I would like to revive this thread, since there is still no “seamless” way of exporting Rhino drawings to other programs that are not Illustrator - like Affinity Designer.
They just released their Publisher [InDesign alternative] so I decided to finally ditch Adobe, but to my surprise, I didn’t do the research well enough, and I’ve hit a brick wall.
I liked the way Rhino exports .ai files. You select what you need from your view > Export selected > [pick .ai] > Save - and that’s it. It opens the file and Illustrator converts it to a newer version.
No printing windows, no additional organizing work to “clean” the area of the print.
Everything is layered as it should, hatches are full fills [not segmented], lines are correct and without any distortions…
But this is not the case for Affinity Designer since it only supports “Illustrator 9 and above”.
This is one thread of many that talks about this issue and all of them are dead -
I understand that PDF is a viable option since McNeel did a nice job refining the PDF print, or SVG but it does not work as well as just exporting as .ai.
Serif [makers of Affinity Designer] for years are avoiding supporting .dwg filetypes, and as someone already contacted them from McNeel - they don’t want to releasae the sdk so that we can have a native support for their file type in Rhino.
Interestingly enough, they have a universal file type, the extensions .afdesign .afphoto .afpub are just so that the OS knows which program to open.
So I’d like to call for modernizing the .ai file export, since this would make many people happy, not just people using Affinity but Adobe users too.
I would really like to hear from someone from McNeel where we are at with modernizing the .ai export.