Hello

I am fairly experienced with Photoshop and recently spent $250 worth of vectors only to find Inkscape can not open them, or at least not ALL of them, it works for some but not all.. . (I have just opened some EPS vectors with Inkscape but the performance was so slow I couldn't work with them)

I have just paid a further £27 to rent Adobe Illustrator for a month just so I can open these files and save as SVG to allow me to then learn Inkscape and how to edit these black and white and coloured vectors.

I have read that for windows OS there are ways to overcome this issue of Inkscape not opening .ai and eps files but for Mac uses, there does not seem to be any way around it.

What settings should I use when opening a large EPS file to enable Inkscape to not slow down to an unworkable state? When the file is open, if I press any of the different buttons nothing happens like the software is still thinking about the last thing it did.

I have 16 GIG of Ram on an iMac

Also, I have this file open with 6 seamless patterns on it....I need to select one of the patterns and separate it from the rest but for the life of me I cannot find the tool to make the selection! lol

Sorry, I know I will be told to go read the manual lol

Welcome to InkscapeForum!

There are definitely some issues for Mac users with Inkscape. Here is some info http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php ... fic_issues and you can find more by searching this forum. Although it sounds like you may have already done some research?

How large are these files? Even with 16 gb RAM, it's possible to have files so large that Inkscape can't handle them. And if the size is the problem, using Illustrator to "re-save" them won't help.....(unless you're removing some content while in Illustrator). But if the problem is EPS or AI format, it might help to save as SVG.

If you can manage to get the files to open, you could use View menu > Display mode > Outline or No Filters. If the images contain a lot of filters and/or gradients, that should help. You could try setting up some layers, and transfering various parts of the image to different layers. Then you can hide the unneeded layers, and be better able to edit the visible layer. But it could be painfully slow initially, making layers and transfering content to them. You could also try File menu > Vacuum Defs, which will remove any unneeded data from the file. If it happens to contain a lot of unused data, that will help. Depending on how the image was made, it could have an excessive number of nodes, and if it does, then Path menu > Simplify will help (don't do it more than once or twice to avoid distortion of the path). If you do Simplify once, but you see that paths are distorted, that means that it did not have excessive nodes.

For the pattern issue, it depends on what kind of object comprises the pattern. Select the patterns with the Selection tool , then look at Inkscape's status bar, and it will tell you what kind of object it is. If it's a Group, the next step will be Ungroup. Otherwise, please tell us what it says

I looked after reading these forums and the file I was working on at that time was 38 meg lol

I think I would have found my way around the issues if the file wasn't so large but the whole application was so lagged I couldnt get a response from anything buttons. All I managed to do was un group and that took 3 minutes after that when I selected and dragged it soon became obvious that I couldn't work with these massive files so I have opened them in PS by increasing the default pixel size to 3000 and I am able to do some editing and run them through filters to achieve a pleasing result but I really wanted to get my teeth into vector creating and editing :O

Thanks for replying .

Oh, well yes, that is rather huge, lol.
Maybe someday you will need to work with smaller files. Then you will have another opportunity to learn Inkscape