JET_Affinity

Yes, but merely constraining angles to a desired set of axonometric axes can be accomplished in any program that provides a user-defined constraint angles feature (ex: the Constrain Guides sub-feature of Illustrator Smart Guides, and similar features in CorelDraw and ACD Canvas) without need for a page-spanning grid. What's always missing in those features, though, is any provision for assigning correctly-proportional ruler scales along the constrain angles. That's why I said in my previous post "If grids are to serve as the rulers...": I'm glad you're looking into that, because there has to be some provision for specifying properly foreshortened and accurate measures parallel to the three axis directions from any snapable point in the drawing. One possible treatment might be a radio button set in the Transform palette labeled "Axis Scale" versus "Page Scale." That would at least provide a substitute for what other mainstream drawing programs are missing in their user-defined constrain angles. Moreover, it would enable entering measures in terms of true-measure values. But even that does not emulate the direct intuitiveness or elegance of even a pre-computer drafting machine. Axonometric drawing, by definition, is all about making correctly-proportioned direct measures along three coordinate system axes (i.e.; each axis must have its own scale factor, and those scale factors must be correctly proportioned to each other), and zeroing those measures from elements of the drawing, not from increments of a grid. And performing such measurements should not require looking away from the drawing to a palette. That's why I said that if grids are the only provision to serve as those on-page rulers, then the intersection of the grids needs to be able to be instantly and fluidly zeroed to any point wherever a mousedown occurs, just as the scale head of a physical track drafter effectively "moves" to the point of interest in the drawing and allows the illustrator to perform a measure from there without having to look away from the drawing. The closest emulation I've yet seen of the kind of fluidity I envision is Lazy Nezumi Pro (so close, yet so far). In its isometric rulers preset, three rulers appear at and follow the cursor. Unfortunately, when set to other axonometric angles, those three rulers do not currently display proportional scales; all three still show the same scale. (I anticipate this changing, since LNP's converging perspective rulers do display proportional scales.) Plus, being an application-independent "overlay" seems to limit its functionality for vector drawing because (among other things) it is unaware of the program's zoom. And though tick marks were just recently added to the elliptical rulers (thereby allowing them to serve as elliptical protractors--something essential to serious axonometric drawing), the increments are not yet snapable. But the interface concept is quite sound and elegant (and not unlike similar cursor-following interfaces of high-end 3D modeling applications). A similar treatment actually built into a 2D drawing program would not have those limitations. For example, imaging drawing with the Pen Tool in its Straight Line mode: The Axes feature is turned on. Three light-colored axonometric ruler guides appear, with their origin under the cursor. There are correctly-proportional tick marks along each of the three rulers. This set of guides always follows the cursor during mouseup, while the cursor responds to all the normal snapping candidates. Upon mousedown, the rulers stay put. The user drags along one of the axis guides. If he holds a modifier key, the cursor snaps to the tick marks of that axis. If he releases the modifier key, the angle constraint is still active, but the tick mark snapping is not. Either way, though, a distance readout (accurate to 4 decimals, please) continually appears next to the cursor. That allows the illustrator to draw quickly with reasonable precision without having to look away from his drawing and toward a transform palette. But the transform palette (assuming its Axis Scale checkbox is on) can still be used to manually enter exact length. Given such an interface, a page-spanning grid would not even be necessary. Sure, it would be useful when one wants to automatically "project" side views drawn "in the flat" onto the axonometric planes, and that's fine. But most of my drawing would be done with the grid display turned off. The whole purpose of axonometric methods is to allow the illustrator to intuitively draw directly into a mechanically-correct 3D orthographic perspective without having to draft side views first. Oh, I'm all for some fresh innovation rather than just conventional wisdom. I look forward to seeing what you have in mind for the new feature. I just hope it's not too "locked in" to be open to some user feedback in terms of the implementation. JET

Regarding the axonometric grids and ruler origin reset: Hopefully before these two related sneak peek features reach a customer beta stage (in which feature schema and behavior is mostly already committed and focus is mostly just on bug testing), I want to throw this out, so I can sleep at night: Having been doing isometric drawing since the days of drawing "on the board" before desktop computers, I dare say you won't find anyone more enthusiastic about adding some geometric intelligence (other than just snapping) to the plane grids (more akin to DrawPlus). Such grids are a great way to introduce commercial illustrators without prior experience to axonometric drawing. So don't think it contradictory when I say this: In all those decades, frankly, I have never met a fellow serious axonometric illustrator who is highly dependent upon grids; neither before the advent of graphics software nor since. Here's why: There is a fundamental concept which the trivial "isometric grid" features in mainstream drawing software typically gets completely "backward": As usually implemented, grids make your drawing conform to the grids, when the grids should be adapting to the drawing. Grids tend to force your drawing to conform to the increments of the fixed grid. That's fine for "fantasy" drawing like, for example, bird's eye view game artwork wherein the actual dimensions and spacing of whatever "boxy" shaped things you are drawing are entirely up to you. But in real-world technical drawing, it's not about just drawing conveniently "boxy" things, and it's not about making your drawing measures conform to a fixed grid; it's about having a set of freely moveable and correctly proportioned angled rulers which enable you to make correctly-scaled measures from any point in your drawing. In pre-computer days, the only time you saw a tech illustrator using a grid was when he was away from his drawing board (or when his drawing board was not equipped with a track drafter). Newbie illustrators would sometimes use a printed axonometric grid under a sheet of tracing paper. And guess what: He would be constantly moving the grid around under his drawing sheet. A technical illustrator is not the least bit concerned with measures incremented from any page origin. He's constantly gliding his properly-angled rulers to make measures from pre-existing points in his drawing. If grids are to serve as the rulers for axonometric drawing, they need to be able to act like rulers and freely follow the cursor, not be stuck to any page origin. The origin of the grids (the intersection point of the three planes) needs to be able to snap to any snapping candidates in the artwork, completely free from interference from a page layout grid. This is essentially why no grid-based approach has ever really matched the quick, easy, intuitive fluidity of a physical drawing table equipped with a mechanical track drafter. The closest software emulations of the fluidity of the physical tools metaphor are not grids, but three proportional rulers (axes) which follow the cursor, as in some 3D modelers. But axonometric drawing is, by definition, a 2D construction method historically performed on a 2D sheet of paper. So there's no reason a similar interface could not be provided in a general-purpose 2D illustration software, based on 2D geometry. JET

Regarding manipulation of nodes: I hope someone has their eyes on some of the innovative Bezier handling previewed of (and now present in) in the just-released FontLab Studio VI. Others may remember that much of FreeHand's superior path drawing and selection interface stemmed from its progenitor, Altsys Fontographer. To my hopeful eye, this may signify at least potential for a long-needed renaissance in 2D Bezier-based vector drawing. JET

Take heart. I dare say there is no one here who would have been more inclined than me to respond (which I'm doing now) to news that the grids feature is getting some rework. I check in here pretty regularly, but somehow just didn't discover this thread until now. So I figure many others similarly just haven't noticed it yet. In fact, I'm responding right now, having not even viewed the sneak peek yet, because this announcement mentions a functionality particularly near and dear to me: axonometric drawing. Definitely interested in participating in the 1.7 beta (or better, a customer alpha participation which may afford input on interface implementation, as opposed to being more focused on just bug testing.) JET

My assumption was that they're just sensible "jump to" or "edit original" conveniences. For example, select an imported vector graphic on the page. click the Designer icon. The graphic opens in Designer. Edit it, save it, jump back to Publisher and the graphic updates accordingly. And I'd actually be fine with that. But, of course, if you guys have something significantly more powerful / elegant / innovative than that, I'm not against being delighted. Unlike most, I can appreciate many things I can get for "free". JET

Thanks for the preview. It's another spunky, open, hold-us-to-it commitment (which I never doubted, but I know some have). It's the missing element of the publishing triad among the competitors (raster, vector, page assembly). It's the differentiator. It needs to happen as soon as possible, but because the stakes are high, it needs to be done well. That's the challenge. Contrary to popular myth, print is not dead. (Affinity's two classy workbooks are a case-in-point.) So don't make it excessively web-centric. Ebook is important, though. Please have Parliament pass a law prohibiting Adobe from buying Serif. JET

It's pretty much the same situation as with drawing programs. Corel Draw can ostensibly "open" Adobe Illustrator files. Adobe Illustrator can ostensibly "open" Corel Draw files. But caveats are encountered in both directions because both programs have their own proprietary constructs for which the other has no corresponding construct. Sometimes those objects just get deconstructed to their more fundamental constructs (blends, for example, may become stacks of individual path, which is what they really are "behind the curtain" anyway.) Other objects may simply not import. It's always been that way. One might anticipate that the situation is more complicated with page layout applications than with vector drawing applications. But is it? Both genres contain basically three kinds of objects: vector paths, raster images, and text objects. Most drawing programs can also thread text across many text frames. But frankly, I wouldn't care if Affinity Publisher was released with no ability to import InDesign or Quark XPress or any other proprietary file formats of competing page layout apps. Serif may have more innovative things in mind for the page-assembly genre, just as it has for vector graphics and raster imaging. The most important issues regarding Affinity Publisher are two things: Speed to market and full feature set. Both are far more important than delaying the product release in a no doubt tedious and resource-robbing effort to import files directly from the formats of very long-in-the-tooth and grossly overpriced legacy programs, because the page-assembly element is the current void. Corel has perfectly serviceable alternatives to Illustrator and Photoshop. Canvas is also superior to Illustrator in many ways, but it's not a page-layout program for long, bookish documents. Raster imaging programs are everywhere. But page layout program are not. With the momentum of Serif's two highly popular home runs, the Affinity trio is poised to be the much desired clean-and-tidy single-vendor publishing suite. Capable, modern, affordable, and from a congenial source. But the third piece is crucial. Time is of the essence. I say let's forget looking back to legacy files. Let's look forward to a better way to build pages. Affinity Publisher should be (and no doubt will be) able to import the appropriate data exchange formats for content. Your legacy documents can export their content to those formats. I've been doing this stuff professionally for over 30 years now. PageMaker, XPress, InDesign. But truth is, there have been very few times that I had to bother with trying to directly "open" from a previous program. When I adopt a new program, the one I'm using doesn't immediately vanish. (I've never agreed to rent mission-critical graphics software and never will.) I still have my paid-for license to the program in which my legacy files were created. I can, if necessary, export the content to appropriate basic exchange formats, and re-assemble them in the new program. Few projects are "eternal." Those which are, are worthy of a clean rebuild in the new platform. The vast majority of past projects withered on the vine and are archived as print-ready PDFs. New projects are initiated cleanly in the current program of choice. That's the way it will be for me when Affinity Publisher is released. And if it's quality is comparable to that of Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo, I won't look back. JET

I applaud your use of "line end effects" rather than "arrowheads." It is so 1980s to think in terms of just arrowheads. As with other still-missing features, I very much hope that the reason for the delay is that the Affinity team has something far better in mind than the prevalent conventional wisdom. Those who also follow Gravit Designer's (rapid, but sometimes too rapid) development know that it has been under a similar "must have" outcry for "arrowheads," and that it was just recently added. I have high regard for Gravit's nobel effort to restore what has been for too long abandoned in vector drawing programs: interface elegance. But its obviously rushed-out-the-door arrowheads treatment is possibly the poorest I've ever seen. I sure don't want to see Affinity go that way due to unrelenting user pressure. Paths have strokes and paths have ends. Nowadays, everyone expects (and rightly so) vector-based path stroke features to be far more elaborate than just the archaic basic color, weight, and end caps settings. Sadly, Illustrator's Pattern, Art, and Scatter Brushes (despite their needlessly overblown interface and lack of integration with other features) leads that functionality and is one of the really very few true advantages of that program. All the while expecting more sophistication for path strokes, there seems to be a prevalent fixation on the archaic single-purpose use of "arrowheads" as path ends. Yes, arrowheads are a common need. But they are just a pointy-shaped vector graphic positioned at the end of a path and rotated to maintain tangency with the path's stroke. Thinking of "arrowheads" as a distinct feature needing its own interface is as archaic as thinking of dashes as something worthy of a standalone interface entirely distinct from other path strokes. Even the conventional treatment of "brushes" misses the elegance mark. It's an example of how the typically-strained "natural media" metaphor breaks down. Like Illustrator, most programs have come to treat "Brushes" as an attribute. But in the physical media metaphor, a brush is not an attribute; it's a tool. A brush applies strokes, just as a pen or a pencil applies strokes. Paths have strokes and paths have ends. Path ends should be every bit as versatile as path strokes (including so-called brushes). Both represent opportunity to exceed the functionality and disconnected non-integration with the rest of Illustrator's cumbersome, scattered, and grab-bag-like interface. Powerful as they can be when used with a little ingenuity, Illustrator's brushes are hamstrung by their stand-alone nature: You can't simply use a Symbol as the "end tile" of a Pattern Brush. Why? You can set an option on or off to "Scale Strokes and Effects" for any ordinary object(s) in the document, but you can't set that for Symbols, strokes contained in Art Brushes, or strokes contained in Tiles of Pattern Brushes. Why? You can't simply assign a Symbol as a path end. Illustrator has its archaic separate Arrowheads setting. You can create custom Arrowheads, but to do so, you have to open a separate Arrowheads file, draw your custom "Arrowhead", and store it in that separate document as--wait for it--yes, a Symbol! You then quit the program, re-launch the program, re-open your document and now your "Custom Arrowhead" is available in the stupid separate Arrowheads popups of the Attributes panel. Arguably (albeit a stretch), Adobe may have somewhat of an excuse for this convoluted nonsense in that it is a very, very old program, so certain archaic aspects have to be perpetuated for the users' old files. But Affinity is new; it should be free of such backward constraints. I'll say it again: Market share be hanged. Adobe Illustrator IS NOT the program for anyone to emulate in creating a far better drawing program. Nowadays, most programs provide a symbols feature. Path ends should be integrated with symbols. Any symbol should be able to be applied as a path ending. The interface for applying a symbol as a path end should include these options: Setting the rotation angle of the symbol, and whether that angle is relative to the page or to the path. Setting the scale of the symbol (relative to how it is stored) and whether changing the path's stroke weight correspondingly affects the scale of its ends. Setting for whether or not strokes contained within the symbol's artwork are scaled. Most programs treat paths as having two primary attributes: stroke and fill. But they really have three: stroke, fill, and ends. It's way past time for someone to provide a modern, powerful, and elegantly integrated treatment of path ends. JET

Amen. And auto-tracing is far from any kind of core functionality for a professional quality drawing program. Yeah, I know it's a popular request. But I also know the modest learning curve necessary to draw efficiently with Bezier curves is a common fear among beginners. So I hope the Affinity team is more discerning than just setting its priorities according to "popular demand." As most commonly used, auto-tracing is a sub-standard workaround to drawing optimally. The widespread misconception is that the advantage of scalable resolution independence is simply a matter of the artwork being comprised of vector paths--any vector paths. It isn't. Entropy rules. Garbage in; garbage out. You don't automatically get increased information from low information. As most commonly used, auto-tracing just swaps one kind of ugly noise (raster pixelation) for another (meaningless vector jaggedness and increased posterization). Unless and until auto-tracing is driven by sophisticated shape recognition artificial intelligence, that will be the case. All the typical auto-trace program does is try to draw vector paths around a set of adjacent same-colored or similarly-colored pixels (according to some user-defined tolerance setting). Consider: What would be the "most accurate" auto-trace? In the current functional sense, maximum accuracy would simply yield one vector square for each raster pixel. Some auto-tracers can do that. And doing so yields absolutely no functional resolution independence advantage. So you up the tolerance a bit and the program draws a meaningless jagged path around a collection of dark gray pixels because the program doesn't "know" that cluster of dark pixels is the pupil of an eye which any human illustrator would render as a vector circle with no more than four nodes. The human-traced version gains noise-free resolution independence. The auto-trace version does not become resolution-independent. Enlarging it simply makes the meaningless noise of the jagged shape more evident. I'm not saying there is no legitimate use for auto-tracing; just that those uses are relatively few and infrequent. If one wants to use auto-tracing as a special effect, or even as the runaway amateurish substitute for properly drawn paths, it is readily available elsewhere. Nowadays, you can even do it online for free, regardless of what drawing program you are currently using. Auto-trace programs all do pretty much the same thing and it certainly does not need to exist in every drawing program. Serif has way too much more important serious functionality to get done if Affinity is to raise the vector drawing segment out of its decades-long "me, too" lethargy. Auto-tracing wouldn't be at the bottom of my priority list; it wouldn't even make the list. JET

Please forgive my admittedly passionate stance on this, but... Auto-tracing is far and away usually very bad practice which merely trades one kind of ugliness (raster pixilation) for another (jagged vector paths). The end result thereby negates the resolution-independence advantages of properly drawn scalable vector artwork. Although it has some legitimate last-resort uses, it is by far most commonly used as a cheesy workaround for avoiding properly drawing efficient and accurate paths. It is also very common and easily available elsewhere. You can even do it online for free. It does not need to appear in every drawing program. (Corel did it right by implementing it as a separate standalone utility.) As overwhelmingly implemented, all most auto-trace utilities do is try to draw paths around contiguous same- or similarly-colored pixels with a certain amount of "sensitivity" control. They have no shape recognition capability whatsoever. As a very simple example, they know neither that a cluster of dark pixels is supposed to represent the pupil of an eye, nor that a pupil is round. So you just end up with an ugly irregular path which looks no better when enlarged than the original raster. That's what I mean by simply trading one kind of resolution-dependent ugliness for another. Another far too typical use is by sign shops which auto-trace a customer's logo so they can cut it from sign vinyl. The resulting jagged shapes of the hugely enlarged paths is a dead giveaway of amateurish sub-standard work. So I, for one, have no interest whatsoever in seeing yet another "me, too" auto-trace feature cluttering up yet another vector drawing program. It's not just dead last on my wish list; it's not on the list at all. Its absence is a better indication that a program is being developed for serious commercial-quality work. Affinity still needs way too many serious vector drawing features to waste any development time on yet another junky auto-trace feature. JET

Well, I've been at it at least as long digitally, and at least another decade before that. And I quite routinely move vector graphics to a raster program in all kinds of projects. I would. For just one example, it would simplify the process of creating "halos" in technical drawings, where it is often needed on open paths, and one has to tediously construct extra closed paths as a workaround. But there are countless other opportunities for its use, especially in programs supporting multiple strokes on paths. Gravit Designer, for another current upstart, provides for it (although buggy at the moment). There's no reason why offset strokes (determined by path direction) shouldn't be just as useful for open paths as for closed. (And frankly, there's no reason why live offset strokes shouldn't be integrated with offset path commands. Why should live stroke position be limited to just centered, inside, and outside? I, for one, am weary of seeing new competitors in the stagnant vector drawing arena merely playing "me, too" to the limitations of Illustrator. Exactly. Your experience doesn't set the desires, needs, or ingenuity of everyone else. JET

Just want to add my voice to those asking for a true Hairline stroke weight. It's not just for vertical-market needs like cutting on NC devices. In the FreeHand days, Hairline was my default working stroke weight whenever drawing paths. It's absence in Illustrator is a pain in the neck to former FreeHand users, and I was delighted to find it in DrawPlus. It really needs to be added to Affinity Designer. For those not familiar, the Hairline stroke weight always renders the finest line possible on whatever the output device is (be it the monitor or a printer). This is different from simply setting a small stroke weight because a Hairline setting does not scale as you zoom. So when you are trying to draw paths precisely, the path you're working on is always displayed at the same minimal weight that can be displayed as you zoom in and out. It effectively enables you to work in what Illustrator treats as a separate "outline" view mode just on the path you're currently working on, without losing the reference of all the already existing artwork styling. I also routinely used it for special printer marks (fold marks, etc.) in the bleed areas. Hairline stroke weight is also excellent for use in illustrating step-by-step procedures with screen captures because it lets you use color-coded construction and demo paths while capturing at any zoom. This feature is yet another competitive opportunity to reveal to Illustrator-only users just how cumbersome that program has always been. JET

I despise seeing mimicking of Adobe Illustrator interface elements as any kind of "standard" worthy of emulation. Illustrator's interface is hideously cumbersome throughout, and having to continually toggle an annoying "overlapped fill or stroke" icon is a prime example. Frankly, I prefer a straightforward separation of fill and stroke selection. As always, see FreeHand's Inspector-based interface, not Illustrator's scattered object attributes. JET

Halftoning effectively blurs the edges of line art. A printer (imagesetter) has a fixed resolution. All it actually print is printer spots of the same size. Printer spots are the actual hardware resolution of the imagesetter (typically 3000 or more spots per inch). Halftone dots are made up of printer spots..Each dot in a halftone is a collection of printer spots, trying to simulate a circle..The number of different circle sizes possible is therefore determined by the number of printer spots available to simulate them. Divide the number of available printer spots (SPI) by the halftone ruling (LPI), and that's the theoretical number of different-size halftone dots (levels of grey) the device can print. That's why you always get more banding from, say, a 600 SPI laser printer than you do from a 3000 SPI imagesetter. Everything in a greyscale image gets halftoned. That means the raster is printed as halftone dots, at the line ruling of the halftone screen (typically 150 lines per inch). It also becomes effectively anti-aliased by the halftoning.process.That's why black text that is part of a raster image looks fuzzy compared to black vector text stacked in front of a raster image. 1 bit raster objects do not get halftoned at all. They are simply "filled in" with tiny printer spots. So it's common practice to, for example, create or scan line art (think of the inking of a comic book illustration) as 1-bit rasters at something like 1200 PPI, which overlay grayscale or full color raster images. The color artwork prints as 1/150th inch halftone dots. But the 1-bit raster actually prints as 1/1200th-inch squares, giving a crisp, sharp-edged, aliased (not anti-aliased) appearance. You can sort of think of 1-bit color depth as the "vector" version of raster imaging in that exactly what you've "drawn" simply gets "filled in" with the tiniest printer spots of the given output device. Take a look at this PDF: Zoom into it as far as you can. Tell me if you think it is raster image or a vector line. JET

Agree. Fumbling through the Layers palette to name Artboards is time-wasting tedium. JET

I agree with this, but don't see any reason for it to be a preference. Toggling the grid on or off should just show or hide it for all artboards. As it is, you have to either select an Artboard with the Artboard tool or select an object on an Artboard just to see its grid. Even selecting multiple Artboards or objects on multiple Artboards still only displays the grid on one Artboard. I'm presently working on documenting a series of step-by-step procedures to populate a book. Each step is a separate Artboard, and I take a screenshot of each. It's a tedious pain in the neck which also raises the following additional needs for improvement: • Printing the grid should be a user-defined setting. • Presently, changing the document resolution in Document Setup changes the grid spacing for all Artboards, but doesn't change the number of divisions. For example: 1. Set the document resolution to 300. 2. Set the grid to 1 inch spacing, with 16 divisions. 3. Open Document Setup and change resolution to 288 (three times 96, to accommodate 300% zoom in an on-screen application). 4. The grid spacing changes to .1111 on all artboards, yet divisions remains at 16. I see no reason for this behavior. I call it a bug. You can imagine how infuriating it is, having to go back and reset the grid for each Artboard on an 18-step procedure. JET

Further regarding selection with the Node tool: 1. Pen tool: draw a path. 2. Ellipse tool: draw an ellipse. 3. Click the Convert to Pie button. 4. Deselect. 5. Node tool: Click the Pie object. It is selected as a Pie Object (as it should be). So its bounding box is dispayed and its Pie attributes are available. 6. Deselect. 7. Node tool: Drag a marquee selection around both the Pie object and the path. Both objects display their nodes. But the nodes of the Pie object are not editable, because it's a pie object. What justifies this inconsistency between a Pie object being selected by itself as opposed to its being selected with another object, when both selections are made by the Node tool? JET

Drawing with the Pen is still too cumbersome, because of the Adobe-esque insistence on an interface dependent upon separate selection tools for whole paths versus subparts of paths (so-called "Selection" and "Direct Selection" in Illustrator). It's actually worse than Illustrator in that: In Illustrator, while using the Pen, pressing the momentary keyboard modifier invokes the most recently used of the two selection pointers. In Affinity, pressing Ctrl always invokes the Node tool. That is problematic when the object one needs to select is a special object (a Pie, for example): Ellipse tool: Draw an ellipse. Click the Convert To Pie button. Pen tool: Draw a path. Press and hold Ctrl. The Node tool is momentarily invoked. Click the Pie object. Because the Node tool is invoked, the Pie object is selected as if in node-editing mode, not as a Pie object. So you can't, for example, change either of its Start or End angles, because those fields are not displayed. The behavior is also rather pointless in that, being a Pie object, even though the nodes are displayed while holding Ctrl, the nodes are neither selectable nor moveable. I know that at this point in the game, there is no going back on the grievous decision to emulate Illustrator's cumbersome two-selectors interface. But given that, one needs to at least be able to momentarily invoke the appropriate selection tool for what one needs to do with it. Perhaps make pressing Ctrl and Alt momentarily invoke the Selection tool when using the Pen. At the very least, momentarily invoking the Node Tool should cause it to select special live objects (like Pie objects) in their higher special object state. After all, that's what happens when you are using the Node tool (as opposed to momentarily invoking it) and click a Pie object. (By the way: When writing this post, I applied Numbered List to the steps described above. The step numbers and indenting display in the editor, but when submitted, they disappear.) JET

The list of changes incudes: Align to key items (first/last selected). Where is this implemented? I don't see any preference setting for it, and alignments seem to occur the same way, regardless of the order in which I select the objects. JET

It's like deja vu all over again. The ability to perform alignments on sub-selections of nodes is one of many things in Illustrator that lagged years behind its historic rival, FreeHand, and even then was an inferior implementation. JET

Again, Illustrator is not the program to emulate. Illustrator's treatment for locking and unlocking of objects is one of its many competitive weaknesses compared to its historic rival, FreeHand: Locked objects should not be unselectable. Making locked objects unselectable is the problem which then requires adding such ill-conceived command as "Lock All" and "Unlock All." Locked objects should be selectable. That way, whatever is currently selected can be either locked or unlocked by those two straightforward commands. That way, the two commands work in conjunction with Select All. And making locked objects selectable also serves as an intuitive mechanism by which to specify the so-called "key object" for alignment and distribution commands (yet another goofy interface problem with Illustrator). Why anyone would want to always have to unlock everything that is locked, just to manipulate a single locked object is beyond me. In FreeHand and other programs, a locked object can still be selected; it just can't be moved or manipulated until it is unlocked. So you can simply select the object of interest, and if it's locked, unlock just it. No digging through a ridiculously long objects list in a so-called Layers palette. (In FreeHand, the Layers palette was a list of (...wait for it...) layers.) ​All that's needed is a subtle modification of the way the selection handles of a locked object are displayed. (They can be grayed, or changed to Xs instead of squares, etc.) ​Countless newcomers to Adobe Illustrator have struggled with such goofball elements of its needlessly cumbersome and confused interface for decades. Other programs conforming to it, just because of its market position, is one of the ways Illustrator has effectively kept vector drawing development in the doldrums. JET

Even without a set of dimensioning tools, length and area of a selected path should be provided in the interface of any serious drawing program. JET

You can set up the axonometric grids (more tedious than in DrawPlus), and use them as snapping guides, but as yet there is no object-level association with the "3D Plane" grids like in DrawPlus. Quite a pity, too. JET

If you rasterize the whole document, raster images already contained in it will be re-rasterized according to the same settings. JET

You've been ill-advised. You can buy most any graphics software and, of course, use it to create your graphics work which you sell to your clients. What you can't do is act as if the software itself is your own intellectual property. For example, you can't make copies of the software, re-label it as your own software product, and sell the relabeled software. Think of it this way: An author can write his book in Microsoft Word, sell his book to a publisher, and deliver it as a native Microsoft Word document. But the author can't sell a copy of Microsoft Word to the publisher. The publisher has to buy its own license to Microsoft Word. [Aside: You can, however, repackage and resell (and even modify the source code) for some open-source software, the license for which expressly allows you to do so. For example, there are multiple such offerings of re-branded OpenOffice applications. Again, even that is specifically spelled-out in the software license.] Whomever is advising you is probably confused about the recent licensing scheme change which Adobe foisted upon its customers. The Affinity applications are licensed under a traditional "perpetual license". That is, the license to a particular version is not time-limited. It doesn't "time-out" like Adobe's licenses now do. The license fee for a particular version of an Affinity program is a one-time payment. You don't have to continually "rent" the software. That is the way which most mainstream graphics software used for private or commercial work has historically been, and still is, licensed. Adobe ended that with the CS6 versions of its main graphics applications, and changed its licenses to a take-it-or-leave-it continual time-based fee. This is one huge reason (there are others) why so many professional users are finding alternatives to Adobe graphics applications. Adobe has effectively abandoned the core customer base of entrepreneurs (freelance illustrators and designers, small agencies, etc.) who largely made Adobe what it is. A license "rental" scheme is not as hard to sell to a large corporate IT department, but most small shops and freelancers--often the most creative and talented users--are not nearly so amenable toward being held captive to paying a continual time-based fee just to be able to continue to open their own files. But again, even with a traditional one-time-payment license, the software itself is still owned by the software company (in this case, Serif). You own the files you create with it. but you don't own the software. You can't give away or sell copies of the software itself. So someone downstream (your customer) who wants to work with your files in their native environment (the same software you used to create the files) would have to also buy a license to that software. But that's not the typical case. You typically deliver your files to a printer or to the web or to the client as a PDF, not as a native Affinity file. JET