af_user

The year is 2024. I just searched Affinity forums - 6 years since the first scripting support request threads started to appear. It is hopeless, isn't it?

So we are 3 years into this issue now. Any hope for a solution in the sight? Just pulled Designer 2 from the App Store. It is taking like ~25s or so to start. This is on Mac Studio M2 Ultra with 24 cores & 64GB of RAM. Any other App Store app I try no matter how big and heavy is blazing fast. I seriously doubt the issue can be squarely pinned on Apple alone with this one ...

I have finally found a workaround. Print/export the chars you need from any text editor into a Postscript .ps file then import in Affinity. The glyphs will be imported as curves so the non-Unicode chars bug not affecting them...

Hi Maxxxworld thanks for the advice! This method doesn't work either for the glyphs with no standard U+xxx Unicode number associated with them :unsure: See below:

Having experimented a little more... I discovered that you can drag & drop any glyph from the Font Book into the Emoji panel itself (right top corner where it shows the glyph) and it will find the character just fine. So a path to quickly lookup the character I need in standard Emoji panel indeed exists! From there it is back to the original problem. If you double-click to insert it into your design you get the same diamond & question glyph instead :wacko: I'm starting to think this bug has nothing to do with the codes above certain number but rather glyphs that don't have assigned Unicode U+x code...

Thanks guys. Sorry for the delay. I honestly struggle to drag & drop from Font Book app as R C-R suggests. Not that it doesn't work at all, as I said copying works with character codes up to a certain limit. Up to 3855 (0x0F0F) to be precise. Copying or dragging characters with codes above that will result into "Invalid Byte Sequences" diamond glyph. This cuts out about ~750 usable glyphs out of e.g. Apple Symbols font. Just try it yourself, you can see character codes as you hover glyphs in Font Book. I think it is a bug in Affinity text handling. As for the Apple's Emoji palette... I seriously doubt graphics professionals (I'm not one of them btw) rely on that for any serious work. Same as Jim_Campbell above, my colleague (the one who actually suggested me to try Affinity) is himself sticking to Illustrator because Affinity apps are lacking a number of basic features and Glyph Lookup palette is one of them. You can't really ask people to hunt for hours to find a certain symbol from a specific font in the dreaded (sorry, can't help!) Emoji panel. A simple task turns into a torture even for one single glyph let alone ten or twenty you may need. As usually, Apple was trying to be too clever and designed something off the top of their head without asking first what people need. Sorry, I think I'm taking this thread off topic with Apple standard dialog UI choices discussion B) Lets get back on track. I still struggle to come up with a solution of inserting text characters with codes above 3855. Not all of them have an assigned standard Unicode U+x code so you can't lookup those via Emoji panel either even if you add Unicode category to the list. Serif, any ideas please guys? Half a kingdom for a workaround!

Hi Uuiop. This has nothing to do with using Font Book app for looking up glyphs and more with a bug in Serifs apps not being able to paste UTF text with multi-byte character codes. I'm pretty confident when you copy a character in Font Book it is the same as copying ordinary text from the web, form a PDF, form anywhere practically. Copy/pasting text a pretty basic operation. I specifically asked not to offer "Emoji & Symbols" panel in my original post B) I think you can tell from the title this panel is more for chatting than serious work, not? I admit I have issues with some standard Apple dialogs like standard Font or Color picker panels and yes, the Emoji & Symbols too. Whoever designed those needs to be be shoot down for all the suffering he caused. But regardless, despite not being able to do the most basic and common operation of viewing glyphs of a single specific font, the main problem I have with it it doesn't show all of the symbols. You can go into Customize List and tick all categories in there yet some of the symbols still wont show in the list. A totally useless thing for anything other than emojis.

Can anyone please point me how to insert characters from symbol fonts such as e.g. "Apple Symbols". With other editors I would normally just look the font up in the Font Book app and copy/paste the characters I need from there. Some editors also provide a dedicated glyph lookup window (which I'm missing a lot in Serif apps!). When I try this in Affinity Designer I'm getting a "question mark in a box" symbol every time I'm trying to copy/paste some character from Font Book app. Is there any other way to insert these? Just not Apple's "Emoji & Symbols" panel please! Thank you

Unfortunately I have quite a few of those. The geometry is quite complex due to nature of the project. It is procedurally generated and exported from an SVG. Any ideas guys on when the divide issue might be addressed? Is it months away?

Thanks a ton A_B_C! That works a treat in many cases (including the puzzle example) but fails in some where you have an inner/outer shape. Please see the attached test1.afdesign. Despite the shapes not touching, on the final 'divide' step it will fill the whole outer shape :( test1.afdesign

Sorry guys, you are right. The description makes it impossible to understand what I'm asking for :( I should have used a different example not tied to specifics of my project. Please let me try to put it in a different way. The closest analogy that springs to mind is the classic puzzle game. You have your puzzle pieces (as vectors) positioned in the right order on the canvas. Each piece is on its own vector layer. Then you have your overlay image that you want to put on top of the puzzle pieces. The task is to somehow slice the overlay image in such a way that the slices completely repeat the form and position of each piece and can be moved around individually. A random puzzle image off the web:

Dear community I'm struggling to find a solution in AD with overlaying some vector shapes with an image. Say my canvas has various shape objects such as circles, rects, triangles and what not and I want to overlay them all with one single big image. Now it is trivial in AD to create a mask by duplicating all of the geometry that needs to be overlaid and drag/drop into a layer mask (the right edge of layer icon). This will mask out any empty space between the objects and give the exact visual result I need. Now the problem I have is how do I rasterise all this objects (each is a separate vector layer) with the overlaid image on top of it? So that I can move them around preserving the overlaid image? An obvious solution is to repeat this same masking procedure described above for each object separately then rasterise the result. Which works. But I have hundreds and hundreds of these simple shape objects so overlaying one at a time is not an option as it will take me ages. Any ideas please?

Thanks Matt, that would be great! I think you should export all curve/outline type elements as paths with no extra checks. This way standard shapes can be exported as SVG primitives and users can convert them to curves if they need them as paths in SVG. At least this is what is happening in some other vector editors.

Does anyone know if there is a way to force all elements converted to SVG 'path' tags rather than primitive shapes such as 'rect', 'circle' etc. Converting a simple shape elements to curves doesn't help to my surprise. Even adding extra nodes to e.g. a rect or circle shaped curve still doesn't force it exported as a path in SVG file. It is extremely critical for us due to nature of the project. Any ideas please? I was so happy to escape Adobe CC train and last I want is to jump back just for the sake of SVG exports :(