Can inkscape open ai files

Best advice is to acquire a better quality font. Or if you are on a Mac, please see Inkscape does not see some fonts on Mac.

Some fonts are designed with bold, italics, and some other faces like oblique, etc. For Inkscape versions 0. But it can't simulate bolding. So if you try to bold a font, and either nothing happens, or it changes to plain text, then either it just doesn't have a bold face, or perhaps is not well-made. Best advice is to find a font which is made with the face you need.

So if your font won't go bold or italics, you'll need to find a font which is made with those faces. It might be possible to simulate bolding such a font, by adding a stroke, and adjusting stroke width. But it wouldn't be a true bolding. And it might be possible to simulate italics by skewing the text slightly. But again, not true italics.

You can still force Inkscape to simulate italics by manually entering "italic" into the text field for the font variant in the text tool's controls bar. This feature is not implemented in current Inkscape versions, but you can use Gimp to scan your document and then import it in Inkscape.

Not very many renderers can display flowed text, because it's not fully implemented in SVG standards yet. So the solution is not to use flowed text if you're planning to export to a different format, or use the file outside of Inkscape. Flowed text is created by clicking and dragging with the Text tool, while a simple click creates plain text.

So, if you don't really need the flowing aspect, just use click to position text cursor instead of dragging to create a frame. This command fully preserves the appearance and formatting of your flowed text but makes it non-flowed and SVG compliant.

Inkscape uses a renderer to show the image you're working on, on the Inkscape canvas and to redraw it, with every edit you make. The Adobe Reader is a renderer. And web browsers e. Firefox, IE, etc.

Why do they display SVG images differently? Renderers come in many different forms, as briefly indicated just now, and with many different purposes. They're made by different groups, businesses or organizations, which all have different goals, requirements, and upgrade timelines. Therefore, they have different features, which result in differences in how they display the same image.

What can be done about it? In terms of your immediate needs, it may be as simple as finding a renderer which displays what you need it to display. The current versions of Firefox and Chrome browsers probably are the best, for displaying images made with current versions of Inkscape. That's because Adobe cheats. Inkscape, of course, edits the SVG part of the image and leaves the encoded binary untouched. Therefore, any SVG changes are lost. To work around it, in Inkscape open the XML Editor and remove the non-SVG elements everything not with the svg: prefix in its name, usually towards the end of the tree.

If you need to do this job repeatedly you may consider using some XSLT -based automation. If you're using an Inkscape version higher than 0. From version 0. The option is "mapalt" under group "options", and has a numerical value. This value equates to the modifier key that is mapped to Alt, 1 indicates Alt, ie, no mapping. The value you need to use depends on the setup of your particular keyboard and may be 2, 3, 4, or 5.

The program xkeycaps, available from www. The value associated with a particular key is shown in that program at the top of the screen beside the word "Modifiers" when the mouse is held over a key on the main display. Note that this setting in preferences. Please read Xfce 4 Window Manager documentation.

The documentation is currently out of date for the 4. Beginning from version 1. If you have not already done so, create a local copy of the IceWM system preferences file.

Your mileage may vary. Edit your local copy as follows:. If you find yourself unable to use Inkscape functions that require the alt key i. Changing this setting will have the downside of no longer being able to input diacritic and other special characters via keyboard in Xbased applications because both option keys will be changed — see below for a more fine-grained solution. If you still cannot get it to work you can try using a keyboard mapping file for X11 the environment Inkscape is running in called an xmodmap keyboard modifier map and keymap table.

Open a terminal and type. This will create a new text file called ". Xmodmap" in your home directory. The period before the actual file name "Xmodmap" causes the file to stay hidden within the Finder. This defines the left option key as alt within all X11 applications, enabling Alt based shortcuts. You need to re-start X11 to see the change. You can use an ".

Xmodmap" file to switch the behaviors of Control and Command in X11 applications. See above how to create and open the. Xmodmap file. Then paste this inside:. Finally, in X11, make sure that the option "Enable key equivalents in X11" is un checked and restart X For Mac versions 0.

Starting with XQuartz 2. Only, it currently does not know how to deal with vector images so it just captures the screen, i. It will not prevent copying text from OS X to X For other Inkscape commands involving the system clipboards e. The first time you try to launch an Xbased application on OS X Note: To complete the installation of XQuartz, it is required to logout and log back in again or to reboot the system. It is also recommended to reinstall XQuartz after a system upgrade.

When trying to run the newly installed application for the first time on OS X This is a known Xquartz bug: due to the lack of proper support for multiple monitors, opened windows can go off-screen. To mitigate this problem and find your lost windows you'll be able to see them in the desktop switcher preview screen , you can use the wmctrl utility.

The " xwininfo -root -children " command lists all xquartz-managed windows. It'll give you the list of windows with their id, for instance:. The x window is the main inkscape window, and, if you tried to launch the document properties window, a x window is a good fit its id is "0xc".

Next, you'll have to move it back to the screen. N ote that some trial-and-error might be needed to find the correct values in your case.

Also, in some conditions, if you try to move a window from a screen onto another screen, xquartz will scale out the first virtual desktop to the size of both monitors while only displaying half of it on the original monitor.

If you're experiencing longer startup times than usual, this is typically caused by Inkscape compiling a list of available fonts. Especially on older systems or on systems that have many fonts installed, this can take up to a few minutes although seconds is much more common. You can recognize this behavior by checking in the Windows task manager: A process called inkscape. Once the search in the font files is completed, Inkscape will startup as usual.

Good news is that this will only happen the first time you launch Inkscape, and efforts to reduce the time required to compile the font list are underway. Afterwards, Inkscape will re-use the precompiled list, which is valid until you install new fonts or remove existing fonts.

If Inkscape does not seem to be able to start at all on your machine, here are a number of common causes and steps you should try first:. If you cannot solve the problem with the above steps, feel free to make a bug report.

However, make sure to include at the very least the following information:. If SVG files are not being opened with Inkscape after installation or stop being opened in Inkscape after installing another application:. You can find information about how you can help with coding and development on the Develop page on the website. While there is certainly a lot of coding work to be done, there are also a lot of other, non-programming tasks needed to make the project successful.

From testing Inkscape , reporting bugs and managing bug reports , to translating Inkscape or translating the website , to simply promoting Inkscape when you have a chance — all these things are vital to the growth and development of Inkscape, and the Inkscape community.

Inkscape prides itself on maintaining a friendly community that is passionate about Inkscape. Each member arrives here with some definite ideas about what would make an excellent SVG editor.

When these ideas are discussed and some folks start taking firm positions, it is easy for arguments to get out of hand and become unproductive possibly even driving valuable contributors away from the project. Since Inkscape developers typically judge by user consensus, an effective way to prove a point is to show a pattern of demand for the change from a range of users, or to demonstrate how your change will satisfy a large number of user requests.

This isn't to say that what the unwashed masses ask for is always correct, but there are generally strong correlations. Remember Inkscape's development slogan, "Patch first, discuss later. Presenting your ideas as a patch also bypasses the concern that others are going to have to put in the labor to implement the ideas. Inkscape does not yet support all features of SVG, but all files it generates are valid SVG with the partial and temporary exception of flowed text.

All standard-conforming SVG renderers show them the same as in Inkscape. If they do not, it's a bug. If this bug is in Inkscape, we will fix it especially if you help us by reporting it! Other SVG renderers will not understand this, but this is OK because it only affects how the document is edited , not how it looks. Editing paths post drawing is done with the Node tool, N key.

To deselect nodes, press Esc or click in an empty space. While in the node tool, you can also select a different object by clicking on it, after which its nodes become selectable. You can break the path at any selected node s , or join two end nodes, using the correspondint toolbar buttons. You can edit the nodes of only one path object at a time, but that path object may consist of any number of distinct subpaths.

Use the Break Apart and Combine commands to break a path into its subpaths and combine separate paths into a single path.

To convert a straight path segment to a curve, select both endnodes of the segment and press the "Make selected segments curves" button on the toolbar. Conversely, you can convert a segment from a curve to a straight line with the "Make selected segments lines" button.

Shape objects created with the shapes tools i. Each kind of shape has its own handles which you can drag, possibly with keyboard modifiers, to achieve various effects such as rounding corners of a rectangle.

There are also various numeric fields in the controls bars of the shape tools. Consult the Shapes tutorial in Help menu for details on Inkscape shapes. Overall, shapes in Inkscape are more rich and flexible than in Illustrator. You can also convert any shape to path, to be able to edit its nodes freely. Inkscape's layers are accessible as a drop-down menu in the Status bar, with the lock and visibility toggles beside it affecting the current layer.

An artist can select the layer from the list, and then select its visibility and lock status. Previews are not shown. Converting a text object to outlines i. In Text tool, when you click on the canvas, you created simple non-flowed, i. If you click a drag, you create a text box called "flowed text" where text will wrap automatically. You can also flow text into an arbitrary shape by the 'Flow into Frame' command under the 'Text' menu.

The symbol called a pipe is generally paired with the backslash character on the keyboard. A guide cannot be selected by drawing a rubberband through it, as is done in Illustrator. Rather, to move or delete a guide the artist must use the Selector to grab the guide and move it to another location or to the ruler. Or do I need to install illustrator to get this magic happen?

Looking forward to hearing from you! You just need to have Illustrator installed in order for it to appear with the Illustrator logo as an icon. It would still function exactly like an AI file though. Thanks for the quick answer! I really appreciate your help.

Best of luck. Scribus opens ai files, which can then be exported to svg, etc. Glad to help! I struggled with this myself for a long time and wanted to provide a solution once I understood everything.

You are not only magician of creating shapes and geometrical structures in many programs, you are also brilliant artist of words. Save my name and email in this browser for the next time I comment. If you only have flattened, rasterized copies of your logo such as PNG and JPG then you may find it difficult to make alterations such as color. In this tutorial we'll be using a workaround that In today's tutorial we'll be going over how to erase in Inkscape using the Eraser Tool.

This tool allows you to delete portions of objects that happen to be vector paths and can serve as a more Skip to content. Than you in advance for your answer. Hello Nick, Thank you for you great tutorials!

Thank you again! Keep up the awesome work! Yes, unfortunately the layers will be flattened. This is another downside of using this method. Rename it as xyz. Now i can open all AI Files with inkscape. It worked! Thx alot. Hello Nick Sir, I have some doubts. Tnx in advance and keep making awesome tutorials! Hi, Thanks for this video. However, when I open the file in Inkscape, there is no content. Please advise. Thanks Nick.