Published by breki on 19 Nov 2010 at 08:02 pm
Maperitive vs. Adobe Illustrator
It’s been a hard fight, but I’ve finally worked out most (all?) of Adobe Illustrator’s quirks and bugs in SVG importing and ways to go around them. I can now officially say that Adobe’s support for SVG is lousy (so much for their professed commitment to open standards). I even managed to export SVGs from Illustrator which then could not be imported back into it (“Can’t open the illustration”).
Anyway, SVGs now look pretty nice in Illustrator, but there is a price to pay: they need to generated in a different way than for Inkscape, so there is a new setting available in the export-svg command. They certainly look better than SVGs produced by the Export tab on the OSM.org’s map site and they are structured in a more usable way (better layering and reuse of shapes, use of actual text lettering instead of graphic paths etc).
Here’s a sample SVG map of the Dublin’s center, so you can take a look (warning 1: do not try to open the file in a browser, it is a compressed SVG (SVGZ) file which only Illustrator and Inkscape know how to handle, warning 2: although the map file is not very large, it may take a while for Illustrator to open and show it).
Expect this feature to be available in the next Maperitive release (within days).
lars on 19 Nov 2010 at 23:41 #
Safari shows an encoding error on http://maperitive.net/samples/Dublin_center_AI.svgz
thengineer on 19 Nov 2010 at 23:53 #
You’re the man! Thanks a lot! (now I wont beg you to introduce splines anymore
)
breki on 20 Nov 2010 at 10:01 #
@lars, do not open it in a browser, it is a compressed SVG (SVGZ) file which only Illustrator and Inkscape know how to handle (it doesn’t work in Firefox either).
thengineer on 20 Nov 2010 at 15:08 #
@lars: there should be a gunzip command, if you were working on osx, so you could get the uncompressed file.
igorbrejc.net » Maperitive: New Release on 20 Nov 2010 at 19:40 #
[...] fixed Illustrator SVG problems [...]
Andrew Gregory on 23 Dec 2010 at 13:56 #
While that svgz doesn’t open directly in Opera because it is served as text/plain, it will open just fine if saved on the hard drive where Opera infers the correct MIME type (image/svg+xml) from the extension.
ChrisP on 11 Jan 2011 at 15:38 #
your screenshot indicates that content is grouped in different layers in Illustrator. Did you do that manually or does that work automatically? If yes would it be possible to get the layer support for Inkscape too?
breki on 11 Jan 2011 at 16:27 #
@ChrisP,
The grouping is done automatically by Maperitive. And the layer support is available for Inkscape, too – it’s actually even better than the Illustrator one, since Maperitive generates Inkscape’s custom XML layering attributes: http://maperitive.net/docs/manual/Commands/ExportSvg.html#Compatibility
ChrisP on 12 Jan 2011 at 10:00 #
I just tried it in Inkscape and it works. This is basically what I have been looking for for a while. That’s great, well done!