hey everyone, I’ve probably missed this somewhere in the development guide but I’m making some knobs for my own module & I was wondering what settings I should use to save the svg so that it functions properly in vcv rack, I’m using illustrator.
The manual doesn’t mention anything about Adobe Illustrator. Use Inkscape.
why do I have to use inkscape?
You don’t have to use Inkscape, but using other software to produce SVG files is unsupported by VCV.
There is a thread here that has the settings for exporting SVG from Illustrator. While it’s not supported, plenty of VCV modules are made with Illustrator. Most of our current modules were done with AI, although we are switching to Adobe XD. https://github.com/VCVRack/Rack/issues/577
nice, I’ll have a look later as it’s 6:30am & I haven’t been to bed, does this work for cs6 as well as cc?
I suspect it will, but I don’t know for a fact. There may be others around here who do know. afaik the SVG options in AI have been there for a while.
I guess I won’t know for sure until I try it out, thanks for the help everyone!
so an update on this, I never got to try the settings out, I ended up saving the svgs with the default settings & moving them to inkscape, my problem now is the components layer is sending my knobs & jacks all over the screen rather than staying where they should be on the panel
See the threads about Inkscape update changing where 0 is and breaking the world?
You could be like the rest of us AI users and just use AI, don’t worry about millimeters, don’t worry about Inkscape.
have AI options to save optimized svg? (deleting all the code that is not in the svg specifications ) could it be the problem?
you can try clean with some online cleaners
https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/
Since Inkscape V1 changed its coordinate system from the earlier 0.9 beta versions, the SVGs it produces no longer render correctly in VCV.
At some point it might be a good idea if VCV considered updating its SVG support as only supporting an old beta version of a single application is not really an ideal scenario - particularly as that old beta version is 32 bit and won’t run at all on the latest Mac OS.
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could you say what is exactly the issue that you got in the rendering?
I m not expert but Inkscape is recommend not because is the best, it is because the svg code of Illustrator have a lots of thinks that only adobe understand how to read
the knob & jack coordinates are all over the place, like they’re not even on the panel itself
Try @Vortico’s suggestion of downloading the older Inkscape that works correctly with VCV. Or if you want to be a cowboy use AI set to pixels - it works fine.
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Which version of Inkscape is supposed to make these issues?
Was working with Inkscape last night and I didn’t find any issues with location of the knob after saving it.
I used this version: Inkscape 1.0 (4035a4f, 2020-05-01)
I’ve had good luck with Affinity Designer although the XML needs a tad of adjusting after the fact.
I use Adobe XD. Works great and super easy. But it doesn’t work in millimetres and a little fussing is required.