Converting to SVG....

Submitted by miggols99 on 13 April, 2008 - 21:03

I've was confronted with an annoying problem. I needed to open either a Illustrator, Photoshop or MS Word file and get it into Inkscape somehow. The first one I tried was the Illustrator file, because it's scalable like SVGs, so it should work right? Nope. Inkscape refused to open it. The I searched around and found out that someone renamed the file to a PDF and then converted it on a PDF to SVG converter. For some reason, it also refused to accept the PDF file.

The second one I tried was the MS Word file. It opened up alright in OpenOffice alright...but I couldn't do much else! I couldn't get any images to go on top of it...so that one didn't work.

I tried the final one, the Photoshop (.psd) file. Everyone knows you can open it in the GIMP, so I tried it. And it worked great! Except I didn't really know how to get the CD label images in there..and get them the right size without distorting them. Then I suddenly had a brainwave. I'll export it as a PNG and open it in Inkscape! Simple enough? It opened up in Inkscape fine as I expected, but I couldn't recolour the image, like I wanted to so I could just put the CD label images below it, and then turn it white at the end so it wouldn't show.

I thought for a while, and then I remembered. Trace bitmap!! I was reading k.mandla's blog a few days ago and saw this post about how to vectorize bitmaps in Inkscape. It worked perfectly! Now I don't have to use the horrible Windows only software from the CD I had with the CD labels Thanks again k.mandla