In my opinion Shape Builder Tool is very necessary. I can't switch to Affinity Designer from Illustrator completely just because of this one missing tool. I've seen post back from 2015 of people asking for this tool, why 4 years later this still isn't a thing? I'm very frustrated...
Illustrator has them, Inkscape has them (free no less), but Affinity does not. They sure would be helpful in creating depth maps and 3D reliefs for CNC and Laser projects.
Hi there!
This topic is a word of encouragement and gratitud. Since last year, I had a list somewhere around the forums, of things that people wanted to see in the Affinity Suite. After this launch, and considering some features that came in 1.7, I wanted the thank the whole team for the following (Blue is for things launched in 1.7, Green is for 1.8, and now, red is for 1.9, purple is for 2.x)
Designer
Bleed area guides (now with the possibility to choose a color for it)
Mesh Fill tool
Mesh Warp/Distort tool
Knife tool
Scissors tool
Calligraphic line styles
Arrowhead line style
Export slices with previews
Export preview (not in Export Persona)
Pages (like the ones in Fireworks) (Almost what we expected, but you never know if the allow to create more Pages directly in Designer)
Multiple Effects/Fills/Strokes per shape (Not available for text, but it will come later)
Replicate/Blend
Convert Bitmaps to vectors (Auto tracing)
Select same Color/Fill/Attribute (with some suggestion made by me, that I hope they can include them)
Blob tool
Spiral tool
Width tool
Paint Bucket tool
Vector Eraser tool
Vector Crop tool to do actual vector cropping (can be done with the Shape Builder Tool)
Shape Builder tool
Text Hinting support
Prototyping capabilities
Vector patterns
Fixing the convert to curves problems at small sizes (improved to a great degree. Still needs improving in tiny cases)
Fixing problems with Boolean operations
"Universal Layers" using Artboards
Contour Tool (hope it gets additional functionality in a future update)
DXF/DWG Import
DXF/DWG Export
Photo
IPTC Support
Smart Objects support (import only, and of course, not all possible Smart Objects)
Better digital painting brushes (the double thing has proven to be very good)
Tool Presets
Crop to pixel selection
Text on a path
Publisher
IDML Import support
IDML Export
Data merge
Global Layers / Layer tags
ePub Export
Color separation
Footnotes / Endnotes
Running Headers
DXF/DWG Import
All Apps
Saving custom workspaces
DAM Application
WebP Import/Export
ICO Export
BMP Export
WMF Export in Mac
TGA with alpha Channel Export
CDR Import/Export
PSD Export with editable text
AI Import/Export
Right-To-Left languages support
Scripting/Extensibility
User made Templates
MS Windows Hardware acceleration
Hope to change the color of more items from the above listing soon!
2020-sep-19. Edited to add 1.9 new features.
Best regards!
Good morning everybody,
I am finding another thing that seems to be missing from Designer which I use an awful lot in CorelDRAW and which is kind worrying to me unless maybe I'm missing something. In Corel I have a blend tool. I believe Illustrator has the same thing though I don't use Illustrator. It allows me to create two objects and blend them together. This is particularly useful for creating interesting drop shadows and so on. Is there really no way to do this in Designer? I'm attaching a screenshot to show you what I mean. Corel allows me to choose which aspects of each object interact with one another.
Hopefully there is some way of doing this or it will be added as it seems like a very important tool to me.
Thanks very much and let me know!
Phil
