I’ve run into an issue. Ever since the update where pattern pieces now export as their own group (which is great), the align function in Illustrator no longer works as it should. I have patterns that were exported in an older version that have the pieces align correctly, so it’s not an Illustrator issue.
To now get the pieces to align correctly, I have to flatten the transparency of each layer separately (when dealing with different sizes in different layers, otherwise they get grouped into one layer), ungroup the layer, and group each piece manually again for each layer, effectively undoing the grouped export and adding extra steps to be able to align the pieces.
Has anyone else had this issue?
The pictures are just to show what is happening when I align my pieces both vertically and horizontally. I am of course not trying to align my pieces like this for this pattern.
This is the alignment after exporting the grouped pieces:
I’ve always had this problem. If you select a group, you will find a little lost point somewhere far away from the main pattern piece. If you can find this point (it’s only a dot) and delete it, you will see that the bounding box will surround only the pattern pieces.
If you have ungrouped the pattern piece & regrouped it, then you can drag the cursor over the area outside of the group and it may highlight this little, lost, nuisance dot.
Thank you for your input! The lost points do usually cause issues, so I now select and delete “stray points” by habit. I tried it again to see if I somehow missed it for these files, but the issue persists. I can select each piece on it’s own and the bounding box neatly surrounds it. There’s no more stray points or dots anywhere in the file, yet the align tool still malfunctions
I’m adding some more pictures (with less pieces this time, so it’s easier to see) to show the correct bounding boxes, but wrong alignment:
The alignment should result in this:
To get the second result, I didn’t delete any points, but did the steps I described in my initial post. If there were any stray points, I should have gotten the same faulty alignment.
No rush! Thank you so much for looking into it. I reverted back to version 2024.10.7.203 and the issue is gone. With that version, I have to manually group the pieces, but it does save a lot of time not having the extra step of flattening the transparency on every layer
I can only think that it’s something that makes it incompatible-but-do-able in Illustrator. We do tend to support Inkscape & SVG because it’s free and opensource like Seamly. And there’s no reason for the programmers to pay so much for Illustrator when they only want to check that things work in Illustrator and create a feature to export to .ai for those few that do have Illustrator.
However, I’m sure that @Douglas and @Evans will see this post and decide whether an issue needs to be created or not.
Very interesting! I opened up my file again to see and multiple clicks does give a different result. However, in my case, no matter how many times I click, it’s never fully right. I opened up the pattern piece and have a few empty groups for each piece. After deleting those, the pieces align correctly.
I see! I used to use Inkscape a few years ago but have since switched to Illustrator since I needed it for my job and didn’t want to pay so much to then not use it. If the solution is to (temporarily) switch back to Inkscape, then I may just do that!
Inkscape has come up in the world… They now support pages which is amazing, but I’ve yet to figure out if one can make layered PDF’s like in Illustrator
My Illustrator is very old, but it remains my favourite.
Yes, that was the alignment after deleting the empty groups, which was correct!
I found a fix! As you already mentioned, there are usually some stray points. I get rid of those with Select > Object > Stray Points. The fix for this issue seems to be deleting all the empty groups with Object > Path > Clean Up. It removes all the empty groups and fixes the alignment issue (And it also seems to get rid of the stray points, which I didn’t know yet and saves some clicks!)
I played with the pages in Inkscape a while back, but I’ve gotten so used to Illustrator by now, and I honestly prefer it, especially for the layers when making patterns for projectors!
Thank you so much for looking into this! I would have never thought to go mess about in the individual piece “groups” out of fear of messing something up. I hope this post can maybe help someone else having the same issue.
I believe @Onetchou fixed the issue of extraneous points in a group with a recent update. Please let us know if this is still an issue with the most recent release.
I think it’s a bit of incompatibility between Inkscape & Illustrator, it has to do with the way Inkscape labels their layers, however, @WhiBe has pointed out a quick fix in Illustrator that is perfectly easy to do.
Apparently Illustrator doesn’t know how to handle the < title > and < desc > tags… Inkscape ignores them as it uses it’s own metadata tags. These tags are NOT layers / part of a group… they belong to the document.
saved in Inkscape:
Could you please post an SVG file written from Illustrator, and I can then recomend a course of action. We may just want to remove these tags from the export, or write what would be correct. Inkscape does rewrite the tags differently:
OK… obviously that works as the < title > and < desc > tags were removed from the original Seamly export. Is there a way to add (metadata) Document properties in Illustrator? Like as in Inkscape?
In other words… what I want to see is what Ai writes for SVG document header info, compared to the SVG standard, Inkscape, CorelDraw… and what Seamly is currently writing. Theoretically if an app is reading / writing SVG’s it should be by the standard, and should not be adding propriatary stuff, and at minimum since it’s an XML it should ignore what it doesn’t use / understand./ can’t use due to copyright or patent THAT’S what standard file formats are for. WE should be able to export an SVG that Ai, Inkscpae and Corel are happy with.
(And it also seems to get rid of the stray points, which I didn’t know yet and saves some clicks!)
