Hi Marc,

> Ive notice there is also an alpha black and white image in the pdf file.

Yup, the shaded part of it comes from that image with transparency for the background. The outlines go underneath that so that the shaded image also masks out the inside half of the outline too. One problem that I see now with this though is that the outline will be masked where different objects overlap each other, the outline will only show against the full background not against other objects.


> The layers shows up in Pdf reader and in Xara but not in Illustrator Cs6.
> Not that I mind, I use mostly Xara, but it's a strange phenomena being adobe and all!

Yeah unfortunately Illustrator does not read layers from PDF files. I guess what happened is that the PDF team made layers in PDF to be very flexible and can have all sorts of optional conditions for controlling visibility. They're actually called "Optional Content Groups" in PDF. But then with all that flexibility Optional Content Groups did not necessarily map 100% to the concept of a "layer" in Illustrator. So they seemed to have kind of just gave up on it. It would have been nice if they would recognized Optional Content Groups that were being used in a simple way to map to layers in Illustrator but they didn't.

According to Adobe here, officially it's Acrobat that is the main PDF editing tool and not Illustrator:
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/509192

But you'll be able to get layers to come into Illustrator if you use .ai format instead of .pdf . Can you test loading in this .ai file into both Xara and Illustrator to see if the layers here come in ok to both?

For AI format the shaded image part is in a separate PNG file that is used as a linked image in the .ai file, if you put the PNG file alongside the .ai file when you open it then it ought to be found when the .ai file is opened.

Do the images come in ok to Xara in both PDF and AI formats here?

Thanks, - Michael