File opening error: No fills and all paths broken

[Gunnar]

All my SVG files suddenly appear very strange when I open them with Inkscape. All fill colors have disappeared, path strokes are all black now (even if they were without color before) and all paths appear to be broken at their nodes.

The last things that I did on my Mac before this occured were to export an image from Inkscape as PNG and I installed Photoshop.

Inkscape view display mode is "Normal" and color display mode is also "Normal".

Has anybody encountered this before? I really need some help. Thank you!

[Moini]

Try View -> Display mode -> normal (instead of outline, what you probably have selected inadvertantly). Let us know if that was the cause.

[Gunnar]

Hi,

making sure that the view is set to "Normal" is actually one of the first things that I checked and it is set to normal. So that's not the reason.

Here is something else that I just noticed:
I thought that all of my files open in a way that no colour fills are shown and all paths are broken at each one of their nodes. But that is not the case. Some files don't show this problem. The ones that do, however, also prompt me to set a "Method of Scaling" and "Character encoding" in a "DXF Input" window that pops up. So far have kept everything at default ("Read from file", Scale factor 1.0, X and Y origins at 0.0, unselect "Gcodetools compatible", "Character encoding" is Latin 1 and "Font: Arial").

I hope that's a good hint to find a solution for my problem. I really need to be able to recover these files.

Attached is one of the corrupted files that open with this dialog box. Please download and check if you run into the same issues.

Thanks!
-Gunnar

[brynn]

Welcome to the forum!

I'm not very clear about the problem you're desciribing.  And I can't open DXF files.  Can you show screenshots of the problem? 

The reason for the DXF Input dialog, is because this is a DXF file which you have provided.  Did you not realized that it's a DXF file?

Since I've never been able to look at a DXF file, I don't know what they typically contain or might contain.  But since they are "desktop cutting/plotting" file, it doesn't surprise me that if they only contain cutting paths, and no fills.  I'm not sure if the paths being separated at the nodes is due to being saved as DXF.  But if the path was originally all connected at the nodes, then saving as DXF is probably the culprit.

Whenever you save as DXF, you need to also save an SVG file, if you want to retain an SVG file.  If you convert an Inkscape canvas to DXF (using Save As DXF) and you did not save an SVG file in a separate step, then you simply don't have one.

[Gunnar]

That's it!

I in fact did not realise that I had saved the file as a DFX. I supposed my "Save as" settings were still set that way because I exported a DFX for laser plotting recently.

Now, that's a real problem. If anyone has any idea how to quickly recover the work that I've done, that would be great. Otherwise I guess I need to start over and make sure I SAVE AS SVG.

Thanks to helping me discover this!

[brynn]

I'm not sure if the Save As dialog always presents you with the last file format that you saved, the next time you want to save.  For me, it always presents Inkscape SVG.  But then, that's about all I ever really save. 

Actually I have saved other formats, such as PDF.  Occasionally DXF or EPS for helping other people.  And I don't recall having to change anything, the next time I wanted to save an SVG file.  My best guess, without have any other evidence, it that Inkscape always offers Inkscape SVG as the first format to save with.  But you still could have chosen DXF really without thinking too much.

Or there could be some difference here, between Windows and Macs.  Maybe Mac does always offer the last format?

Well for recovering your original files, the DXF file still has all the paths.  So you have not lost the paths.  It sounds like the only thing you are missing are fills, right?

Just open the DXF in Inkscape, replace the fills, and save as SVG.  Unless there's something I'm missing?