tcarisland

It was the context toolbar I was looking for, among other things. It's difficult to find a clear example of the snapping problems, they tend to show up after having worked with the shapes and reproducing them for a while. It would be nice to enable an extra strict "snap to grid" feature that doesn't allow nodes to be placed anywhere that isn't at a grid intersection. Thanks for the help, most of the issues seem resolved. I just don't get why the toolbar and context toolbar should suddenly disappear and not show on startup.

The past few days I've found that the UI of Affinity Designer on Mac behaves inconsistently. First the tools disappear out of nowhere and I ended up spending a long time just to find how to get the basic toolbar back (which isn't named "Toolbar", but simply "Tools" (the ambiguity here combined with the fact that the "Tools" is way down low on the "View" menu was extremely annoying). Now the node buttons (join curves, close curves etc.) that used to be available when I used the node tool to close paths is gone. Another problem is that the "snap to grid" does

Drawing ellipses and the likes of it is a real pain when it comes to perspective. Would you consider creating an isometric version of the polygon tools so that we can create ellipses, rounded rectangles and regular rectangles directly in one of the three axes? This would be a real time saver, especially combined with boolean operations.

That's monkey work, especially when working with tens to hundreds of shapes. This is just one of my many drafts for a font, and for this font alone I need to delete 32 shapes, probably multiple times since design works in iterations, meaning that for 4 iterations I'm easily up to 128 click and delete operations for just one font, now let's say click and delete takes 4 seconds on average, that's 512 seconds of nothing but clicking and deleting for one design that might not even get accepted, meaning I've wasted 8.5 minutes on each font for something that could be done instantaneous

The "Divide" operation almost does the job, but not exactly. What I get is this: As you can see, I end up with some shapes "filled in" that I don't want to have to remove, if not for the center shapes, I wouldn't have to use my old copy of Illustrator for this particular job.

I find that using the "Add" operation Affinity Designer creates one big "curve" instead of grouping together all disconnected curves and only removes the overlap of overlapping curves like Adobe Illustrator does. Personally I like both features, but a lot of the time I need the AI feature because I work a lot with type design and I need individual and/or disconnected shapes to remain as separate shapes. There's a feature lacking in nearly every vector graphics program, and that is the ability to use the subtract operation on a group of curves with another group of disconnected curv

A few months ago, my employer (a "mom and pop" frame store that, among other things, produce their own frames) asked me to dig up an image, put on the logo, the website and the frame size and create what he called a "face paper" for our locally produced frames. So I dug up a photograph of a fox I took five years ago at a park and did just that. The art boards came in handy, but this type of job feels like something I should have done in InDesign or the upcoming Publisher. This is the result.

It's not really about photo editing, but the most useful book I ever read on Photography is one titled "Light Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting" by Fil Hunter and Steven Biver. There are so many books on photo editing out there and they all seem to touch on the same boring old stuff you can read about in any magazine (too bad the magazines are more expensive than actual books these days). The more interesting books on what you can do with a tool like Affinity Photo and Designer are the ones on digital painting techniques, so you could look there. And if you're

A few months ago, I started designing fonts using Affinity Designer and Fontforge. I came across a few repetetive tasks and made a small utility program to avoid this problem. Now I have 5 fonts on my DaFont profile and 6 on CreativeFabrica for sale and thought I'd make the program I use available to others, yesterday I started working on a GUI-application that resizes all SVG files within a directory so that exported SVGs from Affinity Designer retain their relative size. The program is available on my website along with a short tutorial here.

I've been working on this for the past month trying to design fonts using AD, exporting glyphs and importing into FontForge. As of yet, my best solution has been to name all curves/groups, so uppercase A is either just A or AU, and lowercase a is al. Then I go into the export persona and I created an export preset called "GlyphExport" which is simply .svg format with ViewBox checked and make sure that NOTHING will be rasterized. Then it creates SVG files such as al.svg and A.svg. I'm considering learning how to script for FontForge to import all properly named files, but as of yet I find i

I looked at the online tool Glypher and Birdfont, none of which were any better. FontForge has a learning curve and a few very annoying UI issues, for example: to move an object, you need to open a window and plot how many points you want to move it, it's a good thing you can plot numbers, but there should be a mouse option just to move the object as well. Later on I found that with a bit of programming knowledge and learning to use a calculator while designing makes it pretty easy to use with experience. I still would never consider doing the actual vector design in FontForge though,

Around three weeks ago I started designing fonts using Affinity Designer and FontForge. I do nearly all the design in Affinity Designer and basically just the font specific stuff in FontForge. Then, about a week ago I tried my luck at submitting my fonts to DaFont, three of them were accepted, and after my first was accepted I was contacted by this Dutch company called Creative Fabrica to submit my fonts for commercial licensing there, pretty surprised since my experience with working with stock photography and illustration was that it was kind of difficult to have things accepted. Th

The extraneous node problem caused by expanding the stroke and boolean operations, not to mention the generally buggy way the boolean operations work made it really difficult for me to create an "extruded font" yesterday. I've reported the problem before, but it doesn't seem to be a priority. I also asked for the ability to move objects at a specified angle without response a couple of months ago, I know how to do this mathematically, but would prefer not having to whip out a calculator for something so easy to program. I don't mean to sound overly pessimistic, but yesterday I was

If you're using Code128 or similar, no amount of font design can make it work just by typing in the letters. Code 93 and Code 128 needs a start and stop character at beginning of the barcode and use a checksum right before the end character. You can use online services to preprocess the text before you use the font, pay for a service or as me, just code the checksum yourself. I made a very basic java program that covers the alphanumeric parts of Code128B here: https://github.com/tcarisland/utility-functions/blob/master/Java/Code128.java You can of course pay for a program that does thi

Barcoding can be done through using special barcode fonts. In the case of Code128 or other fonts of that class you need to calculate the checksum and concatenate the beginning and end characters. Which barcodes are you talking about? UPC, EAN? If you're doing inventory or personal use you probably don't want to mess with those since they're regulated, not to mention very limited since they're strictly numeric. Are you talking about 2D barcodes like QR-codes? This is a pretty complex subject that might require a LOT of programming and may not benefit the major amount of users here.