kenjacobsen

Bumped! Are you listening Affinity? This is a really important feature that Affinity should absolutely implement, if it hasn't already (I only have V1) – the ability to choose to open a PDF with the text converted to outlines. I've been using the Mac professionally since 1995 and the program that could always do that in the past was Deneba, now ADC, Canvas. I waited 15 years for Adobe Illustrator to do this and they finally implemented it recently. Now I'm trying to move to Affinity for everything, but this is a bump in that road. Now in Illustrator, trying to open a PDF with fonts that aren't installed (as none of them ever seem to be) brings "The document contains PDF object that have been reinterpreted: To preserve appearance, some text has been outlined." This isn't as nearly as good as ADC's Canvas, which gives you the option of substituting fonts or converting them to outlines. But Designer, at least V1, will only substitute fonts, which usually always badly mangles the PDF.

I teach several college "Introduction to Computer Art" classes each year and after 25 years of misery with and endlessly overpaying for Adobe products, especially Illustrator, I'm really glad to be able to recommend Affinity's products to my students. Since the classes I teach are in the Art Department the students are geared to drawing and painting and having the equivalent of Adobe's "Blob Brush" would be REALLY helpful. By the way, I hope it's not CALLED a "Blob Brush" –imitating Adobe's annoying misnomers is not a great idea, in my opinion. We're all annoyed at having to "Expand" our vector art in Illustrator when nothing actually "expands" at all.

Third! Designer is brilliant but a pressure-sensitive blob brush would be extremely useful! Also badly needed is an eraser tool that works in the same way. While I'm at it, calling it a Brush tool, a la Illustrator, when it doesn't work at all like a brush, is counter-intuitive. I teach Illustrator at a college and have to spend way too much time explaining how un-brushlike the "brush" tool is -not to mention Illustrator's insane pencil tool –and a whole lot of others. I suspect that software designers don't appreciate how completely unintuitive drawing with vectors can be for those who draw professionally –when a correction needs to be made, coat-hanger-wire bending is not how people who draw make corrections. They just draw again, just like the blob brush and eraser do. Thank you, Affinity! By the way, I always recommend you to my students.

Here's another vote for a trace tool! I notice that "Convert Pixel selection to Vector shape" is on the Roadmap, so hopefully that means its in the pipeline. I've been using Illustrator, and their tracing tool (originally a separate program called Steamline) fulltime since 1995.