Milomade

It is a vector - I created it in Affinity Designer. Thanks for the link - that's something I need to learn and add to my skill set. Very handy indeed! Not sure it's helpful in this respect though as it will only allow me to space things according to the boundary box of an object - but at least it will help with the horizontal alignment and speed up that process. I do a lot of templates for my jewellery in Affinity that I print off and stick to silver so that I can pierce them out with a jewellers saw, so this is super helpful. Thanks! Off to have a go and try that out.

I think my image was too small previously and that's why I was getting an error - thanks for the tip @N.P.M. Here's my template - as you can see the oak leaf is irregular in shape. I could space it 2mm apart according to the rectangular selection box around it - but that then would cause lots of offcut waste. So I'm trying to minimise the waste by arranging them like this. I just wondered if there was a setting in Affinity to determine the distance between objects. I've added a 2mm stroke around one oak leaf and then spaced manually.

It's OK - I did a quick Google - looks terribly complicated. I can't upload images - get an error every time.

Is there an online tutorial on this? Will have a look into the settings and see if I can figure this out. Thanks

Yeah - I can do the 2mm apart horizontally/vertically - but with an irregular object like an oak leaf it gets tricky. I've discovered that if I type 2mm into the stroke field, Affinity converts this into points, so I'm able to add a 2mm stroke around the elements and do it that way - it's just a bit tedious.

Hi All I need to set up a template for a laser cutter and they specify that there has to be a 2mm gap between all parts. I have an oak leaf design and want to set up the file in such a way to minimise on waste. At the moment it looks like the attached. Is there a way to evenly distribute elements so that there is a 2mm gap around each object in Affinity? Or will I have to manually move stuff around - how do I check that there is a 2mm gap all the way around each element? What's the easiest way to do this is what I'm asking. Getting an error every time I try and add an image, so can't show you the template!

Not for me - all the files I worked on today where I created slices, exported what I needed and then saved, the slices are not there on re-opening. I'm having to start from scratch which is really annoying. I've not done the latest update, so will do that now and try again to see if that makes any difference.

Is it just me, or do slices not get saved when a file is saved. I've re-opened a few of my photos to adjust the slice and re-export, to find no slices in place. I've had to re-create the slices from scratch. That's a bit annoying.

I figured out that I just need to add my width followed by the letter 'w' and it works - thank you so much - I don't think I would've found the solution without your assistance! So now I've got the 5 slices I need set up in each file and the export sizes I want for each and it's made my process so much faster. YAY!

YIPPEE! I just found this forum post - I'm not alone in my quest - just needed the correct search term: Off to try this out.

AH - that's maybe where the answer lies - no idea how to do that, but I can go and search as I think that might be a way to do it. Thanks

If I change the size of the slice in the transform panel then I won't be exporting the part of the image I want - it's the export size I want to be able to adjust - the size of the jpg that will be the outcome of exporting.

Thanks for this - I'll take a look later when I'm back in editing mode.

I have a master file that I use - I keep this large in dimension as I need to export for print as well as for screen in lots of different ratios and I don't like having multiple versions of the same image in different files. I grab the RAW file from my camera, edit and save and use this to export from. If I go into Export Persona, yes I can create slices to the exact pixel. But when I export these slices, they export at a size much larger than I require. So I understand what you're explaining, but what you demonstrate doesn't answer my query. In this example the 3:4 ratio slice is sized 2500x3125px but I'd like to export this at 1080x1350px - there doesn't seem to be an option to do this with slices. That's why I'm using the file>export option, but doing things that way requires me to crop my photo, then export and then undo the crop and re-crop for the other ratio I need and then re-export. If I could specify the export size of my slices, that would mean I could set up all my crop and export them all rather than having to change the dimensions of my file constantly. I hope that makes more sense.

I'm aware of that carl123 but I can't then set the slice to export at my desired size. When I use file>export I can input the exact size in pixels - I can't find a way to do this with the slice tool, so I'd have to export it and then open and edit the jpg to scale it down to the correct size.