Layer support in SVG Export

I don’t know, I did the SVG exporter for Laser cutting, groups are useful for cutting or engraving. On Grasshopper forum Nik Willmore also made an implementation with nested layer and he found it useful for Illustrator.

Based on that GH post, it looks like Illustrator supports deep nesting on import. I’ll probably just have to support both nested layers and a flat list of layers using their full paths.

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Is there currently any way to get layers or groups exported to Affinity, Illustator, Xara, or Inkscape?

It really is tedious having to manually sort dozens of curves into layers. If at least groups were preserved that would help.

For now, what’s a good strategy for exporting into illustration software? Export each layer into a separate file? But how to do alignment then?

Did you try my plugin for rhino 5 on food4rhino ?

Thanks, I know about it, great plugin!

However, I was wondering how to do things with the native export tools in WIP.

I wonder if layers support for SVG output has been implemented yet?

Nope. It is on our list as RH-38196.

Thank you for the update. Quite looking forward to this feature.

@wim, just wondering if there has been any progress on this or plan to have any time soon? Since we are switching in the office to Affinity Designer, it’s become quite critical since affinity doesn’t import DWGs or have advanced selection tools (e.g. select by color or stroke as in illustrator), hence hoping that we have layers support in SVG (or PDF) exports soon.

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@wim any update on status or a push would be appreciated :wink:

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Hi this is becoming ever more important to us. In my company, we a thinking of shifting some of our graphics software packages to ones that cannot import DWGs, yet we need a graphical layered output.

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I have copy and paste between Rhino and Affinity working in the latest WIP (Windows only). I haven’t publicly announced it yet since I would like to get the Mac clipboard working as well first.

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Any news?!?!? :smiley:

Any news on what?

The Mac support for copy and paste is on hold for a few weeks while I finish up another project that needs attention now.

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on copy/paste function with Affinity.
good you’re working on it.
is an very useful option.
thanks

@stevebaer. Great to hear that you are working on implementing the functionality for copy and paste. However, for large files, copying/pasting may be inefficient, whereas export a file as SVG and having the option to retain layers would be great. I suspect as more AEC firms make the switch over to Affinity, multi-layer SVGs (or PDFs) may become a much more requested feature.

Hi -

Note that multi-layer PDFs has been implemented now.
-wim

What a nice suprise! Does it work in Rhino 6 or only Rhino 7 WIP? Does it work through file -> export or only when printing to a PDF?

Hi -

That only works from the Rhino 7 WIP.

You need to use the Rhino PDF writer. On Windows, that means that you can either use Print or Export and on Mac it means that you need to use Export.
-wim

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I am testing a simple case on exporting PDF by layers. It seems to work fine, except for the fact that PDFs don’t support dashed lanes, so any dashe lane is broken up. I know this is a limitation of the PDF format as opposed to McNeel’s PDF exporter. However, given this, it would be highly useful to be able to export multi-layer SVG format.

I also noticed a few bugs with the PDF exporter. This is version 7.0.20168.13075, 16/06/2020 on Win 10.

  • Last layer acts as nested. If you notice the screenshot above, when opening the PDF, Layer 3 contains layers 1 and 2
  • The solid line circle has some issues with the node points. I’ve opened the generated PDF in other pdf viewers and it consistently appears as shown.