I have a .ai file (also opened fine in Inkscape) with thousands of paths which sometimes overlap. I would like to have no overlap and just each object. I will need to simplify it further as I am planning to laser cut/engrave with it but manually cutting and joining is going to take a long time.
It seems I could export as a very high resolution raster image and then trace that but that seems less than proper.
Answer
Use Illustrator:
- Select All
- Click the Merge button on the Pathfinder Panel (Window > Pathfinder)
This removes all overlapping areas and combines areas with the same fill color.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : altendky , Answer Author : Scott