Converting vector fill patterns to explicit objects

Question

I'm creating some masks for photolithography that have arrays of 50 µm features across a 4"x4" span.

An SVG file that represents my mask objects implicitly as a fill pattern is trivial:

<!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/1.1/DTD/svg11.dtd">
<svg width="4in" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1" height="4.25in">
<defs>
  <pattern height="0.100000mm" width="0.100000mm" patternUnits="userSpaceOnUse" y="0" x="0" id="tile">
    <rect y="0" width="0.100000mm" fill="black" x="0" height="0.100000mm" />
    <rect y="0.025000mm" width="0.050000mm" height="0.050000mm" x="0.025000mm" fill="white" />
  </pattern>
</defs>

<rect y="0" width="4in" height="4in" x="0" fill="url(#tile)" />
<text font-size="6pt" y="4.1in" x="0.1cm" font-family="Consolas">50 µm squares, 50 µm pitch; tds 3/6/13</text>

</svg>

Our printing provider says they can take EPS files. Doing a round trip from SVG to EPS in Illustrator works fine, but the generated EPS file still has an implicit representation of the mask features, and the print shop says they can't see anything. I think that I need to have an explicit representation of each of the features instead of using a fill pattern.

What's the best way (with Postscript?) to convert a vector fill pattern into explicitly rendered vector objects? I could generate the SVG by hand but gosh, that would be a honking huge text file.

Answer 1

You should be able to get this converted from a pattern to actual vector data within Illustrator by selecting Object > Expand (make sure Fill is selected). Note that this will generate many paths and your resulting file should indeed be honking huge.