Hi guys.

I used to use Illustrator and macromedia Fireworks quite a few years back. Haven't used for about 7 yrs and now i'm back. So some of my terminology may be wrong in asking this question.

I still have some (macromedia) fireworks png files that I want to edit. But when i try to open it in Inkscape, it comes out as 1 image as opposed to vectors which i can edit. When i open them from fireworks, it opens as vectors. I tried to "break up" the grouping. but that doesn't work either. and I can't convert the image to paths.

So the goal.........I need to be able to edit the png files. the vectors need to remain as vectors and not grouped in one uneditable image.

tried searching on the web and on this forum for help but couldn't find much. By the way, the macromedia fireworks program i was using to create these files was a 2001-2002 version.

thanks in advance for your help.......

Mike

png is not a vector format, it is a bitmap format. You will never be able to open it as vectors in inkscape unless you can somehow save as a vector format from fireworks. I've never used fireworks so I don't know if that's possible.

(Just to clarify: PNG is a bitmap format, but it allows for the use of private chunks that provide additional information. Fireworks PNG files use private chunks that specify vector information. So Fireworks PNG files are effectively vector images, but will be treated as ordinary PNG files by applications that don't understand the private chunks.)

You will need to convert the Fireworks PNG files to a different vector format in order to import them into Inkscape. If Fireworks itself can't do that, then FreeHand probably can.

Thank you for Clarifying.

With fireworks, you can save the document as ...

bmp, gif,animated gif, illustrator 8, jpeg, flash swf, flattened png, photoshop psd, tiff, wbmp.

I tried to save as the illustrator ai. But when i tried to open or import into inkscape, the error "failed to open" comes up...

Illustrator 8 files are PostScript, so you should be able to convert them to PDF using the ps2pdf utility in Ghostscript (or using http://convert.neevia.com) and open the PDF in Inkscape.

Well I worked a long way to do it. Opened the png file in fireworks, then saved it as adobe illustrator (*.ai). Then opened the .ai file with adobe illustrator and saved it as svg (scalable vector graphic) and that is the format and standard inkscape uses. So i got to edit the file like regular vectors.

NOTE: When saving from Fireworks to PNG and open in illustrator, some things may change, like gradients, patterns and fonts.