RayC

For thwe record. I kept my Serif DrawPlus X8, which has a decent AutoTrace built in. DrawPlus X8 can still be had for about $25.00 US.

I have 1.0.5.011 and it takes a full 1 minute and 15 seconds to calculate the size of my my small (20.66 kb) file as PDF. That is way too long.

David: I'm not opening a PDF, I'm opening a AI file, and after editing, saving it as PDF. Ray

OK Dave, I'm looking at the export dialog (1.5.0.11), and I'm not seeing these settings.

Where I work, we use LinkOne Publisher to make our parts books. LinkOne reads text from vector graphics, and ties the text callouts on the illustration to the items with the same callout number in the parts list. Really nifty actually. We use primarily PDF files from Adobe illustrator for our vector graphics. I am making vector illustrations at home, and testing them in LinkOne at work. That is where I see that LinkOne is reading the individual Characters instead of strings. As for Dave Harris' comment; I have not looked at this, and I have found that I sometimes must go through many settings scenarios before something will work correctly. Let me look at that and test the results, and I will post what I find. Thanks to all.

I have been testing this for technical illustration. I start with a Solidworks drawing, save it as an Adobe Illustrator file, and open it in Affinity for editing. I strip out all Engineering notation, and replace item balloons and arrows with simple leader lines and plain text tags. When I’m done, I save as a PDF file. When I do this in DrawPlus, everything is fine. For this work, Draw plus is a fine affordable replacement for Adobe Illustrator. When I do the same thing in Affinity, the text tags are not as expected. The text appears as individual numeric characters (“0”, “8”) instead of a string of characters (“08”).

Loads and navigates an AI technical illustration very well that I could not edit in 1.5.0.8, Still a little slow, but a BIG usable improvement. I will test the Export to PDF output in a few days when I get back to my workplace.

In Affinity, when using the Pen to draw a line, and constraining it with the Shift key, the line can be drawn rotated in forty-five degree increments. When performing the same process in DrawPlus, the line can be drawn rotated in fifteen degree increments. It would be nice to have the fifteen degree increments in Affinity, or to have it user settable in Preferences.

Affinity Designer 1.5.0.7 Windows 10 Home 64 bit Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3 GHz 8 GB I have an Engineering drawing from Solidworks saved as an AI file 641 Kb in size. My goal is to open this file and delete notes and dimensions to prepare it for use in a parts manual. I opened it in Designer, and I started to try to select elements. I was not succeeding. Clicking on objects in the drawing view often resulted in nothing being selected. When I went to the Layers list, it was not responding, perhaps it was still populating. Eventually I could select elements there, but with a long list of elements, I didn’t know where the elements I wanted to find were. Thinking this may be my computer, I opened the same file in DrawPlus x5. It opened quickly, and I could immediately select elements from the drawing view..

This will likely be judged “off topic; but this is a forum for people who create vector art, hosted by people that create computer tools to create vector graphics. Yet, when I attempted to replace my profile picture with a piece of vector art (.svg) that I created using your tool, I received the message “Incorrect image format”. Ok, I understand that your basic web creation package is designed to accept your basic (and primitive) raster graphics; like bmp, gif, jpg, and png. This is just so 1990. (I was there, coding web pages in Notepad.) Modern browsers of all stripes support vector (.svg) graphics, and both DrawPlus and Affinity do a great job of creating .svg files suitable for web publication. I created a vector logo for my personal web site using both DrawPlus X5 and Affinity, and publish it with WebPlus X8. It shows up perfectly in the browsers I’ve tried, including on my Android tablet, and Android phone. Those of us involved in creating vector art should all be promoting their use, and pushing the boundaries. I converted the Technical Publication Department where I worked from publishing raster graphics to vector, what, fifteen years ago. (They were drawing vector, and converting to raster for publication. We can all roll our eyes here.) So, is there a vector graphic in your forum’s future? Join me in pushing the boundaries.

I have done some nice clip art with Affinity now, and included the SVG export on my web page. I love how smart the nodes can be. (My DrawPlus is no newer than X5) But creating technical line art for use in other programs is not going so well. I fail to get real text when I export to EPS, or PDF; but SVG seems to work well, and have real text. WMF export is not readable by anything I have.