Trace Image - Export Options (To Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo)

LightBurn Software Questions
1

I have a very simple image that I have traced in LB 0.9.16 and came out good. Would now like to export that image to Affinity Designer for editing.

From LB, I tried exporting to .AI, but when importing to Affinity Designer, it displays as a blank document (there does not appear to be anything on the layer).

Tried exporting the design to .SVG to import into Affinity Photo, same issue.

Also tried exporting to DXF format, but looks like Affinity Designer does not bring in DXF file.

The .AI .SVG and .DXF all work to import back into LightBurn - but was really hoping to be able to edit scanned file in Affinity Designer if possible.

Is there a setting I am missing somewhere?Tower.lbrn (47.2 KB)

Attached is the LB file.

2

Hi, .ai does not work here either.
.svg does work tho, the only thing is that it’s origin is somewhere very far away.
So select all layers and in the bottom right, set the origin on x=0 and y=0.

Hope this helps.

3

Jordi.
Thanks for the tip - I was able to import the SVG and it was off to the side - but it was there.

Hoping to hear from the LightBurn team as I do believe there is an issue in the .AI output (as Affinity Designer is supposed to import .AI files without issue - this is the first files that I have found that it would not import).

John

4

LightBurn’s exported AI format is really old - AI version 3.0. Modern AI files are actually PDFs (called “PDF preview content”) with an AI embedded in a custom chunk. My bet is that Affinity is importing the PDF, not the AI content, and if you saved an AI without the PDF preview, it wouldn’t work. Vectric software behaves this way too.

5

Looks like this is the issue. Any thoughts on updates to LB to export with PDF preview?

SVG is another option . I do not have a lot of experience with SVG - is there a benefit/downside to using SVG??

john

6

The benefit would be that it would probably work. :slight_smile:

The older AI format is relatively simple, and SVG is very complex by comparison, but we use very little of the SVG spec, and the part we do use is generally well supported, so I wouldn’t expect issues.

I might try to add PDF export support at some point, but it’s vastly more complex than any other format we use right now - PDF files have multiple required sections that all reference each other, kind of like a table of contents, glossary, footnotes, and chapters within a book, where AI is more like writing a single paragraph.

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