Best method to export a file for precise Adobe Illustrator compatibility?

[gaftalik]

Great information Gary ! Do you know if importing a PDF/X 1a to Adobe Illustrator will keep the objects dimensions precisely the same too ?

[handrawn]

ERNIE HAS POSTED WHILST I WROTE THIS:

I think Ernie and Gary are looking at this from a printing point of view; if you need to provide a file that is editable in Illustrator it may not be quite that straightforward

precise accuracy is not actually xara's strong point unless you work in millipoints; if you work in other units you may get rounding errors; the larger the base unit [ eg cm rather than mm] the more likely these are to occur; you can mitigate these by increasing the number of decimal places xara works to but you hve to do that through windows and more than 3 places can be difficult to work with in the UI

for example I made an 8cm square in xara, which when imported via PDF to illustrator was 226.711 points square; changing the units in xara to points showed 226.8 points; you need to be aware and careful

and as said before, because xara does not handle gradient/transparency the same way as illustrator, these effects may be flattened to bitmap in illustrator depending on how they are constructed; I cannot really be more specific as, from experience, I now avoid those attributes in xara for export to illustrator or harmony

[gaftalik]

Thank you Ernie for your input !

Thank you Handrawn for clarifying that, indeed my concern is to provide a file to be editable in AI for laser cutting and since i am seeing errors in the sample's dimensions , they asked me to send the file as .ai knowing that Xara doesnt export correctly to .ai and having no knowledge about AI software, it is hard to fix those errors to match perfectly!

[ernie-f]

Thank you Ernie for your input !

Thank you Handrawn for clarifying that, indeed my concern is to provide a file to be editable in AI for laser cutting and since i am seeing errors in the sample's dimensions , they asked me to send the file as .ai knowing that Xara doesnt export correctly to .ai and having no knowledge about AI software, it is hard to fix those errors to match perfectly!

If You need laser cutting is .ai and/or .xar not the right format. Obviously they will need .dwg or an other one-line CAD compatible format.

An other option can be .svg, but attention with the export. It must be selected as ai compatible. I use it for foil-plotting and it works great.

[behzad]

Friends, no matter which pdf/x you use, most digital printing will convert it to their format for output. I would suggest for big jobs/money get a proof printed.

[ernie-f]

Friends, no matter which pdf/x you use, most digital printing will convert it to their format for output. I would suggest for big jobs/money get a proof printed.

That is not true! X1-X3 flatten all transparencies to bitmap!
PDF/X4 leave the transparecies as objects and don't flatten it to bitmap, but only if the effekt is reproducible in AI and/or fits in the PDF/X4 rules.

[behzad]

Ernie, when I output to print at 300 dpi size as, I do not care if it flattens or not. If the file was for digital online use then RGB pdf without the X would be the one I go for.
Also from my years of experience with print and output from xara to illustrator, the CMYK colors will not be exact to the numbers in ILL. So what I do is now
export RGB from xara as pdf, take it into illustrator and readjust everything and save as illustrator file. I only do this for logos.