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Working with other software

Every file format Kreativus reads and writes — what comes in editable, what comes in exact, and what to export from the other app instead.

Kreativus is built to sit in the middle of whatever you already use. This page is the honest inventory: what it reads, what it writes, and — just as importantly — what it deliberately doesn’t, with the route that works instead.

Two rules run through all of it:

• Nothing disappears quietly. If part of a file can’t come in as editable shapes, it comes in as pixels rendered from the original — never dropped, never approximated. The app tells you which parts those were.
• Nothing fails quietly. A file that doesn’t import says why, by name. If your own software offers a route that does work, the message names that too.

Getting files in

Drop them on the canvas, the timeline or the Project panel, or use File → Import…. Both routes accept exactly the same formats.

Numbered files (shot_0001.png, shot_0002.png…) are offered as an image sequence rather than a pile of layers. Photos keep their orientation — the rotation your camera recorded is applied on the way in.

Dropping a model with its parts? Drop the whole set together — a .gltf with its .bin and textures, or an .obj with its .mtl. They stage side by side, so the references between them resolve.

Vector files in detail

An SVG or PDF becomes real editable geometry: cubic bezier paths, groups matching the file’s own layer structure, fills and strokes you can keep working on. Specifically preserved:

• Groups and names — an Illustrator SVG exported with Object IDs > Layer Names rebuilds its layer panel here.

• Clipping masks — an SVG clip-path and a PDF/Illustrator clipping path both become real masks. Nested clips intersect, exactly as the file means them, and the shapes sharing one mask stay together in one group rather than scattering.

• Fill rule — even-odd artwork keeps its holes instead of filling solid.

• Strokes — width, caps, joins with their miter limits, and real dash patterns (the actual lengths, not an approximation).

• Gradients, opacity and blend modes.

• Gradients — including multi-stop ones, from both SVG and PDF.

Some things have no editable equivalent here, so they’re rendered from the original file and brought in as pixels — accurate to what the file says, just not reshapeable:

• <mask> (per-pixel luminance masking — different from a clipping path)
• Filter effects — blurs, drop shadows
• Pattern fills

When that happens the import report names the element and what became of it, so you find out while you can still go back to the source and change it.

PDF images keep their transparency — a logo placed on a transparent background arrives cut out, not as an opaque rectangle with the background baked in.

Text is skipped in both SVG and PDF for now, and a PDF that contains live text says so on import rather than quietly losing it. Set your type as outlines before exporting, or recreate it with the Text tool.

CAD drawings

Drop a .dxf and it becomes editable vector artwork — not a picture of a drawing, but the paths themselves, ready to animate.

The curves are the file’s own curves. CAD stores arcs three different ways and Kreativus reads all three: the bulge on a polyline vertex (which is how every fillet and rounded slot is stored), true ARC and ELLIPSE entities including the partial and rotated ones, and SPLINE — a NURBS curve, converted to bezier curves by knot insertion, which is an identity rather than a resemblance. For the splines CAD actually writes, the path in Kreativus is the path in the file. The handful that no bezier can trace exactly — weighted or periodic ones — are rebuilt to well under a pixel, and the import report says which, rather than claiming an exactness that isn’t there.

Also carried across:

• Layers — each CAD layer becomes a group, keeping the organisation your drawing already has. A layer switched off in CAD arrives switched off here.
• Blocks — a block reference becomes a group named after the block, so a door placed forty times is forty things you can move, not a scatter of loose lines. Arrays (MINSERT) repeat properly, and fill-in field values (ATTRIB) come across as their own text.
• Colours — the AutoCAD Color Index and true colour both, including entities that say “use my layer’s colour”, which is most of them.
• Linetypes — hidden lines and centre lines arrive dashed with the lengths the file states, not with a generic dash preset.
• Text — labels, part numbers and room names come in as real editable text layers, at the size and angle the drawing gives them. DXF names a text style but doesn’t embed the font, so the words arrive in the app’s own typeface — set the font you want once and it applies.

How big a drawing arrives

A CAD drawing has no pixel size. It’s drawn at true scale — a 100 mm part is stored as “100” — and its paper size is a plotting decision made afterwards. So Kreativus reads the drawing’s own units ($INSUNITS) and brings it in at its physical size: 100 mm becomes 378 px, the same as an SVG of the same shape.

A building at 100 m across would be 378 000 px, so anything past 8192 px is scaled down uniformly — proportions untouched — and the import report tells you the ratio used. A drawing that says nothing about its units arrives one unit to the pixel, and says so.

Everything comes in as a 1 px hairline in its own colour. A CAD lineweight is a plotting property rather than part of the artwork, and it’s very often left unset; a hairline keeps the drawing legible and ready to restyle.

What a DXF can’t bring

Dimensions, leaders, hatching, multilines and 3D solids have no editable equivalent here. They aren’t dropped in silence — the import report names each type and how many there were. Exploding them in your CAD application first turns them into ordinary lines and arcs, which import in full.

Model space is imported; the plotted sheet (paper space) is not, so a drawing doesn’t arrive stacked on top of a picture of itself.

How we know it’s right

Every one of those claims is checked on every build, not asserted. The test suite imports each kind of file and renders it twice — once through Kreativus, once through resvg, the independent renderer the rest of the world treats as correct — and compares the two pictures pixel by pixel. A drift past a few shades fails the build.

The same check runs in the other direction: an SVG exported from Kreativus is rendered by that foreign renderer and compared against what Kreativus itself shows. A file that only looks right in the app that wrote it isn’t interchange.

Getting files out

Video export uses ffmpeg, which macOS doesn’t ship. If you don’t have it, install it once with brew install ffmpeg — PNG sequences and every still format work without it.

Music, fonts and text

Drop a .mid and every track that holds notes becomes its own instrument layer, with its General MIDI instrument already chosen and the notes sitting on the piano roll ready to edit. Tempo changes are followed properly — a piece that speeds up halfway through arrives timed the way it was written, not stretched to one average speed. Channel 10 comes in as drums, since that’s what it means in General MIDI.

Drop a font file (.ttf, .otf, .ttc, .woff2) and it installs into your own font library, available in every text layer from then on. The family name is read from inside the font rather than guessed from its filename — that’s what makes it actually select rather than quietly falling back to a default face.

Drop a .txt or .md and its words become a text layer.

Captions travel both ways

Kreativus can transcribe a voiceover into a real caption track, and that track is no longer trapped in the picture. In the Transcript section of a captions layer, .srt and .vtt save it out as a proper subtitle file — for a broadcaster, a video platform, or an editor working somewhere else.

It reads them too. Drop an .srt or .vtt on the canvas and it becomes an ordinary caption layer: restyleable, animatable, and exportable again. Inline markup (<i>, {\an8}) is stripped, since a caption track here carries one style for the whole track. Overlapping cues — two people talking at once — are trimmed so the earlier one ends where the later begins, rather than being dropped.

Formats we don’t read, and what to do instead

These are closed formats. Rather than half-read them and hand you artwork that’s subtly wrong, Kreativus doesn’t claim them at all — and tells you the route that works. Drop one and you’ll get this advice in the app.

Illustrator files that won’t open are almost always saved without their PDF stream. Re-save from Illustrator with Create PDF Compatible File ticked in the save dialog and it imports normally.