From the course: Inkscape Essential Training

Importing documents from Adobe Illustrator - Inkscape Tutorial

From the course: Inkscape Essential Training

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Importing documents from Adobe Illustrator

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- [Instructor] From time to time as you're working in Inkscape, you may need to open files from Adobe Illustrator or you might have to save files for someone else to work on an Illustrator. So let's take a look at what works and what doesn't between these two programs. The good news is that when it comes to saving files from Inkscape to open in Illustrator, it's pretty simple. Illustrator can open SVG files and it does support most of the things that you can build in an Inkscape file. One notable thing that Illustrator does not support coming out of Inkscape, is flowed text. If you have flowed text you have to convert it to regular text in Inkscape. Otherwise the text will just disappear when the file is open in Illustrator. We'll talk more about this feature later on so you can see how flowed text works and how to convert it to regular text. If you're going from Illustrator to Inkscape you have options. First, you can save as SVG in Illustrator. Note that you'll get the cleanest code and the smallest file size by turning off the option to preserve Illustrator editing capabilities when you save. And of course, if you're going to edit the file in Illustrator later on, make sure that you do this on a copy of the file. If you don't have access to an SVG version of an Illustrator file, your other option is to open the Illustrator file directly with Inkscape. Inkscape can open native Illustrator files from Illustrator 9 and later, if those files were saved with the option 'create PDF compatible file' turned on. And that's the embedded PDF version of the Illustrator file that Inkscape actually opens. In either case, whether you open as an Illustrator file or an SVG from Illustrator, understand that things which are specific to the Illustrator file, like layers, swatches, textiles and some appearance attributes, will be lost. So let's open an Illustrator file with Inkscape from the exercise files. I'll click open and I get a PDF import settings dialog box because Inkscape is opening the embedded PDF in the Illustrator file. I can only import one art board into an Inkscape file. So if my Illustrator file contains multiple art boards, I'll have to choose which one I want here in select page. This particular file has just one art board so the menu is grayed out. I can also clip the file to any of the boxes supported in PDF here. Note that Illustrators gradient meshes are not supported in Inkscape. If you have them, you can choose whether to rasterize them, with the Poppler Cairo option here. This will convert them into pixels or convert them into a group of separate vector objects with the internal import option here. And the number of objects is controlled by this slider going from rough to very fine. So I'm going to leave precision at rough and use internal import and click okay. And Inkscape does its best to recreate the appearance of the PDF content. On the left, this object was a blend in Illustrator and it looks pretty good, but remember it's not a live blend that I can make edits to. It's just a group of a bunch of separate objects. And if I click on the object that was a gradient mesh in Illustrator and press the number three on my keyboard to zoom in on it, it actually looks pretty bad. Remember that we use the rough setting so we get a group of objects that approximates a piece of low res art. Now to fix this, I could try opening this file again and increasing the precision value or selecting the Poppler Cairo option in a way get a much nicer result. But Rasterizing this part of the image will increase my file size and make things harder to edit. I'll press the number five on my keyboard to zoom back out and fit the page in the window. On the right, I have a star that had a fill and two strokes in Illustrator but it's now three separate objects here in Inkscape. And the text came in as editable text, which I can edit with the text tool. And here are a few other things to watch out for when you go from Illustrator to Inkscape. CMYK and spot colors will be converted to RGB colors and Illustrator transparency effects and blending modes are not preserved in Inkscape. But the news isn't all bad. Things that do work, coming from Illustrator, include patterns, masks and clipping paths and graphs maintain their appearance but they're not editable as graphs. They're just regular objects. So to sum up, it's true that you lose some features when you transfer files between Inkscape and Illustrator. But the fact that Illustrator supports SVG and Inkscape supports PDF, gives you the option to move basic artwork from one program to another. Just watch out for specific trouble spots like flowed text coming from Inkscape and gradient meshes coming from Illustrator.

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