Today, most of the morning went debugging an issue with textPaths in Illustrator. I came to the culprit, and much to my relief, I found the issue in Illustrator. But then, why is this relief to know it is not my fault, if my client still has the problem?
If I set text on a path in Illustrator and then save and reopen it, the letters will appear slightly more compact. I explained the issue in a loom video to my client, which I will not link because it is very boring.
I responded this:
Dear Mr. Tatsuya,
To summarize the problem:
As you can see, the last two images are identical. The way in which I think we can agree on accurate rendering is that Illustrator opens the SVG in the same way Method Draw renders it. The reasons why Illustrator interprets its own output differently is highly technical, but it boils down that .ai and .svg have different rendering models.
Since Method Draw can only consume, edit and export SVG, it will be necessary to provide SVG data that renders the same way in Illustrator and in Method Draw. Another area where this is causing problems is in the rendering of gradients, as you have encountered before. For your workflow, this would mean saving every .ai file with an .svg copy, and when comparing results with FVE, compare to the svg file loaded in Illustrator.
Unfortunately, this will not be the end of our rendering problems, because Illustrator generates SVG in ways that Method Draw doesn't handle yet, and this was not scoped into the project. Unfortunately it is something very time intensive, so I would like to suggest an alternative approach.
For every template that you generate, you send it to me and I tune it so that Illustrator and FVE render it exactly the same. Changes that the user does to this file will be reflected accurately when saved from FVE and opened in illustrator. I would suggest that you provide a couple of example .svg files that render correctly in Illustrator so that I can modify them so that they don't cause problems when imported into FVE.
So the next step would be to send me 5-10 .svg files generated by Illustrator, which you wish to use as templates, preferably. My aim is to verify that it is a viable solution. This way I can give you an estimate of how many images can be "tuned" per hour, and see if it would be a quicker solution (depending on the size of your library).
If anything needs to be clarified, please ask me and I will gladly expand on whatever needs to be explained.
Kind regards,
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