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ianrobertdouglas

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  1. Like
    ianrobertdouglas got a reaction from beatngu in Affinity Designer: Advanced web design tutorials?   
    I've done a fair amount of web development — mostly Wordpress. Usually the projects I work on are too small to warrant being mapped out graphically beforehand. I paint with code instead and show clients live iterations on a staging site. But I want to have in my arsenal of tricks the ability to create designs graphically if I have to, so I'm looking to get into Affinity Designer's capabilities for this. Mostly I use AD for logos, so I'm not a complete beginner, but I don't find any tutorials so far that could get me up to speed with the basics and advanced features of using AD for graphical web design. Particularly of interest is the constraints feature for responsive design.
     
    Can anyone point me in a good direction? The few tutorials I've found ostensibly on AD and web design haven't really been about web design as such, and I didn't find one that uses v1.5+ with its new features.
     
    I'd appreciate any help or leads.
  2. Like
    ianrobertdouglas reacted to MattP in Affinity Designer Customer Beta (1.5.2 - Beta 4)   
    Status: Beta
    Purpose: Stability & Critical fixes
    Requirements: Purchased Affinity Designer
    Mac App Store: Not Submitted
    Download: 1.5.2 Beta 4 Here
     
    This beta is intended to fix any critical issues found in the current App Store version and should be considered to be more stable than the App Store product.
     
    To use this beta, simply download the file from the link given above and double-click on the file to open the installer. Follow the instructions to install the beta version. The beta sits alongside the Mac App Store version and will not interfere with it.
     
    Fixes:
    Enabled 32bit documents and associated studio UI (including OCIO) Resizing documents should scale guides and slices as appropriate so they appear to be in the correct location Fix for Mountain Lion in the new Export Persona (panels disappear completely and the app becomes unstable) EPS export improvements with thin lines and mitre joins Fixes for Text Styles (editing 'No Style' and clicking in certain areas of the style preview) OpenType tweaks Print speed improvements Fix for being able to measure between siblings inside groups and containers, also being able to measure immediate children of a container and between selected object and its ancestors. When space is tight, the measurements now appear out-of-line rather than scaling too small to be usable. Improved error reporting when opening PSD files Fix for PDF import of Japanese fonts Shortcut for soft-return is now shift+return Fix for issues seen when bleeds are unequal on different sides Fix for issues seen when trying to output selected areas to PDF and accidentally generating multi-page PDFs Automatic slice rectangle calculations should not include the layer effect inflation from the parents Improved output-path validation for Export Persona Added 32bit PSD export Added EXR/HDR export Initial support for new Touch Bar on MacBook Pro Added Polygonal and Magnetic lasso selection modes Fix for Fonts list jiggling around at times when moving up/down in the list Fix for copying groups within Symbols causing 'the beginning of the end' Had a baby daughter so wasn't around much Miscellaneous other fixes and improvements
  3. Like
    ianrobertdouglas reacted to MEB in Duplicating artboards with symbols   
    No, there's no point in selecting more than one instance, otherwise you will end up with duplicated symbols in the Symbols panel as well.
  4. Like
    ianrobertdouglas reacted to MEB in Duplicating artboards with symbols   
    Hi ianrobertdouglas,
    After you create the second artboard (with all symbols on it), select all of the instances in the second artboard, go to the Symbols panel and click Detach. Then, with all still selected click Create in the Symbols panel. This will recreate all the symbols again but they will be all independent from the Symbols on the first artboard.
  5. Like
    ianrobertdouglas reacted to R C-R in Flatten Transparency all vector?   
    I realize this is not a responsibility of Affinity to explain all the complicated nuances of the various file formats your apps support to your users, but I wonder if it would be worthwhile to either add a topic about this to the app help system or to the Tutorials (or pinned FAQ's or wherever) forum here that covers just the basics. Just enough that, format by format, we could get a good idea of what to avoid in documents when we want to avoid rasterizing anything on export would be nice....
  6. Like
    ianrobertdouglas reacted to Dave Harris in Flatten Transparency all vector?   
    Don't feel bad. And I hadn't realised you had fixed the mid-points before generating that PDF. I see now that if I do that, the PDF exports as vector but loses the gradient's opacity. So that's another bug which will be fixed in a future update, which wouldn't have been found without this thread.
  7. Like
    ianrobertdouglas reacted to Dave Harris in Flatten Transparency all vector?   
    For me your output.svg looks the same as mine, which is what it should look like. Which app are your viewing it in which makes it look wrong?
     
    Your PDF does not look like what I get with the settings in your screenshot, but if I change Rasterise to Nothing then mine does match yours. That's kind of expected as if it needs to rasterise but isn't allowed to it just does the best it can.
     
    Did you try changing the mid-points on all the gradients from 52% to 50% ?
  8. Like
    ianrobertdouglas reacted to gdenby in Working with high numbers of curves/nodes in AD   
    No real answer. Do you absolutely need to expand the strokes? Looking at some of my much less complex files, the size can triple between simple strokes and the same expanded.
     
    I've had a few instances where I thought AD was hung. I'm running an i5, which has 6 cores running at 3.3 GHz. After a few times, doing one of the booleans on maybe 1100 curves, I realized it was just a processing load. I did go and make coffee. Typically that takes 2 - 3 minutes. Given the differences between the machines and the curve count, I'd guess 2 hours would be a reasonable time to do the union.
  9. Like
    ianrobertdouglas reacted to gdenby in Working with high numbers of curves/nodes in AD   
    It seems reasonable that shifting to another app would slow AD's operation. AD operates very much in real time, sort of like a video game. I would suppose shifting to another app, especially one that might some shared resource, or need lots of real time input, would decrease AD priority.
     
    As a btw, I mucked around making a much simpler set of lines, just 200, expanded those, expanded again, and then did a boolean add. I had the activity monitor open, and briefly, I had a number of 104% CPU usage!? I looked at the CPU load window, and saw that doing a similar process again had the User CPU load jump to about 30. After I selected the object, which was 800 circle curves added, and went to use the node tool, and zoomed in about 500%, user cpu load went above 40%. I  also noted that even simple things, like scrubbing the stroke width slider back and forth would greatly increase the CPU usage. Clearly not much of a mathematical process, but display update seems to use up quite a lot of CPU.
     
    Oh, and I tried working in outline mode, wondering if the drawing routine was less intensive. Made 360 intersecting squares, added them together, then Selected all nodes and used the corner tool on all at once. User CPU load went to nearly 50% on the bottom graph, and the CPU % column went above 250% Definitely had a pizza wheel at that point.
  10. Like
    ianrobertdouglas reacted to MattP in Affinity Designer Customer Beta (1.5 - RC1)   
    Status: Release Candidate
    Purpose: New features, fixes
    Requirements: Purchased Affinity Designer
    Mac App Store: Submitted
    Download: 1.5 RC1 Here (Updated at 15:31 BST to include a few extra bits)
     
    This is a beta of a substantial change to our codebase and as much as we have tried to ensure the quality of the code, it should be considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity that you may be adversely affected by the application failing. In addition it is definitely worth noting that files created in Affinity 1.5 cannot be opened in 1.4 so always make a copy of your important documents before opening them in 1.5 to ensure you do not accidentally overwrite them and are unable to open them in your 1.4 version.
     
    To use this beta, simply download the file from the link given above and double-click on the file to open the installer. Follow the instructions to install the beta version. The beta sits alongside the Mac App Store version and will not interfere with it.
     
    Fixes/Improvements:
    macOS Sierra improvements (some dialogs were not getting their input boxes auto-selected which was a nuisance) Sharpen Tool (in Pixel Persona) now correctly performs Blur when holding down Alt/Option Auto-selecting layers with the new Preferences item won't force expansion of selected group nodes now Updated Assets Fix for colour conversion issue seen when copy/pasting a placed image which is of a different colour profile to the document Layer effects now allow the user to type in values in different units (points, inches, etc) Huge performance increase for marquee selection of objects in multi-artboard documents Correctly import miter limit in SVG documents PDF import and export of transparency groups should be much improved now Aligning objects in a symbol instance failed to redraw the newly aligned objects in other symbol instances Better logic for dragging out an Asset with constraints on it while Cmd is held PSD export of raster clipping masks improved PSD import fixes and improvements relating to solid white layers and being able to optimise and just use an opaque white document instead Slice Tool should respond to Escape correctly now Fix for occasional Symbol issue manifesting as the detachment of all attributes when only one is changed EPS and PDF import now generate documents with better structure when a large number of children nodes are imported Draw 'thin' lines in a visually nicer way Fix for crash when creating a Compound from a constrained object Fix for releasing compounds causing objects to move around if the contained objects had constraints Fix for solid fills not applying to pixel layers Pasted text should work correctly with text styles now Temporarily removed 32bit document format and functionality as this has not received enough testing coverage to release Fix for constrained objects in symbols acting strangely Miscellaneous other small fixes
  11. Like
    ianrobertdouglas reacted to MattP in Symbols: Can elements to locked in position relative to other elements?   
    I'm listening, but I can only type so fast ;)
  12. Like
    ianrobertdouglas reacted to Alfred in Symbols: Can elements to locked in position relative to other elements?   
    In the absence of a Blend Tool I can't see a general way to do this directly for arbitrary shapes, but in the specific case of circles you can work around it by choosing a font with a circular letter O and typing or pasting Os and spaces on a previously drawn curve converted to a text path.

  13. Like
    ianrobertdouglas reacted to A_B_C in Affinity Designer Customer Beta (1.5 - Beta 14)   
    Don’t let us get greedy … ;)
     
    I am still trying my best to fathom the depths of symbols and constraints. These are immensely powerful tools that opened a world of new possibilities and new flexibility for quickly adjusting designs. And when you consider the parameters that have to be taken into account in order to make these tools work as they already do, I believe that was not quite a small achievement …  ;)
  14. Like
    ianrobertdouglas got a reaction from LilleG in Hide all handles when moving or nudging?   
    Reviving an old thread, but is this possible? Exactly as others want to do, sometimes I'd like to hide the handles when moving an object. Space bar hides the handles, but when moving it leads to all objects being moved, not just the ones selected.
  15. Like
    ianrobertdouglas reacted to R C-R in Affinity Designer: Exporting vectors with gradients give mixed results..   
    The only way to (mostly) preserve gradients as pure vectors is to generate a separate vector shape for each color in the gradient everywhere that it appears. It still will look "banded" (each transition from one color to the next will be visible) under careful observation, particularly if the document uses an 8 bit color color space. Since this can create millions of individual vector shapes, it is not very practical if reasonable file sizes are important.
  16. Like
    ianrobertdouglas reacted to MattP in Affinity Designer Customer Beta (1.5 - Beta 12)   
    I spotted something funny happening with the tool handles yesterday, too... I'll look into that, thanks...
     
    Aspect-ratio constraining is governed by the Shift key. Some objects constrain by default, some do not, Shift will always select the opposite. You can set in the Preferences if you'd like constraining to be determined by the type of objects selected (the default) to be always on or always off.
     
    Thanks,
    Matt
  17. Like
    ianrobertdouglas reacted to Alfred in More typographic features - Discretionary ligatures   
    The Typography section in the Character panel only has buttons for common things like standard ligatures and small caps, and it took a while before it dawned on me where to look for extra options such as 'dlig'. You need to go to the menu icon next to the closing 'x' at the top of the panel to get access to the 'Show Typography' option, and then it all works as expected.
     
    I think access to the advanced options would be easier and more obvious if there were a 'More' button at the end of the standard row of buttons.
  18. Like
    ianrobertdouglas reacted to MattP in Affinity Designer Customer Beta (1.5 - Beta 11)   
    Status: Beta Release
    Purpose: New features, fixes
    Requirements: Purchased Affinity Designer
    Mac App Store: Not Submitted
    Download: 1.5 Beta 11 Here
     
     
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    PLEASE BE AWARE - If you have not already run Beta 9 or 10, this version will reset all your settings. If you have already run Beta 9 or 10 then it will not. Please make sure that if you have created any palettes, styles, assets, brushes, etc in the current beta that you export them in the current version first BEFORE installing this beta otherwise you will lose them. This was unfortunately necessary for the Beta 9 build and should hopefully not be required again.
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     
       
    This is a beta of a substantial change to our codebase and as much as we have tried to ensure the quality of the code, it should be considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity that you may be adversely affected by the application failing. In addition it is definitely worth noting that files created in Affinity 1.5 cannot be opened in 1.4 so always make a copy of your important documents before opening them in 1.5 to ensure you do not accidentally overwrite them and are unable to open them in your 1.4 version.
     
    To use this beta, simply download the file from the link given above and double-click on the file to open the installer. Follow the instructions to install the beta version. The beta sits alongside the Mac App Store version and will not interfere with it.
     
    Fixes/Improvements:
    Hopefully resolved issues relating to document's reporting they are already open or have a restore file available Improved hit testing for text objects, plus clicking in text tools will now always prefer text objects when selecting Fix for text wrapping behaviour with unclosed frames PSD import/export improvements Improved performance for 32bit HDR document format Fixed raster painting on transformed pixel layers Re-enabled ability to export metadata in File->Export->More Assorted macOS Sierra visual fixes Added 'Paste FX' menu item Enter Node Tool after hitting the 'Convert to Curves' button Slice names now update when Artboard names change Document palettes are now available from the fill flyout Fix for export using incorrect aspect ratio if an artboard is selected and the size of the output is modified Fix for Pencil tool leaving artefacts if 'Use Fill' is selected HSL slider mode in the Colour Chooser now correctly updates the colour box to show the chosen Saturation level Vector export improvements relating to composites and PDF printers marks Fix for lines with square caps invalidating the wrong area and leaving trails on the screen Deleting a node in the Node Tool can now use the old method (by pressing Delete) or the new method that maintains shape by pressing Alt/Option + Delete Miscellaneous other small fixes
  19. Like
    ianrobertdouglas reacted to nametag in Stroke Width   
    Probably on my top 10 most used features in Illustrator is the stroke width tool, which allows you to adjust the width of the stroke at each anchor point.  This can somewhat be achieved using the Pressure tab within the pen line settings, but it isn't nearly as precise.
     
    A couple of solutions might be:
    Add a stroke width tool to allow anchor points to be adjusted. Within the pressure panel, display a point on the graph for every anchor point from the shape.  And allow these to be adjusted only vertically on the graph by holding shift, so that they stay on the anchor points. Create a new panel in the pen menu that allows for a numerical value to be entered in for stroke width.  
    Thanks for listening.
  20. Like
    ianrobertdouglas reacted to Seneca in Affinity Designer 1.5 sneak peek: Constraints and Symbols   
    I'm not sure what you mean.
     
    We don't need a dumbed down version of inDesign. We need a Desktop Publishing application that beats inDesign.
    While inDesign may be daunting to you it's geared towards a professional market and we need a professional application to do that.
     
    There is nothing near in the market at the moment that rivals inDesign for its depth etc., when it comes to professional publishing.
    That's why we need Publisher to rival that and not something that dumbs it down.
  21. Like
    ianrobertdouglas got a reaction from MattP in [Beta 10] Still some save/restore issues   
    @MattP: you guys are amazing and have produced an industry-changing tool that keeps getting better and better. You have all my respect and love, and patience!
  22. Like
    ianrobertdouglas reacted to MattP in [Beta 10] Still some save/restore issues   
    Hi Ian, nobody's saying the bug can't be traced - I asked Ben (who is responsible for these things) to look into it and he did, then he made a fix and left on holiday. Since then, it has obviously transpired that there is still something wrong (which may be different than what he fixed) and as such I can get him to look at it again tomorrow when he returns from holiday :)
     
    Excellent work, R C-R - I'll let Ben know what you've found and I'm sure he can get to the bottom of it.
     
    We're a small team and we're all obviously quite busy - if one person is responsible for an area, we try not to step on each other's toes as they're usually the best person to resolve it with the least side-effects. Hopefully this can be put right early next week ready for the next beta :)
     
    Thanks again everyone,
    Matt
  23. Like
    ianrobertdouglas reacted to R C-R in [Beta 10] Still some save/restore issues   
    Ian,
     
    I have now seen the 'open recovery file' issue happen even when after launching Beta 10, I just opened, modified, saved, & closed an existing 1.5 format document, & then tried to open it about 10 minutes layer. So it appears that sometimes just my steps 1 & 2 are enough to trigger it.
     
    I did not have either MAS Affinity app open at the time. I have seen this problem regardless of how I try to open a document -- double-clicking on it or using the Open or Open Recent menu items all have, at one time or another, triggered it.
     
    I have noticed one thing that might be related to whatever is causing this. I started monitoring the ~/Library/Containers/com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner.beta/Data/Library/Application Support/autosave folder when I opened & closed files. What should happen is a temp file is created there each time a document is opened & the file should be deleted when it is closed. What I just saw a few minutes ago was when I closed a newly created & saved file, its temp file was not deleted.
     
    When I then tried to open it again less than a minute later, I got the 'open recovery file?' dialog. Clicking on the 'don't use' button deleted the temp file from the autosave folder, but the file still would not open, generating the 'file in use' error when I tried to open it again.
     
    It is too early to tell if this always happens when a file is erroneously identified as in use, but I am going to continue to monitor that folder to see if it does. If so, hopefully this will provide a clue for the programmers about the cause.
  24. Like
    ianrobertdouglas got a reaction from smallreflection in Affinity Designer Customer Beta (1.5 - Beta 10)   
    I still have an issue when trying to reopen a file I've closed. It's the same whether I drag to app, go "Open Recent" or just Open and navigate to the file. I get this:
     

     
    And then I get something like this, no matter which option above I choose:
     

     
    The only way forward from there is to quit the Beta and reopen it.
     
    Can someone please weigh in on this? It's been like this for the last three betas.
     
  25. Like
    ianrobertdouglas reacted to Alfred in Affinity Designer Customer Beta (1.5 - Beta 10)   
    There's a thread about that issue here.
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