EPS File, Layers, Separating Shapes (neophyte user)

[therelief]

I am a neophyte and don't have advanced skills yet so bear with me. Looking for your kind and patient help.

I have a stock illustration in EPS that I have opened in Xara.

Apparently there are layers in it which confound me.

What I would like to do is separate all the shapes based on the outlines in the illustration. For the life of me, I haven't been able to figure out how.

Can someone guide me in doing this? I've tried searching the help topics within the program, but it seems like a lot of the verbiage requires some already inside knowledge. Right now, it's a bit over my head and I think I would learn better with a bit of human assistance.

I am attaching a sample image so you can see what I'm talking about.

[mwenz]

Open the layer gallery. Expand it all and take a screen shot of that.

[therelief]

Thanks... So here are a couple screenshots. So, looks like I can the top graphics around. What I want to do is is every line on there, I want to somehow make it "cut" all those into separate shapes that can be colored separately. Am I explaining that very well? Is that possible?

[mwenz]

Either the EPS file is mainly a bitmap or your Xara application (which is it?) has problems with importing it. Chances are it is the import process mucking up the vector parts of the file. It's not very useful the way it is.

If you would like me to take a look at it, ZIP it up and attach it to a post. I can likely get it into XDP format as vector so you can actually do something with it.

Mike

[therelief]

That would be wonderful. Thank you! I'll be just a moment...

[therelief]

Okay, I think I zipped it up correctly.

[mwenz]

Got it. Be back in a little bit.

Mike

[mwenz]

It all was able to come in as vector.

The EPS file was created in Illustrator, which is what I used to open and export a PDF/X-4 file. I imported that into XDP X9 and set the transparency to as close a type in XDP as I could get for appearance. I didn't change the other parts that use transparency.

Illustrator has more types of transparency than Xara Designer Pro supports. That is often the cause of issues importing AI or AI-generated EPS files.

Mike

[therelief]

Thank you so much for that help! No wonder I was really struggling. So, you know those top line (see attached screenshot)? I want to make those separate the background graphics into separate shapes as well. Can you outline for me how to do that? That was the other thing I was having trouble with.

[mwenz]

Sure. It will be tedious, or simply easy to get lost as to what shapes are sliced up.

With the shapes that looks like lines in place, select it and hit ctrl+k a whole lot of times. This will duplicate the line shape and each copy will be on top of each other.

Now expand the layer. Select one of the line shapes. Now select one of the pieces you wish to slice.



Now press ctrl+4 for slice shapes.

Do the same for all the parts that need slicing (hence making a lot of duplicates).

Once done, go through the layer gallery and Break Shapes to those pieces you sliced if you want each piece to be a separate piece.



Mike