What program has the best import/export filters overall?

[jriemerm]

Friends,

I do 95% of my illustration work in Xara, 5% in CorelDraw, and virtually none in Freehand 8, which I bought years ago before discovering Xara.

However, I occasionally get Illustrator EPS files from contract designers that I need to open for tweaking and exporting, preferably in Xara. Almost never is Xara able to open them well. About 80 percent of the time I can open them in Corel Draw, save as a WMF file, and open the WMF file in Xara. (I've also used CMX rather than WMF to pull into Xara, but WMF has generally worked better for me.) About 20 percent of the time I can't successfully pull them into Xara no matter how I export from Draw, and sometimes Draw can't open them at all.

In my experience, Freehand can almost never do the conversions correctly. I haven't tried Illustrator.

What do folks feel is the best program for converting the widest variety of vector files back and forth, with the end purpose of opening the files into Xara?

thanks,

james

[jriemerm]

Friends,

I do 95% of my illustration work in Xara, 5% in CorelDraw, and virtually none in Freehand 8, which I bought years ago before discovering Xara.

However, I occasionally get Illustrator EPS files from contract designers that I need to open for tweaking and exporting, preferably in Xara. Almost never is Xara able to open them well. About 80 percent of the time I can open them in Corel Draw, save as a WMF file, and open the WMF file in Xara. (I've also used CMX rather than WMF to pull into Xara, but WMF has generally worked better for me.) About 20 percent of the time I can't successfully pull them into Xara no matter how I export from Draw, and sometimes Draw can't open them at all.

In my experience, Freehand can almost never do the conversions correctly. I haven't tried Illustrator.

What do folks feel is the best program for converting the widest variety of vector files back and forth, with the end purpose of opening the files into Xara?

thanks,

james

[ivan louette]

Hello James,

I think the best to prepare Illustrator EPS is Illustrator itself. I use Illustrator 8. XaraX import correctly "ai8" files containing bitmaps if they are not only linked, but there are two limitations in my experience:

-if you use postscript fonts, convert them to shapes before exporting from Illustrator (if you use TrueType fonts they are replaced by your default fonts when you import in XaraX, but there is no problems to deselect the font erroneously declared as not present in a message at the opening of the file, and reselect it a second time).

-annul all masks in Illustrator before exporting, but keep their shapes in place and give them an outline otherwise they disappear when imported in XaraX. Then you will be able to use them as Clipview, which is the same than Illustrator masks but much more performant.

Illustrator 8 import including bitmaps is a great improvement of XaraX !!! And far better than WMF or CMX.
I had many problems passing through CorelDraw: many curves were converted to a succession of short straight lines, ...and for the texts that was ugly.

Enjoy,

ivan

[jriemerm]

Thanks much, Ivan. I suspected that Illustrator might be what I needed. Now the challenge is finding a good deal on it so I don't have to take out a second mortgage on my home.

james

[mike engles]

Hello

Illustrator .ai files are a problem on Xarax.
I find that it is more useful to try the Artworks, Corel or Freehand.eps filters, having renamed the .ai to.eps. It really depends on how complex the files are. Xarax is unlikely to be able to replicate all the multifilss and such of Illustrator. Perhaps I am mistaken in this.

I do know that Xara are working pretty hard to get these dilters working properly.

Mike Engles

[ivan louette]

You may pixellise them in RVB (the best) or CMYK before exporting in ai8 from Illustrator (not in gray scale).
But if you create a new mask while you pixellise, WARNING! You must annul the mask after and cut and paste the shape in place in another document and export them separately. Otherwise the two are wrongly placed when importing into XaraX.

Regards,

ivan

[tonylondon]

Multifills work ok - fills are exported one on top of the other as shapes and grouped. I have ungrouped and shifted contents slightly so you can see. Artistic effects become rasters and drop shadow positions are not maintained. Layers are maintained, however text is problematical. It seems to disappear unless on the first layer and even then the font is substituted. I have used Illustrator 9 saved as AI8 and EPS (AI 8)
Tony
PS thanks for info on your fish file Ivan