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Compatibility

What Adapt handles, and what it doesn’t.

Most software hides this page. We’d rather you found out here than after uploading a client file at 11pm. This list is complete and current, including the failures that happen without a warning.

Supported

Photoshop

  • RGB and CMYK, 8-bit PSD files, any canvas from 64×64 pixels up.
  • Nested groups, with opacity composing correctly through the hierarchy.
  • Point text and paragraph text, with real transform-scaled metrics.
  • Layer masks.
  • Smart objects, flattened at their placed resolution.
  • Sixteen blend modes with exact CSS equivalents.
  • Rotated images, baked into pixels. Rotated text, read from the file and kept.
  • Font matching: exact first, then near-miss names, and Adapt tells you which it used.
  • Manual position, scale and rotation overrides at element and group level.

Supported

Illustrator

  • Native .ai files read through their actual content stream.
  • Live editable text where the font is installed.
  • True Bézier bounding boxes.
  • Several objects on one layer, separated by geometry.
  • Multiple artboards: you choose one per adapt.
  • Output as a layered .ai with live vector paths and live text, or as PNG.

Supported

SVG

  • SVG files as input.
  • SVG is not an output format. An SVG source comes back as PNG and a layered PSD.

Supported

Sizes and layout

  • Landscape (1920×1080).
  • Portrait (1080×1920), in beta: approved on a growing set of designs, not yet on every one.
  • Custom sizes from 16 to 6,000 pixels a side.
  • Several layout options per size, one recommended, each checked against eight design rules.
  • Manual anchors per element: stretch, proportional, left, right, top, bottom, centre. Overflow and collision are flagged after solving.

Rejected

Adapt will not process these

You get a plain message saying what's wrong and how to fix it.

  • PSD files that aren’t 8-bit.
  • Any canvas smaller than 64×64 pixels.
  • .ai files not saved with “Create PDF Compatible File” enabled.
  • Rotated Illustrator artboards.
  • Unreadable or damaged files.
  • Files with missing fonts. Adapt will not substitute a font. Install the font and re-upload.

Degraded

It will work, with a warning

Adapt raises nineteen distinct warnings. The ones worth knowing before you start:

  • Live layer effects (drop shadow, glow, bevel) are not re-rendered.
  • Clipping masks are ignored.
  • Hidden layers are dropped.
  • Photoshop blend modes with no CSS equivalent, such as Linear Burn and Vivid Light, fall back to Normal.
  • Group-level blend modes are always dropped.
  • Smart objects can’t be scaled beyond their placed resolution. Adapt warns and offers a Swap.
  • Rotated text renders correctly to PNG, but not to live PSD text layers.
  • PSD layer masks don’t carry through to .ai output.
  • Per-run vertical text scaling has no PDF equivalent and is dropped.
  • Multi-run styled text (two colours in one line, one bold word) collapses to a single style when text is swapped in a campaign series.

Known issues

These fail without warning

We'd rather list these than have you discover them. All five are on the fix list.

  • fit: contain is defined but not implemented. It currently behaves as fill.
  • Spot and Separation colours in Illustrator render as black.
  • Text replacement in a campaign series can overflow its frame with no warning raised.
  • Fonts aren’t de-duplicated across vector components, so output files can be larger than they should be. Around 12 MB has been observed in real use.
  • Cropping a vector-backed .ai asset forces it to rasterise.

If something here is blocking you, tell us. The order we fix things in is decided by who asks.

Report a file that didn’t work

[email protected]