Horseflesh

Ok, figured it out. If you are interacting with an SVG link, you may grab the file. if you have loaded the SVG as an URL, you may not. Because reasons. I love my iPad Pro... I don’t love iOS.

I appreciate the effort but I was just about to post an update. The attachment you created did work, by the way—when I touched that link Safari for iOS did offer to download the file, which was not possible when simply viewing the link. But here is a way to self-rescue which may help other searchers. The free document management app “Documents by Readdle” includes a bare bones browser, and if you load a direct SVG URL as liked earlier, it will let you download it, where Safari would not. @DM1, maybe this is an iOS beta issue... it definitely did not offer a way to save the SVG. It would let me bookmark it, Gmail it, etc... but there were no file handling options. See attachment. (I’ll file feedback with Apple.)

I’ve got a huge project in front of me today... drawing a hexagon in Designer on my iPad. Unfortunately there seems to be a bug with Designer and the iOS 13 beta so I can’t use the polygon tool. No problem, I’ll just grab a hexagon svg off the web, right? Well, here it is, but I can’t figure out how to get this file into Designer. None of the “share” options in Safari will let me save the svg as a file. Copy from Safari and paste into Designer doesn’t work. And iOS 13 has even MORE file handling options than iOS 12 does! I can download a PNG/JPG in safari so this is an svg specific issue, I guess. This specific hexagon is not a critical issue, but getting an svg from the web into AD for iOS will surely be handy in the future. Any ideas?

I just fired up Designer 1.7.2.6 on my 12.9” iPad Pro 2018, public beta 7 (13.0 (17A5572a)). I’m experiencing a showstopper problem with changing tool settings. Any settings “bubble” as you see for the polygon tool in the attachment, cannot be changed from the default values. If you drag on the bubble, the numbers will change (albeit not smoothly) but when you stop dragging, nothing sticks. If you tap the bubble to use numeric entry, that change doesn’t stick either. All I wanted was a hexagon.

This is kind of a weird question but it would be SO helpful if I could figure out a trick to do this... I have some "one line" fonts which are intended to make paths for laser engravers or other CNC machines. Unfortunately, to make the best use of these fonts, you need special (expensive) software to render them as actual single-line paths. Normal design tools like Illustrator and AD mangle these fonts in a variety of ways, as outline fonts aren't supposed to have open paths (as I understand it). Here's an example of what I mean. The "a" glyph looks like it's drawn with one line... but if you use the Node tool and pull at the nodes, you can see it is actually a closed path with 2 copies of every node. My laser cutter would not draw one graceful one-line "a" if I fed it this art. What I want to do is convert this to a single open path as if I drew that "a" with the pen tool. And ideally that would be through some clever few menu operations that I could apply to a big group of shapes... so I can type, convert to curves, and then process to make the text all true single-line. Does anyone have any ideas? The font pictured above is #6 from this page, but they all misbehave in similar ways. http://www.mrrace.com/CamBam_Fonts/

Before I bought a whole new computer I would see if I could figure out the hub issue. You can get decent USB 3.1 hub for not a lot of dough, and it is possible that USB 3.1 dongles will behave differently than those on a C hub. Also, unless the computer is fancy and your C port is actually Thunderbolt, the C and 3.1 ports should be about the same speed. And if the computer ejects the SD dongle along with the card, you can just ... plug it in again. Seems like that would be a minor irritation compared to getting a new computer.

Illustrator's function may be pants, but I haven't noticed... it has done all I have needed, but my use is so far constrained to a weird, small use case. Guess there is nothing we can do but keep our fingers crossed!

Hah, then I am not the only one who feels that way. My sans-serif opinion is that it should be treated as a bug because it is an inconsistency, but I will be happy if it gets put on some official list or other.

That makes sense but then is Designer wrong for not understanding spelling with ligatures when that text is imported? If I type the word "benefits" into Illustrator, and it automatically uses the fi ligature, that isn't a spelling error, and I'd expect the same in Designer no matter how that text got in to Designer. This is not a big deal as I understand what is happening now, but I'm still unclear on what's supposed to happen in Designer. Is "ligatures screw up spell checking" or "ligatures in imported Illustrator text screws up spell checking" expected behavior?

I use Designer (and Illustrator, and even Inkscape) at times to make shapes that will be cut out on a laser cutter. If I want to make pieces that are sized correctly to press-fit into each other, it is necessary to make the piece that goes inside the hole very slightly larger than the piece that you originally cut out of the hole. If you don't do this, the piece you plug in fits too loosely, because the laser vaporizes a stroke about 0.007" wide. Illustrator's Offset Path function is perfect for this "kerf compensation" operation--as well as having many great uses for illustration, I am sure! With it, I can set an offset like +0.008" and then use the miter and join settings as needed to make sure that the new path matches the shape of the source path. I don't think there is a way to do this in Designer, so right now I have to detour into Inkscape or Illustrator, which sucks. This is my most-desired feature addition. In the meantime, if anyone has a trick for using existing Designer tools to produce a very precise amount of offset, I would love to hear about them.

Retracing my steps, I am pretty sure I did NOT activate "favor editable text." I just re-imported with that turned on and the ligatures/misspellings are gone. Looks like that explains it. Thanks @Sean P! (What I am now not sure of is how the ligatures got in there in the first place. I didn't create the original Illustrator file, but the typeface is Open Sans and I cannot imagine the previous designer went out of their way to place ligatures that don't even look any different than the regular glyphs... A problem for another day.)

I took a closer look and there is definitely something different about the "fi" glyphs. You cannot put the cursor between "f" and "i" as if they were one glyph. Is that how ligatures work? I honestly don't know. But in the typography panel, there is nothing about ligatures. (The text also looks identical to the re-typed text, so if this is a ligature, it seems pretty useless!) If I select the re-typed text, the Typography panel shows a ligature setting. And lastly if I look for the "fi" glyph in this font (OpenSans), it isn't there! So this does seem to be related to ligatures, thanks @R C-R, but I don't know enough about that topic to know if what I am seeing with regard to spelling is a bug, or expected behavior for however this word was constructed. Well, mystery partially solved anyway.

Excellent idea! It's in English though, so that isn't the issue. Pretty weird. In addition: If I Copy the text frame with this word in it, and do New From Clipboard, the new document doesn't show this error. However, I found that it shows NO spelling errors... Even if I make some deliberately! (The language is still set to US English.) If I Copy the text frame, make a new document, and then paste it in, the weird spelling error comes along for the ride. I have attached such a sample file in case Serif looks in to the issue. I would be curious if anyone else who opens the file sees the same misspelling indicator. spelling bug.afdesign

Today I opened an Illustrator file in Designer for Windows (1.7.1.404) and saw that a few words were incorrectly underlined as spelling errors. I typed the same text into a fresh Designer document, and spelling worked as it should. Then I copied the "bad" text block from the imported .ai file into the Designer document, and the incorrect underlining came along for the ride. I can copy/paste these underlined words into new text frames and the underlining persists--but if I select the word and re-type it, the spelling works correctly. Someone file a bug. I can provide example files to the devs if it will help.

Looks like the required settings are in a provided preset! I looked under that menu and found "Pixel work." Too bad it won't automatically snap to the grid on paste, the dragging step is not intuitive. I am not a pixel artist but knew I would get bit by this someday too. Glad there was a solution.

@GameDevJoe are your snapping options set like this? If that doesn't do it, I am sure there is some way to get the desired behavior.

Apologies as I bring this thread back from the brink of death with an off-topic question... Can you explain the issues you noted with the workaround you mentioned? I need this feature bigtime, it is important in preparing some files for laser cutting. All I know for sure is Illustrator's "Offset Path" function works perfectly.

.afphoto is analogous to a PSD file... it is native to the program and supports layers, etc. The options you want for creating jpegs etc are found under Export. Cheers!

Interesting, thanks... that sure is what it seems like. The dude will abide... but I hope they can make this more clear. Still, from a cold start I was able to be productive in my first session. Pretty cool!

That is news I can use, thanks!

I am confused about how linking works in Publisher, when you edit your linked objects while inside Publisher. If I create a new Publisher doc and Place a simple Designer object in it, I can then double-click on the Designer object and edit it. Cool. I can activate the Designer Persona and use those tools. Super cool. But in the Resource Manager, it shows as Linked... and the changes I make inside Publisher are not reflected in the source Designer object. So it's linked, but it acts like it's Embedded when you edit it, because my edits don't trickle down to the source object. Then, if I update the Designer object in Designer, the Publisher notices the change and the placed copy updates... erasing the changes that I made inside Publisher. If I edit a Linked object, do I still need the source file or does it become Embedded? What are best practices for working with this system?

Thanks, can't believe I missed that. I just realized--part of the problem was at some point during my search, I was in Designer mode, which of course conceals Publisher's menus... StudioLink on top of unfamiliar apps will take some getting used to!

Publisher is pretty great so far, but my layout is covered in blue boxes from text frames. I can hit space to hide them temporarily, but at some points in the workflow I want bounding boxes GONE unless an object is selected. Is there any way to do this? Or at least change the color to something less glaring? I didn't see anything obvious in the View menu or preferences.

One of my frequent tasks is creating user interface mockups. It is very common for me to start with a bitmap image, and use a few pieces to make something else. For example say I grab the Edit controls above this post, and paste into Designer: Now I want to grab a couple of the icons in that image, and turn them into objects that I can easily move around: There are many ways to accomplish this... for example I did partial screen grabs and pasted the new images into the document. I have also seen suggestions to use masks and export slices in Designer. But those threads were pretty old now... Is there a faster way to get a destructive crop, or copy/paste part of an image, all inside Designer? I know I can use Photos for any kind of pixel operations, but the vector nature of Designer, and better text controls, are a big benefit for this kind of work.

I was really pleased to find these forums. A good user community, and a company that engages with the community... well, both are really valuable, and you definitely lose at least the latter when you sign on with the big guys. I will definitely raid the Resources area!