MattP

lol! Thanks guys :)

lol! I'm not 100% certain I'm going to be done with this before tomorrow to be honest - today has been one of 'those' days! ;)

Brilliant work, Dave! :) Really great to hear that you're enjoying Designer! 'Expand Stroke' should be coming soon (I have to iron out the niggles, so I don't know if I'll get it perfect in time for tomorrow's beta, but I'll obviously try) and I've already added the menu item for 'Release compound' but just need to write the code still, lol... I know that after launch we'll be adding multiple fills/lines and better selection methods (select all text with certain fonts or ranges of sizes, select all red things, similar things, etc) and I do know there is talk of zoom shortcuts in the office at the moment - basically, I think that you'll hopefully be happy with the finished product :) Thanks, Matt

In my build? Mostly... will have to see how I get on with finishing it today :) It's nearly there, anyway...

I am going to look at this - as I mentioned before, there's actually more than you'd imagine involved in making this actually work, but I'll sort it out when I have chance :)

Hi Arie, This is a hotly anticipated feature - take a look here... :) Matt

Thanks, Chris. Much appreciated! :)

As mentioned above by rui_mac, it's a Preview issue that's showing the dark lines that aren't actually in the file - but as I mentioned I think we can reasonably look at fixing this for most cases so it will look just fine. Thanks again, Matt

Nice work! :D ...and nice hint about the blend tool :P

Okay, I've just had a look at your files and tried to export them to PDF - I think it's doing what I'd expect it to... If you open Dragon3 and press Cmd+8, the zoom will change to show you the actual print size. Notice that it's quite small. Exporting the document to PDF does indeed create a PDF file at 300dpi that is the actual size shown, so I think that one is working as I'd expect. Dragon4 has also been exported to PDF at the correct size and with the correct DPI, which is good. The next problem you mention is the transparent vector shadow area being rasterised - I'm not sure if this is something that we have control over because we're making use of Apple's built-in PDF functionality. I didn't write the PDF export so I don't know it well enough to say whether it's possible to fix this, but it's basically rasterising the area because it's a transparent vector. We output the area as a series of tiled bitmaps in order to avoid ever running out of memory if you were to export an extremely large area. This actually seems to show thin lines in the built-in Preview application when you view the PDF. I've just used our new PDF importer to view the file properly in Designer and I can see that these tiles don't overlap and they don't contain any dark lines, so it's just a bug in Preview. It's worth us considering this though and trying to not output tiles if the whole bitmap would've been fairly acceptable in size if just output in one go - at least that way we could still tile if you were outputting something huge, but it would look correct in Preview most of the time. Basically, we have work to do here, but the files it's creating aren't actually a bad starting point. I'll have a chat with the team next week :) Thanks again, Matt

Hi Chris, My initial thoughts are that you aren't necessarily doing anything wrong from what you've described. The 'New document'/'Document setup' dialog is far from finished (I think this is why you've had the problem where it changed the number of pixels in your document without you telling it to!) and it needs to make use of our backend commands to convert colour spaces and resize documents, which are all there but just not wired in quite right at the moment... When you use transparency, I don't think the PDF is able to export that properly, so it will be rasterised to make sure that all levels of PDF viewer/printers will be able to open it and show it correctly. You're seeing the thin black lines because of either a bug from our side, or a bug in previewing the final file. There are a number of PDF-related problems here and I think a lot of them are fixable fairly easily. The PDF export resolution issue is something that we'll look into... Thanks for your files - it makes testing the behaviour much easier! :) Matt

In the examples you've shown, the corners that are becoming beveled would have exceeded the miter limit if a miter had been used instead. We used to have a user-editable miter limit (and still do in the rendering code) but we removed this from the UI as it's very rare that people actually tend to change it. Perhaps we need to rethink that? Thanks, Matt

Looking great! :D

Hi puredesign, It's very difficult to diagnose things like this without seeing them... whenever you next see the 'corruption', can you just hold down Shift+Cmd+3 and OS X will take a screenshot and put it on your desktop. If you could share that screenshot here, we might know what we're looking at :) Thanks, Matt

Yes, that's actually done as a system cursor, not a preview :)

...and here's how they look! I haven't made the off-curve handles into crosses - I just don't like them as much, so can't bring myself to do it, but the other nodes are as-per your design and I think they look good! You'll get this in the next beta build - along with being able to choose what size of nodes you'd like in Preferences. Thanks again, Matt

:)

Hi Matthias, I understand completely what you're saying and I genuinely want to make you happy - I really do value your input greatly and you're an extremely valuable member here. Please don't think that we're trying to ignore or be unreceptive - I've tried to implement pretty much everything you've mentioned so far, but... you could just zoom in a bit so the selection isn't so tiny? And, yes, in each of those cases where you mention not being able to tell what's selected, I can tell - the bottom left to top right line is selected (the wireframe blue line is visible) and the outer circle is selected in the last image as the bounding box shows us the size of the object. Nodes being selectable in the Move Tool (and not just the Node Tool) means that you have to sacrifice something to do with general purpose selection dragging/transforming... So I have a selected curve, it shows me the nodes - how do I drag the curve somewhere different? I can't drag the curve because it would modify the curve segment I hit (or is that function only supposed to be allowed in the Node Tool?), I can't drag the nodes because it would select and move them, and I can't drag off the curve to move the selection around because that would start a marquee node selection (again, is that function only supposed to be allowed in the Node Tool?) There are lots of pros and cons for everything... I do have Freehand MX now and have been using it - I agree it does a lot of things well, but I genuinely am much more productive in Affinity Designer... This is because I know how it works and am comfortable in it. You are obviously in the reverse position to myself, coming to Designer from Freehand so are seeing the things that are different as negatives, but I would argue that little handles generally around the selected area without any frame can also be hard to use depending on the geometry of the shapes involved - shapes don't always fill their area, so checking to see which handle is attached to which object is awkward (for me, at least). I certainly do not get along with multi-selections showing each object's bounds with little handles - it looks extremely cluttered with a large selection, plus I can't resize them all at once - I have to group them first which is insane because it completely destroys any hierarchy I had in place. I'm not trying to be awkward, I'm just trying to suggest that it depends on your perspective what you view as desirable. I'll definitely continue to think on things though :) Matt

The preview is just some extra work we do on mouse move - we can easily add a checkbox that just disables doing that extra work, hence you will no longer get a preview (i.e. it's not being shown - because it's not doing the preview at all) :)

Not yet... but there will be one added soon after launch as a free update

It's being written right now ;)

There's currently no way to stop the preview - but we can add a checkbox to the end of the brush tool's context toolbar that toggles the preview. Would that be enough? Matt

Hi Alex, There's a couple of different ways... The easiest is just to select the object, go to the Gradient Fill Tool and choose 'Bitmap' from the drop down list shown in the context toolbar - choose a file and you're done. Other ways include inserting the image into the document, then using the layers page to drag the image to be a child of the circle/rectangle, or even just selecting the circle/rectangle then choosing 'Inside' from the target modes available at the top right of the application, then inserting a new image (which will automatically place it as a child of the circle/rectangle) Hope that gets you going :) Matt

Incidentally, I've just added the ability to change the size of the tool UI - I'll hook it up to a slider and add it to the Preferences. I'll try to post some screenshots tomorrow when I get chance so you can see what to expect :) Matt

Ah, the key was that you mentioned you'd added the gradient through the layer effects menu! :) The layer effects are all raster effects, and while the gradient overlay layer effect will make the same visual effect that you're after, we have a much better way to achieve what you really wanted to do... You should just make a rectangle for the background then use the Gradient Fill Tool (half way down on the left tools toolbar) and drag on a gradient. This is a vector gradient - it has no implied DPI and is by far the best way to do gradients in a vector editor :) Hope that helps, Matt