MattP

Hello! :) You can expect the next beta version to always lock aspect-ratio if you drag a corner handle, unless you override it with the Shift modifier. I've tried it out for a little while now and I'm just about managing to cope with it and am still able to draw things! ;) Let me know how you get on with it in the next beta! Cheers, Matt

Hi Franco, We've got a whole Export mode that lets you do exactly what you want. Just look at the different Personas available at the top left of the main window (Draw, Pixel and Export) and choose Export. Now select your object and change the export options available in the panel and you'll create an exportable object automatically. Click the export button either on the context toolbar or next to the object in the 'Slices' page and it will ask you where to save it. Note that you could also choose to export a retina version very easily with this method too. Having said all this, I do think we probably need to add a 'Selected object(s)' checkbox to the File->Export dialog so that you can just easily export a selection :) Cheers, Matt

Hi Petar, I think that this thread is essentially asking the same question. Basically, the only way I'd be interested in writing this feature is the proper way which is how AI implements it - and that is actually a large unit of work that I don't have time for before the launch. I'd expect this to happen one day, but not any time soon :) Cheers, Matt

Well, I think we might go with the following change... Cusp nodes will be displayed with a triangle because they are making sharp corners, smooth nodes are displayed with squares as they are the default type and look obviously different to the round off-curve handles. I've played with this before (I even added it to DrawPlus a long time ago) but was never very happy with how it looked, so always removed it. I think I like this though (for the moment!) so we'll see how you feel about it in the next beta :) Cheers, Matt

AndyT just mentioned to me that you might like to try the following Apple procedure: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

Just to add to this, our application has been validated for sale on the Mac App Store with the current codebase so it passes all Apple security checks to ensure that there is nothing untoward happening, and that we only access allowed APIs and use them in a consistent fashion. This means it should be impossible for the application to do anything that would affect your system. Unfortunately, I'm not enough of a OS X techie to be able to offer any meaningful support regarding your system. Incidentally, what version of the OS are you using? (Is it OS X 10.7 or above?)

Hi Dave, Choose the 'inside' target mode, select the object you want the next thing to appear inside, then hit paste. It should work, hopefully! :S Cheers, Matt

:)

I'll have a play with a version that constrains everything by default and see how I get on with it - as I said, we are not going to ignore our users blindly, so watch this space... :)

Hi Matthias, I definitely agree that curve node type indicators may be helpful (we're investigating this at the moment - we used to have them, but they looked ugly and distracting so we removed them, but are currently trying to find something more subtle). Have you tried Affinity Designer's Pen tool yet - I'd argue that it's very full-featured and extremely productive already, and we're currently adding additional functionality as we speak - hopefully available in the next beta :) Cheers, Matt

Hello! There could be many things which would affect whether the vector items are exported as vectors or rasterised. Is there any chance you could attach a .afdesign file showing the problem and we can have a look to tell you what's happening? :) Cheers, Matt

Hello and welcome to the forums! :) It's definitely inconsistent, but it is done deliberately and has worked very well for us in the past: That doesn't mean that we won't reconsider if there are compelling arguments against it though... If you consider the Shift key as an aspect-ratio constraining modifier, then things make more sense. Basically, if you imagine you didn't have knowledge of the Shift key, you would want to be able to resize a rectangle/ellipse/curve freely, but if you were to resize text freely you would just get some ugly looking text. So certain items (groups, images, text) force the tool to automatically constrain, and the remaining objects force unconstrained resize. The Shift key is used to modify that default behaviour. The idea is that most people will not notice that it has done the auto-constrain/unconstrained logic because it just did what they expected to happen - but clearly it's not always true ;) Cheers, Matt

It's definitely a useful feature and it is on our list of things to do - but it all takes time, so we'll get to it as soon as we can! :)

Hi, Internally we do have functioning macros and a macro recorder. We can replay whole or partial document creation and we actually use this for our regression testing framework. We will look to expose this in the future and we may also add Apple Script support. Cheers, Matt

Great - glad you've got it working :D

Praise is welcomed in all areas of the forum, hehe ;) We're trying to be pretty active on the forum, so generally we'll read everything written and try to help when we can :)

Hi David, Not at present - but it is in the works and will be done after initial launch. There are a number of features that go hand-in-hand with adding Pantone colours; adding one but not the others would feel wrong, so we're planning to add them all as a single unit of work soon after launch. Thanks, Matt

Hi Mike, I think this is a good feature - but one that will not appear for a while, to be honest. I don't like the way this is done in Inkscape (it effectively rasterises at a fixed resolution, does a pixel-based flood fill then traces the bitmap outline to form a vector and inserts this into the document - so it is never perfect) and to do it properly would require a large unit of work which we don't have time for before release. Instead, you can usually make the result you're after from a bit of object copying and geometry operations against a large rectangle in the background :) Cheers, Matt

Paste inside is already available :) Just choose the 'Inside' button from the Insertion Target group on the top toolbar (i.e. click the right-most button at the top-right of the main window). Hopefully that does what you're looking for? At present, we have no options for the nudge distance - but these will come soon. I'm not sure what you mean about option-drag? At the moment, we are supporting the default behaviour of option-drag and popping up a context menu (i.e. acting like right-click). However, if you are over a handle in the Select Tool, for example, and you do the option-drag, you'll get different behaviour so that we can add extra functionality to this modifier :) Incidentally, if you are a user of FreeHand - do you have any old FreeHand files available that you could send to us? We're trying to write an importer at the moment and have very few .fh files to work from! They would obviously be treated confidentially, never shared anywhere and deleted as soon as we have written the importer. If you could send them to asomerfield@seriflabs.com that would be incredible, thanks! Thanks, Matt

This will definitely happen - and hopefully it will be very soon :)

I think we're considering something very similar - a general 'Transform' command that is able to apply given transformations a number of times, modifying the existing object or creating clones of it at each iteration :) Thanks, Matt

Hello! The only real problem with allowing a dark and light UI in the same program, is that your icons have to be able to work on both light and dark shades... So you either end up with icons that don't work very well on both shades, or two sets of icons. We are only supporting the darker shade at present (with adjustable UI gamma to brighten things up - available via Preferences->User Interface->UI Gamma) but certainly won't rule out looking at this in the future :)

Tracing will come in the future - but it will be a new 'Persona' (one of the main buttons along the top left of the window) so that it can have its own UI and tools. We have a fair few ideas for this - not just the obvious... :) It's not coming any time soon though, I'm afraid to say...

Hi bjohnb, If you go to the Preferences dialog, the User Interface section has a checkbox which is ticked by default "Lines in Points". Uncheck this to make the line weight appear in the document units (pixels in your scenario). 5px should appear converted to 3.75pt, doesn't it? :) Cheers, Matt

Hi Nichod, Thanks for getting back to me :) I agree with your statement that ideally any effects should be exported as SVG effects (I hasten to add this doesn't happen when exporting from Illustrator) but there's a very good reason why it's not happening at present - quite simply the SVG effects are implemented differently to our own and hence they just don't look the same, so we can either rasterise them or ignore them completely on export. We can also potentially offer a third option, which would be a 'best guess' at the parameters - so they're roughly right, but the problem is that if you have any other areas of your document that simply had to be rasterised on export and they intersected with the areas of effects that we were going to output as SVG effects with 'best guess' parameters, then you'd quite clearly see areas where the two didn't line up in your exported image... :( I definitely agree that the way your test had been sliced up was not ideal from an editing perspective... The problem is that you applied a gaussian - that makes an effect larger than the original object - i.e. it would not be possible to crop to the original object to produce some sort of useful vector outline for re-editing, nor should you be able to see any part of the original object because it would interfere with how the blended result would look. Off the top of my head (and it's early on a Saturday, so forgive me if I'm wrong) there's no way a vector could be included in this file that would be in any way helpful? The Gaussian effect definitely can't go out as anything other than rasterised completely, ignored completely (hence the vector shape would go out without its effect) or the 'best guess' version I described above that would have issues with anywhere it intersected other document elements that must be rasterised... Thanks, Matt