No longer need Illustrator

[thendricks]

We have been switching over from Illustrator 10 to IsoDraw. One of the hurdles we have been working around is IsoDraw's inability to recognize newer files. We have been forced to convert back to .ai version 7.0 in order to get a mostly clean import. We'd like to have a single license of Illustrator CS3 in order to accept some of the files we get from other departments however this has presented the issue that we must maintain both CS3 and 1o (CS3 to convert to and older 10 version, and then 10 to convert back to 7.0). Does anyone know if IsoDraw is planning to support newer Illustrator formats or if there is a simple converter to pull these files over. For reference, the files have been saved in .eps format, have multiple layers, art and text depending on layer, and contains both text lines and boxes (at this point the text boxes are manually be changed to text lines). Any assistance would be appreciated.

[RussellLapidge]

Hi Trevor, It's been a while since you put up this post and I hope you've managed to resolve the problem by now . . . If not, try exporting Illus 8 from CS3 and then opening it into IsoDraw. I know "IsoDraw doesn't support new versions of Illustrator than version 7" but this seems to work as well as can be expected and includes the layer structure . . .

[RussellLapidge]

Hi Trevor, It's been a while since you put up this post and I hope you've managed to resolve the problem by now . . . If not, try exporting Illus 8 from CS3 and then opening it into IsoDraw. I know "IsoDraw doesn't support new versions of Illustrator than version 7" but this seems to work as well as can be expected and includes the layer structure . . .

[StephenD]

Hi Trevor Have you tried exporting in SVG, or opening and exporting through Corel Draw, the old 9er version works. Or save as version ai3 (CS2) without swatches and gradients and masks. If for any reason you can keep version 10, save as the 5.5 Mac version its the cleanest. Only version 7 and lower works with different results

[thendricks]

We are keeping a few licenses of Illustrator to do the converting. The exports mentioned in this thread and others were tested from CS3 but resulted in layers being flattened, errors, etc. The output we chose is .ai version 7. We still must replace text contained in text boxes, but that is the only clean-up necessary. Layer contents, assignment, and layer names are brought over cleanly.