perpetually being passed around) coming up for others.

[MEB]

japtor,

Those are proprietary formats and as such their specs are not openly available. This means they have to use reverse engineering to understand the format specs and implement them in Affinity import/export. This takes time. All this have been improving during the beta and i'm sure they will continue to work on them and improve over time. They are also supporting other now obsolete formats like Freehand, so i think that's quite promising.