Jump to content
You must now use your email address to sign in [click for more info] ×

SolarDude

Members
  • Posts

    9
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by SolarDude

  1. Exporting to PSD, a checkbox in the extended export options is "Compatibility Mode." Compatibility with what, and are there tradeoffs to be aware of aside from compatibility with... whatever. Did look in the help file and did not find any guidance there. Cheers
  2. I've been at this stuff for a long time but only sporadically, so for all intents and purposes I'm a beginner. I'll give you a method that will get you started and perhaps more knowledgeable users will jump in with a better idea. AFAIK there's no way to format a text box to define fill, stroke etc. It's just a container for text. Off the top of my head the only way to achieve what you're after (formatted text on a formatted rectangle) is: 1. Draw and format your rectangle as before. 2. Select the text tool, click on the artboard and drag out a rectangle roughly the same size as the one you created. 3. Type your text in the text box, format as you like e.g. selecting center placement horizontally and vertically, size, text colour etc. 4. Notice that this operation has created a new text layer in your layers list tab in the "right studio" i.e. that tabbed section to the right of the screen. 5. With the move tool, select the text box and drag it so that it overlays your coloured rectangle. 6. Drag the edges of the text box so that it matches up with the rectangle beneath (or is centered therein or whatever relationship you'd like). 7. With the move tool, click and drag a selection that captures both boxes. That is, e.g. place the move tool outside the upper left corner of the rectangles, click and drag until it's past the lower right corner. You should now have both text box and rectangle selected. If you have the layers tab open you will see that both layers are selected. 8. You should see a "group" button on the tool bar, or you can go to the Layer menu and select "Group". Henceforth the text box and underlying rectangle can be selected and moved as one. If you double-click the object you'll be editing the text layer. If you select the object, then select only the coloured rectangle layer in the layers tab, you'll be able to edit its parameters. There are probably also keyboard shortcuts enabling one to select the next layer down, dunno about this. Worst case you can always select the grouped object and ungroup temporarily if you need to make a lot of changes to the underlying rectangle. Also note you can grab the side handles and corner handles of the selected object and resize the frame/rectangle without altering the text size, or grab the extra handle off the lower right corner (there's an official name for this of course) and drag to resize and reshape the object in a manner that re-scales the content (text) at the same time. Pretty cool. I'll see if I can attach a little, ugly example file here. TextOverRectangle.afdesign
  3. Apologies to all respondents that I am so new to the forum I didn't realize I had to enable notifications and have only now noticed your post. Thanks sincerely for your reply, but I'm not sure how to interpret it. Is the upshot that the behaviour I've described in Adobe products is impossible, or are you simply confirming that it is not currently possible in Affinity products?
  4. Sorry I'm just noticing this now. I failed to enable notifications on this thread. (Noob.) This is very useful, thanks much. After trying it out for a few minutes, I realize what I miss the most is the ability to quickly zoom and pan (i.e. change the view) without selecting the move tool and then having to double-click into text editing again. At the moment I'm editing 5.8 pt lyrics for a CD insert and having to zoom in frequently to see what I'm doing at the character level and then zoom out to see how the column breaks are working out.
  5. I came to the forum today looking for a way to replace a certain keyboard shortcut functionality I'm used to in Adobe products. Specific examples of operation given below are from InDesign; from what I recall Illustrator is pretty similar and Photoshop is a little different. I only found one post here that was even in the ballpark, so... Scenario: you're editing text. Obviously you can't use "V" to select the Move tool; that will just insert a "v". OTOH selecting the Move tool with the cursor is a pain if you just want to do a quick move and get back to editing text right where you were. The Adobe convention I miss: If you have the text tool selected (also applies to many other tools although not always in the exact same way) you can press and hold CTRL (PC) to switch the cursor to the Move tool only as long you continue to hold CTRL. As soon as you let it go, the cursor reverts to the Text tool (or whatever tool you were using). But wait, there's more. Having pressed and held CTRL, you can then add SHIFT or SHIFT+ALT in order to zoom in or out, or if you add SHIFT+ALT and then release CTRL, you get the Hand tool and you can shift the artboard. When you release SHIFT+ALT, you're back to whatever tool you started out with. It's still second nature to me even after years of very infrequent use. Fast and hassle-free. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't see any way to add this kind of temporary tool select modification to the keyboard shortcuts myself. --- Disclaimer: I no longer use graphic design software on a daily or even monthly basis, and for all the years I've used Adobe products, I'd still call myself a noob. My copy of Adobe Creative Suite is v3, so... yeah. I should also point out that I am thrilled at the quality, facility and AFFORDABILITY of Affinity software. A boon for a guy like me who has a few skills that occasionally come in real handy, but rarely generate significant income -- certainly not enough to justify Adobe prices.
  6. Really appreciate the effort. This is definitely in the right vein. Trying this on a simple object and some associated text, I was able to select objects with node tool+shift, and to select specifically the end points of the lines I wanted to be included in the move, but I was unable use the same individual node selection method on any part of my little graphic and text object. The object(s) would show as selected but I was unable to interact with single nodes. If I tried to select the node it would simply deselect the entire object. Sooo no matter what I do, only the line end points move when I try to drag. BTW I tried some variations of this method to select the nodes I wished to move. E.g. attempting to combine move tool object selection with node tool selection, which, so far as I've been able to tell, is not possible. Even if I could get this method to work, I'm sure you can appreciate the relative ease of using marquee selection to select a group of nodes, irrespective of which objects they belong too, and to be able to move them as a unit. If this really is not possible, I will have to hang on to my creaky old Illustrator license for a while yet. I accept that this specific feature may not be attractive to a wide user base, but for me its use is second nature. FWIW I'm very much a novice user of Designer so maybe I just need to develop a different approach. I want to move on from my Adobe days, and I gotta say, I'm very grateful for software of this class being offered at such a mortal-affordable price.
  7. My use of Illustrator over the years has been primarily for technical drawings - block diagrams, schematics and similar drawings wherein objects are connected by simple rectilinear lines. There's specific software for such purposes, designed to understand and maintain connections between objects as they're moved about, but it's typically highly specialized and expensive. A method I use so frequently that I take it for granted is to marquee-select a group of nodes in order to rearrange relative locations of objects while maintaining the "connections" symbolized by the lines between them. So e.g. imagine a box with several objects overlaid on the right border. Say I want to expand the box. I marquee node select (direct selection tool in Illustrator) including the nodes of the upper and lower corners of the box as well as all the objects on the border, then drag (or cursor-key nudge) to the right. Because I'm selecting nodes, not objects, the vertical line segment of the box comes along with the objects, and the horizontal segments of the box lengthen automagically since I'm moving the corner nodes. Select, drag, done. Or perhaps the objects are connected by multiple line segments instead of sitting over top of one line. If I want to move one or more objects closer together or further apart, again I can marquee-select all the nodes of the objects as well as the line nodes I want to move, so that all the connections are maintained without a lot of futzing around selecting and dragging individual line segment end nodes after the fact. Am I missing a way to do this in Designer? It seems my only marquee selection option is to use the move tool, so in the above scenario, the box wouldn't be selected since the marquee did not include the whole box object, so I would only succeed in moving the other objects off the border of the box. Then I would have to resize the box as a separate operation. I could be inventing a memory given the passage of time, but I think Corel Draw(!) actually had this ability before Illustrator even did. Yes, I am that old. TIA
  8. FWIW, same behaviour experienced here - including workaround, thanks for posting! In my case I'm editing pre-existing AD files. 1.7.0.293 Win 10 Pro Dell E6410A i5 M560 2.67 GHz 8 GB RAM 1TB SSD
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Guidelines | We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.