gdenby

What platform and application(s) might that be?

Hey, Silverdust, Bunch of ways to do this. Here's a quick illustration of what I came up w.: Couple of vector objects, and a couple of copies of a pixel object nested in them, with blend set to erase. May not be quite what you need, but perhaps work in that direction.

I think I'm beginning to understand what you are trying to do, and after a night of sleeping on the question, I can make a suggestion. You are right about the vector shapes only clipping the fill. My experience is that Designer takes the perimeter defined by the nodes as the shape which can be clipped. The stroke is drawn after, and is not part of the clipping. In your example, the problem is doubled. The strokes are from vector brushes, which are bitmaps stretched along the vector outline. They have no geometry of their own, and so cannot be part of the clipping routine unless rasterized to a mask. I'm still working thru the problem, but have had some results that may work for your goal. Instead of clipping the inside shape, leave it as a separate. object Copy both shapes. Subtract the inner shape from the outer. Paste the copies in, change the layer stack order, and intersect. There will be 2 vector shapes that fit together, and each can have its own vector stroke applied. Depending on the layer order, one or the others stroke will sit on top. The vector modifications remain available for both. Additional nodes, lines stretched, different strokes, etc.

Quite nice. Done with pencil?

You referred to "artboard," so I'm supposing you are using, Designer, not Photo. (Designer is not much like Photoshop. Its more like Illustrator, w. elements of Photoshop combined.) You mention that the color doesn't stick to the map. From this I infer the map has been brought in as an image. While images are bitmaps like pixel layers, the application handles them differently. Pixel layers can be placed over them, but the pixels don't fuse w. the image, unless the image is turned into a simple pixel layer. This might be good for you purposes. Create 2 pixel layers whose fills are solid colors, one for the larger area, and 1 for the smaller. Lower the opacity of the layers so the map shows thru. Place those above the map image, and lock the map layer so it can't be modified. Then the users can select each of the layers in turn, and use the flood tool (paint bucket) to re-color the layers as needed w. just by selecting a new color an clicking the tool on the already colored area. Lock everything else, so those can't be accidentally colored. I can think of several other ways to do this, but I think from your description it might be the most appropriate way.

Are you referring to the selection menu: "Select: Feather" ? It does not cause a feathering effect on the image, it just "feathers" i.e. blurs the selected area. It is the subsequent actions whose effect will be affected.

The one you made on the right, the smiling face works. So use that method. Not certain about what you did to make the smiling face, but I had similar results when I drew the outer hair with the fill and the stroke the same color, copied the object, and then rasterized it. Then pasted the former vector form into the pixel layer, where it could be changed in shape and color as desired, but clipped by the pixels. Didn't seem to hard to me.

After defining the stroke weight, you can set the gradient in the stroke dialogue if you like. But to change its position and direction, you need to us the fill tool. Select the object, select the fill tool and change the context from "fill" to "stroke." Then adjust as desired/

It appears that when the fx is applied to a letter with a stroke, the fx is drawn on both sides of the letter form border. The work around I found is to make the text w/o the fx, but with the heavy stroke. Then, duplicate that and paste in place. Remove the stroke, and add the fx. As to the kerning problem, I don't know enough about font structures to say anythingexcept maybe there aren't any kerning pairs for the letters pizzeria.

I have only a sketchy knowledge of font creation, but the outline of a letter form is tied to a rectangle that includes other information, such as kerning space. The form itself is not being scaled, but being adjusted within the letter's bounds. And the string of letters is scaled by reference to all of the sub parts. Ordinary vector objects scale directly based on the bounding box their outermost nodes define. When a group of objects is selected at once, the scaling occurs within the groups bounds, not only the individual objects. As I mentioned earlier, I haven't found a built in routine that records how a single object is scaled in regards to itself, and then transfer to other objects. AD symbols seem to be a way to get about half of the same function, w/o defining a whole character set. I suppose if one was really handy at font creation, one could make a dingbat font on the fly, and scale that thru the text engine.

I haven't found any way to do a batch transform like what you want. I.E. Select 20 circles and make each have a radius 10% larger. Best I've been able to do is make 1 larger, and copy with snapping to where the others are, and delete the originals. However, if you want to go back to the start, remake the shape(s) and convert them to a symbol. Arrange copies as you like, and the scale any one, and all will update. Check out the help on symbols. Not quite intuitive, but very powerful for doing mass conversions.

I've assumed the "g" is a letterform with some fx to make it look 3-d w. a drop shadow. So still a vector, but with some pixel shading. The ellipse will also be a vector. If those are grouped, both can easily be moved around the background image. I d-loaded the image you posted, and found that a regular ellipse does not fit into the hole. Very close, but no cigar. So I converted the ellipse to curves, and using the node tool to move the existing nodes, and adding 4 others to tweak the shape, came up w. a pretty good fit. If the "g" is already rasterized, then rasterize the infilling ellipse shape, and merge down. PS, I'm a completely amateur photographer. Maybe someday you can give me some pointers. PPS, In the Lord of the Rings, Sharky is slang for old man.

"I want to select the inner area and fill with white..." If you want the hole in the "g" to be white, it would be very easy to draw an ellipse in it. Group the 2 vectors so they move as 1 if need be. Then add a pixel layer, and paint away.

Quick run down. Either Artistic or Frame Text will work to start. The text fonts are all vector objects encased in some spacing parameters. But when selected, and converted to curves, that info is tossed out, and the batch of text is a group of vector objects. You don't need to ungroup, tho it can make things a little more straight forward. To be able to edit the nodes of any one of the letter forms, you will need to get to the one you want. If grouped, in the layer panel, open the group, and select the letter to be modified. In Photo, press "p" then command/window to use the node tool. In Designer, "a." Move the nodes, push the lines as you like. There's no particular name for this, other than a couple of text layer manipulations on top of a pixel or image layer.

Hi, Lisa, I haven't used Illustrator in years, but there certainly wasn't any smoothing or refinement tool when I was working w. it. Those are really pretty new, and the smoothing tool "pencil" works nicely from what I've seen from online videos. However, I think AD does have more than 80% of the same capabilities. Inserted is a screen grab of a couple quick closed flowing shapes made in AD 1.6 beta. These were done using a mouse, not my tablet, which is far easier to use. The new stabilizer mode creates very smooth curves, w. a minimum number of nodes, like the Illustrator pencil after 2016. It does require touching the command key to drop the last node onto the 1st node to close the shape. I didn't need to do any reshaping, but a tap on the "a" key invokes the same capabilities as the reshape tool. AD is working well for me, despite my ever worsening arthritis. I'm waiting for the day when it will just pick up my eye movements in response to my sub-vocalized "draw this."

And $20 a month being tethered to their cloud ;) If you happen to live in an "underserved" area, and the cloud connection goes out at random, 5 seconds doesn't save anything.

I can answer the 1st question. Draw the rectangle. You will see next to the fill and stroke options on the top bar, a box that is checked called single radius. Un-check that, and each corner of the rectangle can have different corners. For the 2nd part, I'm unsure what you want to do. If you just want to fill the shape with an image, select the shape, then use the fill tool, and select fill type "bitmap." Navigate to the image you want, and open it. It can then be sized to fill the shape in different ways.

Good demonstration. I did my example just before I went to bed, and a bunch of fals starts. Have been messing around w. the problem more this morning. Here's a still of "pie donuts" before being run thru various booleans. Included, some output.

Yeah, but my level of skill made it a fairly tedious job. Shapes cut out based on shapes not shown. Hard to tell what was trimming what, and what the radii were. What 'ware did you use to make what you showed?

I'm assuming there is a transparency gradient on the object, and that it has been dragged across the object, so there is an axis with transparent at on end, and solid at the other. Just clicking on the stop doesn't change the level of transparency. The click activates the stop for alteration. After clicking the stop, change the opacity level in either the color selector in the right hand studio section, or click on the fill button of the transparency tool in the upper left of the tool context bar. Those are the places you can adjust the translucency. If there is a transparency gradient, however applied, the opacity setting for the object effects that too. So If you have a transparency gradient , and try to change how it works by clicking on the opacity level of the shape in the layers panel, that changes the whole of the object at once. Hope that helped...

Also, after doing what Alfred said, also look at the brush settings menu for the new brush under the general and dynamics tabs to change size, rotation, x&y variation, etc.

Both files you posted have the same .svg code for scaling "preserveAspectRatio="xMidYMid meet"" which says the figure should scale from the center. There are some differences, and its beyond my experience to say which might be influencing the different behaviors. The padlock 2 is a vector file, untitled2 is a .png embedded in an .svg. I think the problems is that untitled2 is essentially a bitmap. From what I can see from experimentation, AD exports untitled 2 as a bitmap within an .svg geometry envelope. I'm going to guess that the database deals w. the .svg files differently based on if they are vector or bitmap. My suggestion is to re-create the untitled2 image as just a vector circle object. Not much to doing that. See what happens.

What you are looking for is called auto-trace. Designer doesn't do this at present. There are free online services that will do this, very inexpensive purpose made apps that do only that, and it can be done for free if you set up Inkscape. It is important to have very clean images, smooth lines, flat areas of tone. Even then, there is usually some manual work thats needed to finish. In some cases, its as easy and fast to just trace over the image manually from the start.

Select the .svg shape. Look at the transform panel at the bottom of the right studio panels. There is a small icon representing the shapes bounding box. By default, the upper left corner has a larger dot, which shows where the scaling starts. Click on the center dot. Then it will show larger, and the tranform happens from the center. But, as described above, you should be able to just hold down the command/window button while dragging the corner of the svg shape. Holding the key down while dragging tells the program the shape should be scaled from its bounding box center.

Be sure the circles are above the letter forms in the layer panel. Select a hole and a letter. Use the menu Layer/Geometry/Subtract