Tanks for the help.
It worked wonderfully and I was able to completely edit the styles as I wanted.

I will look into the affinity program as this looks to be something I'm keen on learning more about.

Thanks again!

@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

Hi Michael,

Thanks a lot for taking time to explain the differences between formats.

It is very much appreciated as always.

Michel

Hi Michael,

""""""""""""" layer definitions are unfortunately part of the undocumented part of the data """""""""""""""

Some programs preserve layers as groups in the PDF, it might be a workaround but I have no idea how much work would be involved.

Marc

Hi Marc,

re:
> Some programs preserve layers as groups in the PDF, it might be a workaround but I have
> no idea how much work would be involved.

There is a thing in PDF called "optional content groups", and MoI's PDF export does set those up currently. They will show up in Adobe Reader's layer palette where you can hide and show them.

But Adobe Illustrator does not seem to read them in as layers when opening a PDF file, I'm not sure about other software.

If I remember right, the PDF "optional content groups" don't quite match up exactly to regular layers because of stuff like an object can belong to more than one of them I think.

If you have an illustration program that can round trip layers to a PDF file, can you please e-mail me (moi@moi3d.com) a simple example file (like with just a couple of lines on a couple of different layers) so I can take a look at how it's structured?

- Michael

I heartily second Marco's Affinity Designer advice. It's much less bloatware than the old Illustrator dinosaur, and much easier to learn and to work with.

By the way, I noticed that when exporting a vector file from Affinity Designer to import in MoI, EPS works best, as opposed to PDF when transferring from MoI into Affinity Designer.

Hi Metin,

> "I heartily second Marco's Affinity Designer advice"

I can say that as soon as Affinity Designer for Windows will be officially released certainly it will replace my Illustrator for almost all jobs!

Or at least, I will keep using Illustrator only for that particular cases where Affinity it's not yet mature.

> "By the way, I noticed that when exporting a vector file from Affinity Designer to import in MoI, EPS works best, as opposed to PDF when transferring from MoI into Affinity Designer."

I never tried export in EPS from Affinity but simply copy/paste vector objects from Affinity to Moi work like a charm in almost all situations.

Best,

- Marco (mkdm)