Russ Johnson

You can use a PC or Mac to download a video, then sync it to your iPad. But it needs to be in the correct format. You can download HandBrake to transcode, if your video isn't the right format for your iDevice.

Since we’re talking about Macs, you can do this by setting up (I think it’s called) an hard link. You’ll need to learn some Unix to make this happen, but OS X’s underlying Unix kernel has the ability to make itself think a file is in two locations at once. So you could have the file in the export folder hard linked to the same file in your Dropbox, and both AD and Dropbox would treat it the way you want, no extra coding on Serif’s part required.

Sorry it took a while to get these posted. But here are examples of what I’m talking about. Some of these aren’t super obvious, but where curves touch in these examples, they touch at one point and only one point exactly. I threw in a couple extra I thought of as I was doing these, too, including something that will make long shadow aficionados like me swoon. HTH! —Russ

I hope I end up with some kerning values that aren’t whole numbers! My opinion: make the thing as close to analogue as possible. Oh, there still will be those who want x points of kerning exactly, and sometimes I’ll even be one of them, for one reason or another. But that’s what text input fields are for. We already have 1,000,000-plus-per-cent zoom. I see every reason kerning should be exactly the same. And besides, having the ability to work more æsthetically than mathematically is one of the things that will separate a good tool from a great tool. And Serif already have proven they intend AD to be a great tool.

Honestly, I wasn’t … at least in AD. That having been said, I've been doing typesetting long enough to know that stepping through discrete values, whether by typing or repeatedly pressing ⌥→ and ⌥←, tends to build some bad habits, not the least of which is paying attention to setting values at the expense of getting the look of a piece just right. The trick is to make changing spacing as analogue a process as possible.

I can appreciate launching a feature like this in a page layout program first. That having been said, some of us (:::raises hand REALLY high:: :) are basically junkies for hand-setting text. Any chance you could code a shortcut for character spacing, something along the lines of ⌥⇢ to increase and ⌥⇠ to decrease kerning, maybe with an optional ⇧ modifier to affect tracking instead … and while we’re at it, ⇧⌥⇣ to increase leading and ⇧⌥⇡ to decrease leading? I could blow through some headline text in seconds with one hand on my mouse and the other on my modifiers & arrow keys! PS: The dotted arrows here indicate scrolling with the mouse wheel/Magic Mouse or one-fingered swiping on a trackpad.

Examples I got. Which would you like me to clarify?

The feature was removed because of the problem being discussed in this thread.

@evtonic3: @A_B_C is absolutely right. Relying on automatic curly quotes to choose between an apostrophe and open-quotation mark is a bad idea. The choice between them is a matter of meaning; unfortunately that’s a bit hard to program. So, it's coded in terms of context, which actually produces the wrong glyph more often than not. ⌥[, ⇧⌥[, ⌥], and ⇧⌥] (and ⇧⌥W for German, plus ⌥\ and ⇧⌥\ for most European languages) ought to become some of your very best friends. By the way, which keyboard layout are you using? Some don't support the ⌥Option key combinations in the same way. Try using US or US Extended. If you're using German, for instance, the key combinations I gave you will result in •, °, ±, , „, ‘, and ’, respectively. Only ⇧⌥W gives the „ I was talking about, and the European quotes « and » I was talking about change to the open-quote mark (‘) and apostrophe-cum-close-quote mark (’), respectively. ________________________________________________________________________ This was taken out because most of our users had problems of unintended scrolling with the magic mouse. … @Andrew Tang: I have to agree that manually typing numbers gets a bit tedious. How about implementing a feature so that dragging up or down performs the same action? (This could be triggered only if the pointer leaves the bounds of the text box, to keep the feature from being activated by someone who's actually trying to highlight and type a value.)

I’d have to agree that the Character and Paragraph panels … contain generous amounts of white space.

Well if that's the case, I'm going to have to insist on Amiga and OS/2 versions as well. You can have the CD-ROMs to me in the mail by the end of the week, if it's not too inconvenient.

MattP: It was raining for you today? You’re not in Tennessee, are you? lol —Seriously, though, thanks! I actually thought that would involve a decent bit of eye-bleeding math. Glad to know it’s so easy. So, here’s hoping the forecast calls for more showers before the next beta! ;)

I'd like to see tools that leverage geometric measurements to make shape making easy. Specifically: Path tangent to 1 curve Ditto 2 curves Arc tangent to 1 curve Ditto 2 curves Ditto 3 curves Circle tangent to 1 curve Ditto 2 curves Ditto 3 curves Path perpendicular to 1 path Ditto 2 paths Path along shortest distance between paths Arc by three points Arc by start-end-direction Circle by three points Circle by two points and direction Shape exactly inscribed in another shape

@MEB: When this is implemented, will it work with the upcoming distort feature, so strokes and fills can be poked and prodded independently of their parent objects (I sure hope!) ?

It's a little convoluted at the moment, just because you can't just click a path and press ⌫, and the Break Curve command doesn't yet work on multiple points at once. Anyway, here are the steps. 1: Make sure your shape is made of curves (which yours already is, but for ellipses, rectangles, cogs, etc., press ⌘⏎ to convert the shape to curves.) 2: Using the Node Tool, click on one of the nodes adjacent to where you want the break. 3: Click the Break Curve button (the first button in the Action group of the main toolbar. 4: Still using the Node Tool, click the other node. 5: Click the Break Curve button. 6: Deselect. 7: In the Layers panel, find the newly created shape (the segment you cut out), then delete it. Hope that helps! —Russ

@Andy: You’re right; this was a question that came up in the context of discussion on this forum. I haven't found “Alt” used anywhere in AD's UI. @ A_B_C, @bpedit: You're welcome.

(This comes largely from a PM I had with a member who exhorted me to post it on the forum. Since the Questions board is the closest thing to a general discussion area, I figured this would be the place to post it. On the off-chance this gets me in some kind of trouble, I'm not going to try to throw him under the proverbial bus by using his name.) One of our members expressed some confusion over the ⌥ Option key. Wasn't it just another name for Alt? After all, both Alt and ⌥ are labeled on the physical key anyway. Or did it mean Alt was the same as ⌥⇧ (Shift)? From a purely technical standpoint, ⌥ and Alt do send the same key code back to the system. One still shouldn't use the term “Alt” to refer to the ⌥ Option key, however, since the buttons perform completely different functions. The best analogy might be if I (an American) went to London, and asked where to buy pants, wanting to pick up some new khakis. Technically, “pants” always refers to a unit of clothing covering the body from the waist down. But I would find no khakis, for in the UK, “pants” means “underwear.” The actual, functional difference between ⌥ and Alt, then, is thus: On Windows, Alt is used in Ctrl-Alt-Delete, Alt-tab, and Alt-F4. It also navigates on-screen menus, which keeps it from being used for much else, unless it's accompanied by Ctrl (the most common modifier) or Shift. On the Mac, ⌥ is used to enter international characters and special symbols. And while Windows Ctrl-shortcuts generally map to ⌘ (Command) on the Mac, ⌥ is very often used by itself as a modifier, especially in programs where typing is just another sometimes used feature. Additionally the ⌥ Option key has been used for decades on the Mac to tell the computer to resize a selection while keeping it centered. This was even implemented in the windowing UI itself when the Resize from Any Edge feature was added. As for the reason the Mac keyboard often has “Alt” labeled on the ⌥ Option key, it's because the ⌥ Option/Alt and Command/Windows keys are wired backwards between Windows and Mac machines. This isn't meant to imply that the names are interchangeable; it's meant to rescue the poor sucker who loads Windows on his Apple just to find it crashes so badly even Ctrl-Cmd-Del doesn’t work. Hope that helps!

Sorry, Rik, but I'll have to agree with Ben, MEB, and MattP here. If you were to go back to the 1980s (you could take the trip via YouTube if you don't have the DeLorean) and watch some old Apple commercials you'd notice they scream, "easy!" The difference between the Macintosh user guide pamphlet and the IBM user guide novel is especially telling. Your comment about the Mac being Apple's-way-or-the-highway is quite apt, and it's by design: Apple publishes and maintain a Human Interface Guide, a single set of standard conventions to ensure Mac programs look and feel like Mac programs. The last time I checked, the equivalent Microsoft document to Apple's HIG went about as far as "this is what a button looks like, and when you click it, it makes the program do something." Here's a great example of the real difference between platforms: let's say you want to use an online image as a layer in AD. (If you try to do it the Windows way) you'll right-click the image, save it, then go back to AD, click File, click Open, navigate to the Downloads folder, open the image, select all, copy to clipboard, switch to the document where you wanted it in the first place, then paste. Whew! But on the Mac, you can simply drag an image directly from Safari into AD, and it will be imported as a layer. That's because according to Apple’s HIG, drag and drop is for moving anything, anywhere, and if it makes sense for the thing you drag to go where you drop it, the Mac should figure it out for you. It's astounding how much easier to learn and more productive Apple makes the Mac, just by making basic skills work everywhere. So I think it’s a losing proposition to pit a pair of measly undo-redo buttons against the kind of productivity you can get from your Mac if you'll simply let go of the Windows crap and learn and leverage the Mac conventions. Of course, that's just my 2¢. —Russ Johnson Murfreesboro, Tenn.

I understand that Custom Keyboard Shortcuts are coming to AD in a future release. If you read my recent post in the Questions forum, you'll know how passionate I am about my hotkeys. So I would like to propose that these custom keyboard shortcuts be export- and import-able, so that we can share them. I know I'm certainly a tinker, and I'll happily play for hours getting a set of hotkeys just right if the mood strikes. Certainly there must be other people out there who would love to have a custom set of hotkeys but can't/won't/don't-have-a-clue-how-to make all those changes themselves. I'd be happy to share my work with them, especially because rising tides. My 2¢. —Russ

I know there's been a lot of talk about shortcut keys, and how and why AD doesn't use many of the standard Mac shortcut key combinations. I think MattP alluded to a discussion on them in a reply to someone. I was wondering whether that discussion was internal to the Affinity team at Serif, or was is here on the boards somewhere I haven't yet been able to find? Specifically, I'd like to know the reasoning behind scrapping much of 20-plus years of established convention. Please understand: this isn't a complaint. At least, it isn't yet. Oh, I'm firmly in the you'd-better-have-a-d*mn-good-reason-for-making-me-relearn-something-I've-known-how-to-do-for-years camp. That having been said, the allusion I heard (something to do with ergonomics and productivity) certainly peaked my interest, and I'd like to hear the arguments for and against AD's current set of shortcuts. I understand that this issue will be rendered (largely) moot by the upcoming Custom Keyboard Shortcuts feature. That having been said, if there's a valid argument to be made in favour of the current shortcut assignments, I'd love to save myself the trouble of re-setting AD to use conventional keyboard shortcuts. On that note, I think I'm going to post a suggestion in the Feature Request forum that the Custom Keyboard Shortcuts option include a method for sharing those shortcuts. Anyway, thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for any good answers! —Russ Johnson Murfreesboro, Tenn.

LillieG, Maybe I wasn't clear enough. Currently, when AD makes a radial gradient, it basically takes a linear gradient and rotates it around one endpoint, so that the gradient spreads outward in all directions. (For elliptical gradients, it simply makes a radial gradient and then stretches it.) Giving a direction to a radial gradient essentially takes its origin point and moves it off-center. Take a look at the example i've attached to this reply. On the left is the kind of radial gradient AD currently is capable of creating. On the right is a radial gradient with direction. Notice how the white portion of the circle seems bunched up against one side? It's almost as if a white light were shining on a grey wall from above. AD currently isn't capable of this effect. I've been thinking about how to approximate the effect, and I've come up with a rather convoluted solution. Unfortunately, it isn't really worth pursuing, for various time and technical reasons. And besides, once the mesh feature is available, I can simply use a point-to-circle or point-to-ellipse (or point-to-any-shape) mesh to create the effect … at least for simple gradients with only a start and end colour (otherwise it gets complicated again.) I believe that feature already is on the roadmap, right, MEB? Anyway, LillieG, I hope that helps clear up the question. :)

First, let me ditto roryobryan's kudos: you guys really are doing a terrific job. If you weren't, we wouldn't be giving you such a hard time. :) That having been said, maybe I can help out by proposing a method. Since AD already includes the ability to expand a stroke, that analysis software already will have been written, if AD simply automatically expanded each stroke into RAM and discarded the old RAM expansion any time the geometry of a polygon changes. Running the relevant code after scaling or other operations that already account for or have nothing to do with the do-or-don't-scale-stroke-with-shape setting, the notion of deeper analysis ought to be moot. As for layer effects — which nobody yet has mentioned yet, but I can just hear the hecklers already — they come with their own mathematical (pardon the pun) problems and simply could be ignored entirely … along with inside strokes, for obvious reasons. I know adding a feature like this really isn't something to do in just a few minutes, but it seems to me that the hard part will be debugging, and making sure the in-RAM copies don't get saved to disk or spat out a printer as spurious geometry. Anyway, that's just my 2¢. —Russ

Thanks for the replies, as always. I think, however, I may have led you down a false path with use of the word "sides." I didn't mean that the endpoints of the stroke can't be changed independently (I found that feature already — with ⌥ Option rater than Alt, not to be too picky.) ;) What I meant to convey was that width profiles can't be applied asymmetrically. I've attached an example of what I'm talking about. The lips you'll be looking at comprise exactly two shapes: one stock straight line with a red stroke, and one stock straight line with a black stroke. Using the stroke width tool in the program these came from, I was able to make the strokes asymmetric, to bend the top of the red stroke to create two bumps, and the bottom to create a single curve. With the black line, I added width markers just to one point in the middle, to create a mild rise on the top side while leaving the bottom side almost completely flat. I've included a screenshot of the handles to make it easier to see where the points are. As for vector brushes, I would imagine the "more options" you mentioned in your reply, MEB, will include the ability to stretch a source vector image along a curve, yes? Thanks again as always! —Russ

Thanks for the reply — I appreciate it. As for the roadmap, well, I can be patient! :) —Russ

Hello all, I've found the pressure profile feature in AD, but for some reason the feature doesn't allow for linear changes between values, except in profiles that have only a start and end point. Additionally, it doesn't allow the width of each side of a stroke to be changed independently of the other. Alas, this means that what might be boiled down to simple strokes (eyelashes or lips, for instance) must be formed of curves. Also alas, this means that editing such shapes must necessarily be more convoluted and less precise, especially because the profile must be modified in a separate editor, away from the artwork, which adds guesswork, and again more time and effort, into the equation. So I would like to propose a more flexible pressure/width profile feature, which allows pressure profiles to be edited directly on strokes, to allow curves and corner points — now that I think about it, a vector brush system would do as well. So I'm putting these forward: a more versatile stroke width feature, and vector brushes. Thanks, —Russ Johnson Murfreesboro, TN