[Snapping options could include "Ignore other Artboards" toggle]

When the Snapping Candidates is set to "All layers" (but not neccesserily), the Snapping happens across Artboards, which might be causing significant performance drops (especially when working with Text, for some reason).

 

As an App UI designer, I currently have around 50 artboards (both vertically and horizontally aligned) and the Snapping would sometimes choose to snap to some object very far away crossing multiple Artboards. 

I think Snapping options should include "Ignore other Artboards" toggle, because I would keep it ON most of the time. 

This could solve a lot of problems/confusions for the users.

 

Thanks for consideration 😊

[Snapping causes Text tools performance problems]

@NathanC Thanks for the tip! 

The 'Candidate list' works great. I red more about it in detail here: https://affinity.help/designer/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=pages/DesignAids/snapping.html?title=Snapping

And I think I will start using it from now on, because I like that I can hover over objects of interest and they will become candidates and there can be multiple of them!

 

I should have mentioned that the snapping also happens across Artboards which might have caused performance drops as well. As an App UI designer, I currently have around 50 artboards and the snapping would sometimes choose to snap to some object very far away crossing multiple Artboards. I think Snapping options should include "Ignore other Artboards" toggle, because I would keep it ON most of the time. This could solve a lot of problems for the users.

 

18 hours ago, NathanC said:

While testing this and comparing on a Mac, I did find that with the text tool simply selected (No snapping or objects selected) the app was responding considerably slower when compared to having the move tool selected so it's evident that there is some performance impact on larger/object heavy documents, so i'll be getting this logged with the developers.

I can confirm this on Windows as well. This is a topic I see everywhere on forums. There is something going on with performance of Texts in general!

 

Thanks for your care! Affinity is among the best things that happened to the Design industry! 😊👍

[Snapping causes Text tools performance problems]

@NathanC Of course:

TextLagTest.afdesign

[Symbol Sync toggle needs a shortcut]

11 minutes ago, loukash said:

I hear you. I bought ADe in 2014 and APh 2015, but I wasn't ready to leave Adobe CS5 behind until 2019 when finally Publisher was released…

Yeah, I started with APh and AIl when I decided to be a graphics designer. Burned a lot of money and when I decided to cancel my annual subscription, they still fined me the remaining 6 months! Completely greedy, dick move by Adobe. I can't support that company for moral reasons and I do not want to build any dependency on any of their products. Now unfortunately they bought competition Figma and are now leaving it to die.
....ok, rant is over, I feel better now, that was a bit off-topic...  

Anyway, the point is, Affinity is a complete blessing and I love these guys! That is why I am defending them so much. They are making this industry a better place

[Symbol Sync toggle needs a shortcut]

11 hours ago, loukash said:

Er… well, Symbols are there since v1.5. That was like… 7 years ago…?

dammit! ...well, I guess we need to be patient with Affinity.... still better than sticking with Adobe products! 

 

6 hours ago, carl123 said:

On Windows you can have multiple vertical columns...

I know about it, but I really like the symmetry of my workspace.

I will give it a go though, maybe it will turn out more efficient for the other tools too.

(I still want a shortcut though! Shortcuts are completely superior to mouse/trackpad aiming and clicking)

[Symbol Sync toggle needs a shortcut]

50 minutes ago, loukash said:

The problem with the Symbols panel is that the content UI is only half-baked. The "list view" is actually pointless as long as you can't ven change the thumbnail size. (Uh… just noticed that Symbols panel does not have a list view. Duh.)
As every so often within the Affinity apps, it seems as if the Serif UI department employees would each one sit in their own lone booth, refusing to communicate with each other.  

List view and scaling would be nice too! 

But I think they are so incredibly busy, they just wanted to quickly introduce a Symbols feature, as simple as possible, so it could be featured as soon as possible. I believe we are seeing only the early version and they will eventually expand it when more important things are done... But making a shortcut should not be too much to ask for

[Symbol Sync toggle needs a shortcut]

19 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

I am a little confused. Are we talking about this panel?

Well, you do not have 30 items in it. Even though I know I can scale to window down, the panel is still taking valuable working space and I would have to scroll or drag it every time I want to access some symbol. When I have it docked on the Lefthand side, it can stay very tall.

 

@loukash

Nice idea with the System Events. A bit more elegant! That could be a workaround for now  👍

[Lets make Shortcuts more powerful!]

5 hours ago, loukash said:

Works on Mac. For example, I use cmd-opt-1, cmd-opt-2, cmd-opt-3 etc. for personas

Can you please tell me in which category are the Personas shortcuts? I couldn't find them due to lack of Search feature. Either I missed them or they do not exist on Windows.
 

5 hours ago, loukash said:

...more important would be if the Symbol panel button commands would appear in the context menu when a symbol is selected on the canvas...

I am not sure how to imagine this. If you mean Right-clicking on a symbol and then selecting Sync from a context menu, wouldn't this be the slowest way to do that? Nothing against Human Interface Guidelines, but I never perceived Apple's way of achieving tasks as efficient nor fast.

 

4 hours ago, Granddaddy said:

For a bit of history...

WOW, ok, well, I think this feature is not coming any time soon. Respect for such a great effort!

[Symbol Sync toggle needs a shortcut]

3 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Is there any reason you cannot just move the Symbols to the Righthand Studio?

I am using the whole Righthand vertical space for Layout. I am doing App UI and I am working with around 50 Artboards atm. I even moved Colours panel into a viewport as floating window, to gain more Layouts space.

If the Symbols Sync button could be floating window, it would work great, but the whole Symbols window itself is really big.

 

32 minutes ago, fde101 said:

If you are on a Mac and have Keyboard Maestro, as a workaround, Keyboard Maestro has a feature which will search the screen for an image (take a snapshot of the button) and click at some point relative to that image.  If the button is at least on screen and stays in a reasonably consistent place, you could set a search area around that and code a macro to click the button for you when you use a key sequence.

It is not optimal, but it is something.

Nice workaround. However, using Mac for work would be a major productivity downgrade. 

Thanks for an idea though, I think I can achieve this with Autohotkey!

I still think it would be best if this feature would be built-in though.

[Lets make Shortcuts more powerful!]

So, I like to work FAST and efficient!

That is why I use shortcuts for everything possible, minimizing aiming and clicking on buttons with a mouse, which is way slower and interrupts the flow.

Now current shortcuts system is GREAT and I very appreciate it in it's current state, but there are couple of things I am missing and I believe users would appreciate.

I would like to list them all here in a single topic for a discussion (sorted by importance):

 

1. Shortcuts in Settings need Search feature to search by both A: Function ("Show Rulers"), B: Keystroke ("Ctrl+R").

2. Shortcuts in Settings should have Mouse Buttons support! To speed up flow and avoiding to reach to the other side of my keyboard with my right hand for brackets [ ], I created a macro for my mouse which will emulate brackets press [ ] when pressing Back and Forward mouse buttons. This works REALLY GOOD when organizing layouts! I think it should be a built-in feature, supporting ANY mouse buttons (there are very advanced mice out there with many extra buttons that could be very useful in Affinity suite. I am not talking about you, Magic Mouse, you carpal tunneler). The point here is that the right hand can stay on the mouse, so most common keystrokes should require left hand on the keyboard only.

3. Shortcuts in Settings could have secondary field for alternative keystroke (like in videogames).

4. Like in Blender (3D software), Right-clicking on buttons could reveal a small menu, which lets you define a shortcut right away, even if this button does not have a shortcut ability.

 

5. Tooltips could display their shortcuts after the tool name (to help new users remember them and to make it easier to find for anyone).

   

 

6. Some important things are missing a shortcut ability. F1, F2, F3 (or so) could be shortcuts for Personas. Symbols Sync button could use a shortcut too.

 

Thanks to amazing Affinity developers for considering these suggestions!

Please feel free to suggest more relevant productivity-improving keystrokes.

 

[Snapping not working when Artboards are Groupped]

I was wondering why the snapping on my Measure tool suddenly stopped working in Affinity Designer.

Apparently, when you try to organize your Artboards by grouping them into folders (because as a UI designer, I have my Layers cluttered with like 50 artboards), the snapping will stop working on all the tools.

 

Steps to reproduce:

Create 3 artboards > Create some geometry on all of them > Group 2 of the artboards together (Ctrl+G) > Grab Measure tool and try to measure distances between your geometry.

Inside the Group It will only be snapping to Artboard itself, ignoring any geometry. The ungrupped Artboard will have it working normally.

This is my snapping settings:

[AD Hide Artboard?]

@MEB

[Colour Swatches in FX have buggy behaviour]

There is this strange behaviour of the swatches selection in the FX panel.

Please see attached screen capture.

swatches glitchy.mkv

 

I am actually demonstrating two bugs. 

1. Whatever I select, the menu keeps highlighting the colour that was there in the beginning.

2. The menu has this "jumpy" effect when I click in the bottom items, which totally confuses me every time, especially when working with very similar colours.

 

(it would be also really nice if the list was a bit taller (or stretchable), perhaps double in size, so I could see more than 4 items at a time)

I have no idea what is causing this, but I am doing this VERY often and it would be really nice if you guys would find a little bit of spare time to try to find a fix. Even though the glitchy menu seems to be purely visual and will still produce correct result, I find it really annoying and confusing.

Thanks for your hard work! Your software makes my job efficient and fun!

[Symbol Sync toggle needs a shortcut]

As app UI/UX designer, I am often working with many Artboards, showing different states of similar app screens.

Symbols make this task much easier, because I can do tweaks on design and changes are linked! (Thanks for this amazing feature!)

 

However, I need to often toggle it on and off, when I want to do some change that should be exclusive to just one case or so.

And pretty much every time I am reaching for the Symbols Sync toggle, I am clicking on Layers in the same time.

My Layers are docked on the Right side of the screen and my Symbols are docked on the Left, so I have quite a cursor travel across the whole screen to do this. 

Floating Symbols Sync toggle would be nice, but I think making a Keyboard Shortcut would be best!

So far I think the shortcut input does not exist in the settings. ...speaking of, the Shortcuts category in Settings REALLY needs a search feature!

 

Thanks for your hard work with this software! It is a good time to be a designer!

[Snapping causes Text tools performance problems]

I am aware that there are some performance problems with the text tools for quite a while now. Hopefully this may help the devs to get closer to solving laggy text tool problems.

I am demonstrating a test with many texts on this video (apologies for a bad video cropping, my first time...):

As you can see, just having the Text tool selected causes a huge application lag. And my tower is quite overkill for the task! Ryzen 9 5900X, RTX 3080 10GB, 32GB RAM.

I am demonstrating that the snapping dot is lagging behind the cursor and the whole canvas lags when panning the view when holding any Text tool.

I discovered this lag is caused by the Snapping tool, apparently doing some crazy calculations when turned on.

Strangely, only Text tools do this. The other tools have no problem.

 

Hopefully this can help discover the main core of this problem.

Thanks for your hard work! Your software is a blessing!

[Text is very slow?]

 

I may have found part of the problem.

I am demonstrating a test with many texts on this video:

As you can see, just having the Text tool selected causes a huge application lag. And my tower is quite overkill for the task! Ryzen 9 5900X, RTX 3080 10GB, 32GB RAM.

I am demonstrating that the snapping dot is lagging behind the cursor and the whole canvas lags when panning the view.

I discovered this lag is caused by the Snapping tool, apparently doing some crazy calculations when turned on.

Strangely, only Text tools do this. The other tools have no problem.

 

Hopefully this can help you discover the main core of this problem @Dan C and other developers.

Thanks for your hard work! Your software is a blessing!

[Duplicate below (not above)]

On 10/9/2022 at 4:38 PM, shushustorm said:

Yes, it's cmd+V for pasting and cmd+[ for moving the layer. However, the latter just doesn't work. Not sure it's an OS issue or Affinity. I don't require that shortcut in any other software to test that. I guess I'll just remap that function and be done with it!

Try to delete that shortcut and re-assign it manually to the same thing. It just fixed it for me for some reason.
(You can find it in the Layer category in the Shortcuts settings)

[AD Hide Artboard?]

On 7/11/2018 at 1:58 PM, MEB said:

Hi Mr. K,
You can hide the contents of the artboard, unticking the corresponding check box in the Layers panel but not the artboard itself.

Hi MEB, 

I am an app designer and currently working with 48 artboards representing multiple pages of the app, screenshots etc.

I am looking for a way to hide the artboards I am not currently working on out of the Layers panel, as they take a lot of space and do not provide any useful information value when I simply work only in a single Artboard at a time. 

I can imagine that App development is one of the Affinity Designer's common usage. Is there some feature I am missing that would help me organize this? I know I can Group the Artboards, but that does not help very much and grouping everything creates deep group trees that are pretty confusing to orientate in (off-topic, but also important issue).

Thanks for support and keep it up guys! Affinity is already better than Adobe in my eyes!

UPDATE/BUG discovered: 

I tried to Group my Artboards as best as I could to reduce their footprint in Layers tab and strange bug happened: Any Artboard that is inside a Group will have the Measure Tool stop snapping to most of the things. Artboards that are not in any Group have Measure Tool working normally.

[Layer order (reverse, reverse inside groups etc)]

On 9/30/2019 at 10:32 AM, lalcimo said:

Hello Everyone,

I don't know if anyone already know this yet but I'll share it anyway. I'm using Affinity Designer 1.7

1. Select everything you want to reverse the order

2. Cut it (Ctrl + X)

3. Enable "Insert behind the selection" or go to LAYER > INSERTION > BEHIND

4. Paste it

You can see that the order of the objects are now reversed.

LOL this is such a cool trick :D:D I have no idea how could you even find about this! It almost feels like a bug.

 

anyway, I want to BUMP THIS TOPIC!

This feature would make so much sense, together with setting where I want the CTRL+J duplicate to appear (above or below selected layer)

Thanks!

[What makes layers take so long to get updated?]

Thanks for helpful tips.

After Clean-reinstalling the Nvidia drivers the issue is gone! However, it came back as I set all my previous settings.

I tested the switches one by one. 

Turns out the Vertical Sync set to Fast was the problem! Having it on Off or Application Controlled fixed the issue.

Yay!

This was quite a process to find out. I have no idea how was I supposed to find out without actually toggling all the settings manually!  Apparently, I still do not fully understand how Vertical Sync works. 

Thanks a lot for your patience @Dan C, your assistance was extremely helpful!

(You guys probably want to override this setting for Affinity products to prevent this from happening to other users. It makes this awesome software feel glitchy / unstable.)

[Select next Layer up/down keyboard shortcut?]

The Ctrl+Alt+[ and Ctrl+Alt+] actually doesn't work by default, but re-setting it in shortcuts settings fixed it

[What makes layers take so long to get updated?]

@Dan C so, I uninstalled Display Fusion and I was pretty sure this was going to resolve it, but the problem is still there. I am thinking if this isn't some sort of bad display driver or something?

I would also send you a list of my applications, but the list is huge (mostly games, haha). Is there an easy way to print them all out into a text file or something?

[What makes layers take so long to get updated?]

@Dan C Thanks for staying with me and sorry for late reply.

I did some testing...

• Interestingly, I was unable to reproduce the issue on my previous system (laptop only with no external monitors).
• I was also unable to reproduce the issue when running my current machine in Safe Mode.
• However, trying to kill all sorts of random processes and applications did not solve the issue. The issue was still present.

After this I tried to move Affinity Designer to my secondary monitor and the issue was gone, unable to reproduce it even once! (It is also hard to reproduce if large portion of the canvas is on the secondary monitor, but cursor is still on the primary monitor, clicking on layers...it is not about cursor position anyway, it also happens when I am changing canvas using keyboard, eg. pressing shortcut to show/hide Rullers...)

My setup looks like this:

1. Primary monitor (LG): LG 27GL850 (144 Hz, G-Sync compatible) connected over Display Port
2. Secondary monitor (Philips): PHL 274E5 (60 Hz) connected over DVI (but plugged into GPU as HDMI...probably doesn't matter)

It seems to me like the GPU or the Display Port interface is manipulating with what app gets refreshed. Really odd behavior, but I already know that if you turn the Display Port-connected screen off, it will also completely disconnect from system like if you would unplug it, so we know that Display Port has more features than just transferring picture...

Yes, I guess Display Fusion is also a suspect. I tried to completely turn it off and all it's processes but it didn't help. I also tried to turn it on on my laptop but it didn't cause any issues there. The only thing that remains is to try to uninstall it, which I would like to avoid, because I want to avoid setting it up again...

To answer your questions:

- Yes, Display Fusion was also installed on my previous computer, but now it still is and I can't reproduce it. However the two external screens were connected to that laptop before.

- Yes, I am using drawing tablet from Wacom, connected over Bluetooth. Killing it's software did nothing and it was also turned off anyway.

Hope this helps!

 

UPDATE:

Turning OFF the Adaptive-Sync feature of my LG moved the issue to the Philips screen (it also moved all my windows and desktop icons to that screen. In Windows settings I can see it made it Primary (main)). I could no longer reproduce it on the LG screen but It was now happening on the Philips one.

So now we know that the issue travels with PRIMARY monitor!

[What makes layers take so long to get updated?]

@Dan C Thanks for your care.

Unfortunately this is happening in ANY document.

It also happens after I reinstalled the Affinity products and also reinstalled Windows.

This was happening on my laptop before and I am now on new Desktop build.

Could it be some of my windows settings or some Nvidia Control Panel settings? - I suspect that because I would probably set those "my way" right away when reinstalling system.

[What makes layers take so long to get updated?]

@Dan C Unfortunately still the same.

I tried with both HW acceleration ON and OFF.