SVG To Ai or Eps ?

I need to pass fom SVG to ai or eps :smiley:

Inscape crashes in my computer in vista when trying to save as eps.:frowning:

And i havent found anything on the web to pass from svg to ai.:frowning:

Please tell me this is possible.:frowning:

If you have access to illustrator, you could simply save your SVG to an image, import that into illustrator, then do a live trace in illustrator to re-establish the vector form.

Make sure you file a bug report. Maybe you’d have better luck exporting from scribus.

Recent versions of the format are just PDF’s, so you can just use a printer driver and change the extension.

Illustrator can import SVG files directly. Adobe used to heavily back the format before they got control of SWF/Macromedia.

Are you sure about that? there’s an option when saving from illustrator to keep or discard illustrator editability. Off course, you can still open it, but text may be chopped into small sections, and out of alignment etc…

HEY! if you know a bit about pdf’s and stuff maybe you can help me with something!!!
sorry for the brief hijack, but I’ve been having trouble exporting to pdf with selectable text in a pdf you can COPY and paste in say, jedit or notepad.
I make indesign documents where I used to import ugly setup pdf’s saved from illustrator, with a text and image area. I would just use the image area and redo the text in indesign. When i exported the pdf, I could select the text, but also had the hidden text from the “illustrator image/product pdf”.
Now I made a clean template for those image/product pdfs, so I only have to insert the pdf into indesign, and not worry about manually correcting new revisions etc. But when I output to pdf, the text CANNOT BE COPIED! I just get dots. I haven’t found anything in the pdf’s options to correct or explain this.

And the adobe forums are awfully quiet…

Illustrator can import SVG files directly. Adobe used to heavily back the format before they got control of SWF/Macromedia.
And damn right they did! svg rocks.

@FD: Ghostscript & GSView might be able to help you. They can do a lot with PS & PDF stuff.

Are you sure about that? there’s an option when saving from illustrator to keep or discard illustrator editability

Yes, versions of Illustrator past version 9 just use pdf files. If you take the ai file and change the extension to pdf, any normal pdf viewer should open it.

The “editability” probably means the difference between keeping the text data, and embedding the fonts, verses converting all the letters to paths.

I need to pass fom SVG to ai or eps

Inkscape or Scribus are your best (free) bet if you don’t have illustrator. You might be able to dig around and find why it’s not working on Vista.

Of course there is the handy little svg2pdf tool (which as stated before is the same as an ai file) but you would have to find a windows port somewhere, and that would not be easy given that it depends on cairo and libsvg.

If anybody on Linux or Mac wants to build it though do:

$ git clone git://cgit.freedesktop.org/~cworth/svg2pdf
$ make

This assumes you’ve installed git and have your build environment and tools set up correctly.

okay, that’s cool to know.

The “editability” probably means the difference between keeping the text data, and embedding the fonts, verses converting all the letters to paths.

I’m quite certain this is not true. I’m guessing it keeps things like text in the original layout instead of “baking it’s position”. If you have a text field in illustrator(CS2) and save it with editability, that text field will still be a text field when you reopen it.
However, when you open a pdf that’s exported out of indesign (CS2) pdf 1.3 and/or 1.4, the text is chopped into several lines, to ensure that the text stays visually in place I guess… Fortunately text is still text. But the order in which that text is created defines which text is selected first.

For example, there are some old productdrawings that originate from copy paste from a pdf folder. The text in that folder was most likely layed out nicely, which text and alinea styles, but in the print exported pdf file, nothing of that remains. so every value in a table is a seperate text field. When products change, or a dimension is added to that production drawing, the new dimension is added to the table by copying the lowest row of text fields, dragging them down, and edit the text for every single one of those fields.
If a lot of small things change in that table, and you save the pdf, and THEN try to select the text and paste it in notepad or jedit, you’ll find that the entire table is scrambled. Because the order in which those text fields are selected has changed. With a single text field, you wouldn’t have this problem.

Those are old drawings. The new layout I made has a clean layout where everything is much better layed out. One text field for the tables, every table is always the same size for every product, and editing is easier. But if I insert these pdf’s into an indesign document and export that indesign document to a pdf, I can’t copy text from that exported pdf, which is a big deal…

Inkscape or Scribus are your best (free) bet if you don’t have illustrator. You might be able to dig around and find why it’s not working on Vista.
I’m trying out both inkscape and scribus at work now.
The latest scribus svn build for windows is unusable for production to me. There’s a lot of small things missing. the 1.3.4 version for linux that’s on my home pc is an improvement, but right now, I don’t think it could replace indesign for me. But for my hobby projects, it might be enough.

Here I am hijacking the thread again :spin:
But it’s relevant to the whole svg>pdf>ai deal I guess.

Ow And I never use eps unless a client really wants it… I think it’s outdated and replaced by the later pdf versions anyway. AFAIK, pdf can do everything an .eps can do.

an image is worth a lot of words:
http://img49.imageshack.us/img49/8910/pdfthingiesbe9.gif
Shot at 2008-10-31