ianrobertdouglas
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Everything posted by ianrobertdouglas
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Filtering layers?
ianrobertdouglas replied to ianrobertdouglas's topic in Older Feedback & Suggestion Posts
Further to this, ability to group select visible layers would be great. Real world example: Say you have an image with 100 layers and you want to hide 40 and change the color on 60 of them, you presently have to manually hide the 40 and manually select the 60. It would be great if there was an option, having hidden the 40, to select all remaining visible layers. -
Is there any way to filter through layers, or could this be possible in the future? The layers panel is good, but perhaps could be even better. For example: Sometimes using live trace in Illustrator produces hundreds of layers and doesn't group them. Say you have a black and white patterned image. The black and white layers will be mixed up together. But say I only want to change the color of white layers, or to hide them, I have to go through the mixed up layers one by one. I would love to be able to filter layers somehow. By color would seem one possibility. The media assets tool Pixave has something like this (it allows you to look for assets in your library by color). Could something similar be brought into AD?
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I'd also love to see an option for extracting the code from .svg files
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Not sure if I'm allowed to post an Automator app here, or if it would be useful to anyone, but I managed to deploy Cliclick to resolve my problem and automate the launch of FontExplorer X Pro and AD in sequence, with delays included to allow the former to get up and running, then AD, then time for FontExplorer to activate my design fonts (1000+), then open a new file, and finally open the AD Preferences and click Reset Fonts and Close. The delays necessary in the sequence might vary according to other people's font number, as well as CPU/RAM, while the position of the cursor or mouse might vary according to people's screen resolution (you can get values for where the cursor is by using the Terminal command 'cliclick p' after you've installed Cliclick). My version of the script also runs a zsh shell, so the export path syntax may change for bash. Anyway, if it's useful, it's here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/mwjm4c5xskn6tch/LaunchAffinity.app.zip?dl=0(2.1MB) Invoking the script/app from Alfred via keyword, I can now at a key stroke have fonts activated and ready to go in AD. Saves me having +1000 fonts active when I don't need them (i.e., when I'm not using AD), and makes activation seamless when I do. I got the whole process down to 25 seconds. That's mainly because FontExplorer is slow at activating a lot of fonts after AD starts up.
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In case this is of interest to anyone else, this great little tool allows the scripting of mouse clicks: http://www.bluem.net/en/mac/cliclick/. Not sure if I'll be able to get it to play with AD, but if I do I'll report back. Still would be neat to have the option of shortcoding this function in AD.
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Thank you, Leigh. It's resetting the fonts that I'm not sure how to script, in part because it's not available as a shortcut.
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I have FontExplorer X Pro (v5.0.2) set up to activate on launching AD a set of fonts. The problem is that AD is much faster at starting up than FontExplorer is at activating the font set. I know in Preferences / Miscellaneous there is the useful Reset Fonts button. After pressing it (once FontExplorer has activated my set), all my fonts appear as available. But I was wondering is there was a way to make a shortcut command of this function, or (better yet) a way of scripting it, so, for example, I could use Alfred to open AD and automatically run a script after a defined wait period to reset AD's fonts. In essence, I'm trying to find a better way of dealing with FontExplorer's sluggish activation, so I don't have to open Preferences and find the Reset Fonts button every time I open AD.
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It didn't make any difference for me, and I'm not sure, but is this not about setting a default, rather than returning to one? The button reports that factory defaults have been restored, but it didn't make a difference on my screen. Oddly, the values of the swatches are different from the appearance of them. In the screenshot below, you can see I have a ColorSnapper loupe hovering, and it clear has a different value than the letter, which is grey, that is colored according to that swatch. So my screen shows green tints, but the actual value is grey. It's the same in my color picker. The bottom is greenish. It's odd. I have no problems with color anywhere else on my system.
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I'm not sure how this happened, but my color swatches now have a green tint. Is there a way to return this to grayscale?
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One other thing maybe you can look at: when one gives a font kerning, if you then highlight the letters you gave kerning, the value of the kerning does not show up in the Character tab. It reverts to zero. Screenshot of this attached:
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I'm not sure where to post this, as it seems a behavior change relative to fonts. I often find myself choosing a font in a design. So I will go through my list using the font pulldown, and then duplicate, choose another and at the end compare the fonts in situ. It used to be the case that when I duplicated a font, if I then went to the font pull down, the font would be highlighted in its place in the list of fonts (I have a few hundred). But now, it appears in the "recently used" font list at the top. This recently used list is very useful. But when duplicating, it was far better that the font is in its order, so I can keep tabbing down till I find the next font I like, continuing the process of narrowing down my font selection. It's a minor but for me important change. The previous behavior was definitely better for me.
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Sorry to jump in on an old thread, but I'm looking for more information on isometric or perspective styles. I use AD mainly to create vector logos. Sometimes I'd like to create 3D-like effects. See an example below. Ai allows this kind of work, but it's a learning curve for me and so far I enjoy that AD does what Ai does with much greater simplicity and intuitive finesse. The example attached was originally thrown together in AD, but I took it to Ai to get the perspective effect. As you can tell, it's far from perfect because I was low on time to research and figure out the exact tools to use in Ai. So it's mainly done by eye. I'd love to be able to know how to get a similar (and hopefully perfect) effect in AD. Example: https://cloudup.com/iLBphXyzthx
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Hi, It would be great to have the possibility of increasing or decreasing input values using arrow keys. Presently, you have to either type in a new value or use the slider or side arrows. In Photoshop you can increase font size, for example, by simply pressing and keeping pressed the up or down arrow keys on your keyboard. I find this possibility saves time. https://cldup.com/7sHPBeCqSF-3000x3000.png
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It has been a great learning process in what is fabulous software. Illustrator is prohibitively complicated, I find. As someone more used to Photoshop. AD is a great bridge, and I'm sure soon will be a total solution that will replace Ai altogether.
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@evtonic3. It's not about help for this file. It's about things not really behaving as one might expect (for example, this discrepancy between .eps and .svg output). I'm new to AD, and vector graphics in general, so I'm learning by trial and error. In parallel to this issue, I needed to produce an .svg that could be useable as a web graphic. It seems the complexity of the grunge effect (even when all layers were "flattened" into one vector layer) was such that this would be impossible. I couldn't get the file size below 1.5MB, which is useless for web use. So I had to bite the bullet and rasterise one layer: the grunge layer. For print uses, I'll use the original file, but won't need .svg. EPS, or .ai will be what I use, and the export works fine in these formats. So not so much problem solved, as avoided. One thing I do learn: No grunge effects in vector graphics!! Ever!
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I'm still having problems with this file. In order to retain everything in vector format, I used the subtract method outlined above. This is working for .eps export. I'm able to get the full transparency I was looking for. But this is not working for .svg export, which is important, as it would probably be the preferred format for a web logo. Here is a comparison that shows the problem: https://cldup.com/hdmkYvbqWy-3000x3000.jpeg Does anyone have any idea why .svg is failing, and what to do to fix it?
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Parallel question: When you combine elements as a compound, is there any way to keep their color independence? For example, combining Layer A (white) with Layer B (black), I'm seeing Layer A go black.
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Great. Thank you, Alex. Thank you, MEB. Erase blend doesn't survive export to .eps / .svg, at least if you don't want to rasterize anything. But the subtract method does. This is what I needed :)
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Yes, exactly. How did you do this?
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Perhaps my next question warrants a new thread, but I thought to put it here because it's same file, and my original image might help explain the effect I'm trying to get. 1. I ran Boolean add operations on all my grunge layers. So now I have only a few layers left (which reduced the file size down to 7.6MB, which is much better). 2. Now I'm trying to use these grunge layers to basically cutout parts of a layer below. So, for example, imagine the following: a. I have a grey background b. I have a black shape on top of this background c. I have a white grunge effect on top of the black shape I want to use the grunge effect to cut parts of the black shape out, so you would see the grey background below. I've tried various things so far, like floating the grunge layer over the thumbnail of the black shape, but I'm seeing what I'm looking for. Then I set the color of the grunge effect to none, and tried again. No dice. I'm sure this is a simple thing (at least I hope so). So I'm basically (to return to where I started in this thread) trying to recreate the "Erase" blend mode but via a different route. Can anyone give pointers? I made a test file of the above, in case it's useful. test_file.afdesign
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The ability to set a custom keyboard shortcut is saving me a huge amount of time and energy. Great new feature.
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Ah, okay. Great!
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Is there a keyboard shortcut for Boolean add, by any chance?
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Incidentally, flattening or combining all these distinct shapes with Boolean add is radically reducing the file size. While I was originally working with 4000 x 4000 (I guess resolution shouldn't matter when working with vectors) and reduced this down to 800 x 400, flattening these grunge layers has so far allowed me to go from a file that was 270MB to one that is 11MB and falling.
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Just a status update: Having discovered what Boolean add actually does, I'm going about combining hundreds of shapes into distinct layers. Hopefully then, I might be able to run Boolean subtract and get the effect I'm looking for. I am seeing, however, that AD balks if I try to add (i.e., combine) more than around 60 shapes or nodes at the same time. I've had a couple of complete hangs so far. Thank heaven for autosave! The app is not particularly processor or RAM intensive when I'm doing this, or when it hangs. Mine is maybe an extreme situation (I'm guessing I literally have thousands of notes to combine, chunk by chunk), but it would certainly be great if AD was totally solid on this, without hangs. That way, I could just select X-thousand and go do something else while it works. Right now, it hung, as I'm typing. But then I did get greedy and highlight around 100 shapes to combine with Boolean add.
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