andy-in-mke

I’m getting ready to send some rack card pdf files to our service bureau when I noticed something strange... I’ve got a couple png files (done in Photoshop) embedded in the Affinity Designer file, and they look fine in Affinity Designer. But when I export them to PDF and open them in Apple Preview, I’m seeing things that I don’t like. In particular there’s a strange milky-white quality to the lower edge of one embedded object (see attachment) when it should be a smooth opacity gradient... In the second embedded object immediately below the first one, the lower edge of the object cuts off sharply when it should be a more gradual opacity gradient. Again, it displays properly in Designer but not in Preview. Is it going to print out this way? Is there a pdf exporting setting I need to use? Is there something else I need to tweak in the Photoshop > Designer > pdf Export pipeline? Thanks, Andy

MEB, I'm grateful (& a little chagrined) for your advice – thank you very much! Problem solved. I guess the only thing I would say at this point is that the preference drop down could be named more descriptively. Just relabel "Move Tool Aspect Constrain" to "Scale Tool Aspect Constrain" and I probably would've solved this one on my own. I'm no stranger to preference dialogs – I'm sure when I first started using AD I passed over this menu while trying to solve this problem because of that one word. In any case, thanks again for your help, Andy

One of my long-standing pet-peeves with graphics apps on the Mac was Apple's early decision to make it necessary to hold the shift key down to scale an object proportionally. To me, that is default behavior, and should be doable without a modifier key. Thankfully, Apple is moving in that direction (which I particularly notice in apps like Pages), but the picture on the Mac as a whole is very spotty. It's my impression that there are plenty of apps out there that adhere to the old-school way of things. As things currently stand with Affinity Designer, when I want to resize an object proportionally (which is most, but not all of the time), I don't know when I'll have to hold the Shift key down to do so and when I won't. I think by sheer chance the first few times I scaled objects in AD, I did so without having to press the shift key, and I thought to myself, "Yay, Affinity-Serif, you got it right." But that turned out not to be true, and over time I've come to realize there's a 50% chance each time I want to scale an object that I'll have to hit command-z because the operation won't go as intended. I suppose there are a couple ways this problem can be solved. The ideal solution, to my mind, is to make scaling behavior the same across all classes of objects, be they text, curves, simple objects, compound objects, or groups (made up of any combination of the aforementioned object types): proportional scaling should be the default when the object is selected and manipulated, with no modifier key necessary. If, for some obscure programming reason, it's impossible to implement the above goal, can we have a scaling indicator that reliably tells us whether the selected object we're about to scale will do so proportionately or not, depending on the currently pressed keys? Thanks very much. Andy

These are all great ideas. And while we're at it, Pixelmator has a wonderful feature along the same lines where if you drag a layer out of the layers palette onto the Mac desktop, Presto! you've just exported that layer as a separate file!

Yes, but you could use the same reasoning and do away with the existing donut feature. It's just one circle inside of another, right? I say extend the same power and convenience to every other shape. Why not? :-)

I've never seen this in any vector draw program... selecting a branch point with Affinity Designer's node tool would provide the user with the option to produce a path that branches out of the existing path while remaining a part of it (i.e. if you select the main path the branch is automatically selected also)... the branch point spawns a fork in the existing path such that the forked segment of the path automatically inherits all attributes of the path from which it sprouts... color, thickness, dash style, etc... I think something like this could be genuinely beneficial in a variety of use cases and would be a key differentiator for AD...

Squares, triangles, stars, pie slices, trapezoids, polygons... mwah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah.... well, you get the idea.

So I just added the Alien Skin Eye Candy plugin to Affinity Photo in the Photoshop Plug-ins tab... restarted Affinity Photo... opened a file... selected a layer... went up to the "Filters" menu... selected Plugins>Alien Skin>Eye Candy 7... and nothing happens. Nothing launches. Am I doing something wrong?

As much as I used and liked FreeHand's old roughen tool, I must say the idea of making it targetable to a segment of a line in the manner you describe sounds really good – I'd never thought of such a thing until reading it in your post. How about making that a tool pref, or a mode, depending on the user. The whole line or just part(s) of it, with the user choosing the default?