@Michel,
re:
> I rarely use export as Illustrator because, for some reason, I am never
> able to directly open the exported file in Inkscape.
Adobe made a big change in the .ai file format a while back, where at AI v9 and higher it became a PDF file with some extra private undocumented information in it. Inkscape only supports reading in this new style of AI file that's actually a PDF file (reading just the public PDF portions of the file just using the PDF reading code), while MoI exports .ai to the older AI8 format which is the format that is more often supported by other programs since it's the last one that was fully documented by Adobe.
So for going into Inkscape definitely PDF is the way to go.
It didn't make too much sense to me to write AI v9 files out from MoI because they are unable to be read by most other programs that support AI format (Inkscape being the exception), and it would be just exactly the same thing as exporting to PDF anyway. And layer definitions are unfortunately part of the undocumented part of the data so the only way to transfer layer data into Illustrator currently is in AI v8 format.
At some point I would like to support SVG format for transfer into Inkscape, but unfortunately that will involve a fair amount of work and study, the SVG spec is quite complex and long (826 page spec) and then from what I understand Inkscape also adds some of its own data to it as well so that would need additional study to learn how that works on top of that in order to gain any benefit over using PDF.
- Michael
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