[Cleaning Up Scanned Image]

Welcome to the forums @Chris911

Does the etching process require vector curves for the mask that can be cut with a cutter of some sort, or will areas of pixels of different colours be usable?

The more information you can give us about the masking/etching process, the better the advice we can give. (I’m guessing that not many forum members perform masking/etching processes so it's often better to have more information than we need.)

Note: The forum software sometimes changes images that are uploaded. If you need to upload an image without it being changed by the forum then it’s best to ZIP the image before uploading.

[Cursor disappears after using stroke panel in Designer 2]

Thanks for the video; that really helps to make things clearer.

That’s a strange thing that I’ve not seen before.

At first blush that looks to be a possible graphics card problem, so you might want to make sure that your graphics card driver(s) are up-to-date.

If that doesn’t help, try switching Hardware Acceleration OFF in Setting/Performance.

If that doesn’t fix it, the developers might need to know your machine spec’s to be able to delve deeper.

Does the same problem occur when you do the same thing in the Stroke Panel (not the Context Toolbar)?

[What is appropriate to post in the Share your work forum please?]

William, have you ever considered that your more-generalised art/graphics/design thoughts, ideas, designs and questions may find a more appreciative audience elsewhere?

There are probably hundreds, maybe thousands, of forums out there in the web with a less-specific, non-Affinity-biased, remit which could be more suited to your creativity and inquisitiveness.

A quick web search for art and design forum gave me lots of possibilities covering a wide range of subjects which seem more likely to be a better match for you in these instances.

Forums like Creative Spark, for instance, have many different sub-forums, each with its own area of interest: https://creativespark.art/

That’s not to say that you can’t still be a member of these forums; they’ll still be here for you to post your Affinity projects and questions.

But there are other places ‘out there’ that may possibly be a better fit for what you have to say, and what you want to know, about things that aren’t particularly Affinity-based.

Getting your ideas in front of the right people, in the right place, might help you to get the answers and inspiration that you could be looking for.

Just a thought.

[Double-clicking textbox in Transform could allow adding text instead of overwriting]

When you type “-16” into either the X or Y fields (or many other fields), that sets the value to -16 rather than subtracting 16 from the existing value.

If you want to subtract 16 from the value you can type “-=16” instead (e.g. value = value - 16, rather than value = -16).

The same sort of thing happens for W and H but “-16” for W or H (and some other fields) doesn’t make sense (a negative width or height is impossible), so those inputs are ignored.

[Cursor disappears after using stroke panel in Designer 2]

Welcome to the forums @getty

Assuming that the “cursor” is the mouse pointer, and not something else…

Can you tell us how you are changing the size of the stroke – which pop-up/panel/etc. are you using and what, exactly, you are doing there? (You mentioned the stroke panel in the title but I would like to be more sure.)

Also, if the mouse pointer disappears, how does it reappear? (I’m assuming that you can still use the computer after this so the mouse pointer must therefore reappear at some point.)

Would you be able to record a video of this happening?

[[Suggestion] Measure Tool - Convert measurement outcome to object]

This has been already been requested in various other threads.

Try searching the forums for dimension .

[Alphabetically list order to eyes or navigate obvious exhausting sorted in any other is not your with it's this which logical]

Sorting UI items alphabetically can cause at least two major problems.

The first is that the software would have to take account of which language the user has selected when the UI elements are being displayed and rearrange the UI items by their ‘display name’ at run time, rather than just having them in an order set by the UI designer at compilation time. Not an insurmountable challenge, but a dynamically-modifiable UI is just one more thing that could go wrong.

The second is that different languages will often order the items differently, which would make software support and things like following video tutorials more difficult. It’s more difficult for support because support staff can’t simply say, for example, “Click the third menu item from the top” or “Select the second from last item in the list”, and it’s more difficult for watching tutorial videos as a difference in language would cause the UI of the tutor’s software to look different to the UI of the student’s software, and people could be making all kinds of mistakes without knowing it, causing further confusion/frustration.

An option for each user to be able to organise their UI alphabetically would also cause the same problems as above whenever they need to communicate with other users in different languages, and it would add more ‘complication’ to the UI at the same time.

(Yes, we can configure the various Toolbars as we wish but those tools have tooltips and icons which can make it easier to find things other than purely textual lists, so I don’t think that’s the same issue.)

Unfortunately however, sorting UI items by ‘most-used to least-used’ or ‘simple to complex’, or any other specific order, also has its difficulties as the question comes up of what you would do as new items are added because users get used to items being in a specific order, and place, and adding new ones somewhere into the middle would cause confusion/frustration/complaints with ‘broken workflows'.

Grouping items can often make things easier find but there’s then the question of whether the groups are alphabetically ordered or are they are ordered in some other way, which brings me back to my earlier concerns.

Basically there’s probably no ‘best’ solution to this, and there’s always going to be some problem or other.

The least-worst option of simply learning where things are is probably going to have to be what we need to accept.

[Affinity Designer 2]

It can also convert Image Layers, and many other types of layer, to (sometimes ‘empty’) curves which could cause you to lose lots of ‘content’ which was in those layers.

[How do I make a hard selection?]

You're welcome.

[Affinity Designer 2]

41 minutes ago, ianrobertdouglas said:

I found a solution.

Even if that is a solution for you in this particular case I would not recommend thinking of it as as generalised solution to what you want to do as "Convert To Curves" can have an unwanted destructive effect on some types of layer.

[How do I make a hard selection?]

If you are using the Selection Brush Tool, you can set “Soft Edges” OFF (on the Context Toolbar), use Refine (on the Context Toolbar), and then set Matte Edges OFF, then press Apply.

With other selection tools you can, more simply, use Refine (on the Context Toolbar), and then set Matte Edges OFF, then press Apply.

I think that will do what you want.

Using the “Black and White” preview of the Refine dialog will show you what you will get a bit better.

See attached video.

[Publisher v1 slower/heavier than usual]

Thanks for the extra information.

1.1GB seems a bit high to me, with no documents open, so it’s worth having a dig around and seeing what you can find.

Even if you have never used Assets it’s possible that you could have installed some as part of a ‘freebie’ and just never used them.
You can open the Assets Panel – via menu “View → Studio → Assets” on V1 – and see if there is anything installed.
If there is, you can Export them to somewhere safe and then remove them from the application which should, at the very least, make launch a bit quicker; you can always import them again if you need them.

As for removing fonts, that would need to be taken carefully as some fonts are used by various applications on your machine; removing a needed font could cause all kinds of problems.
It’s often difficult to tell at first glance, by their names, which fonts can be removed, and it’s easy to remove something that’s required, so you might like to search the forums (or elsewhere) for information about font management applications.

Another thing you could try, for general usage speeds, is (in Settings/Performance) switching Graphics Acceleration OFF/ON and/or trying different settings in that section, but that’s something which someone else would have to help with.

[Multi object resizing - must be an easier way?]

You're welcome.

[Designer 2 - can't select a layer]

Welcome to the forums @Phil Swallow

I’m no sure of some of the wording you’re using, such as “full background layer” and “open a new blank layer”.

Some words and phrases have very specific meanings when using the Affinity applications so it’s best that we know what you are working with.

Would it be possible for you to record and attach a full-screen video of what you are doing so we can see what’s happening?
If you cannot record a video, a full-screen screenshot where we can see your Layers Panel might be useful.

[Multi object resizing - must be an easier way?]

In addition to the advice above, when you have multiple copies of the same item, that’s possibly an ideal time to be using Symbols (if you have Designer).

See attached video for a basic demonstration.

[Masking Help Needed]

Welcome to the forums @thefritz

You seem to be cropping the text with the EPS document which doesn’t sound like what you want to do.

See my attached video for an example of what I think you want.

Note that when I drag the Artistic Text onto the name of the Image Layer, the text is clipped to the shape of the Image Layer, but when I drag the Artistic Text onto the thumbnail of the Image Layer, the image is masked by the shape of the Artistic Text.

How you managed to crop the layers like that, I have no idea, but it looks strange to me, maybe because you’re cropping to an EPS which isn’t normally a good thing to do. Someone else should be able to help more with that.

Note: Full-screen screenshots (taken via the OS or other application) are often more useful for diagnostic purposes than a photo taken by a phone (or similar device) as we get much more information about your document and application set-up.

[List aspect ratios of document options on new document selection screen]

Whereabouts on that dialog would you like to see the aspect ratio information? In the list on the left (for each item), in the preview panel at top-right, in the summary panel at bottom-right, or elsewhere?

And should the displayed aspect ratio be reversed, or not, when the document orientation changes between landscape and portrait?

For facing-page documents in Publisher, should the displayed aspect ratio be for a single page or the whole spread?

Should the displayed aspect ratio take bleed into account, or not?

How many decimal places should be displayed when the numbers are not integers? Or should the software try to always display the ratio numbers in integers if possible, e.g. 6:13 versus 0.461538:1)?

[Publisher v1 slower/heavier than usual]

If you launch Publisher without creating a document, leaving it for a few minutes to get itself sorted ‘behind the scenes’, how much memory does it take up?

The caches I was talking about are the in-memory caches of the applications themselves and these are cleared down when the application is closed.

There will be other ‘cached’ things, such as font metrics and such forth, but I don’t know if we can access these without getting into the ‘guts’ of the application folders, which could cause problems.

My next recommendation would be to have a look to see how many fonts are installed on your system. If you have thousands (or even just hundreds on some systems) then that will probably cause a slow-down upon application launch as the software has to go through them all, finding their information, and checking to make sure they can be used. The more font information the more memory the application will take to store it.

Next I would look at Assets. If you have lots of Assets then that can cause launch slow-down also. You can export Assets to a folder on disk from where they can be imported later is necessary, so you only need to have the Assets ‘on-tap’ that you need for the job in hand.

I’m not sure if either of these things will help for general usage speeds but it’s worth trying to see if your application is, in itself, ‘bloated’ with all kinds of stuff that you might not be using before looking for other possible problems. A 'quick fix' may be all that is necessary.

Also, check your RAM Usage Limit, and Undo Limit in Settings/Performance. Setting these very high or very low could impact how quickly the software will respond under certain circumstances. On my 16GB machine I have Ram Usage Limit set to 8GB with an Undo Limit of 1024 and that works nicely for me with various other applications open.

If your machine RAM is small, e.g. 8GB or less then, if you need to work on large documents often, I would recommend at least thinking about adding more RAM, if possible.

[Changing color of a shirt on a model/person]

The pixel selection tools have a Subtract Mode which allows you to remove pixels from the pixel selection.
Once you have selected the whole shirt you can then subtract the logo from that selection.

The rabbit’s mouth and whiskers might be a bit tricky to remove from the selection though, but the Flood Select Tool set to Contiguous, with a low Tolerance might help.

[live Denise works differently then filter]

This might have something to do with it:

 

[Is it possible to feather shapes or curves?]

Can you give more details about what you mean by ‘feathering’ a shape or curve”?

A curve is just a geometrical line which passes through a set of points, and a shape is just one or more curves, so I don’t understand how it could be “feathered”, in and of itself.

Also, I can’t tell if your example is what you want or what you have got.

If you could show us what you have (before you have tried your own ‘feathering’), and a visual example of what you want to achieve, then someone can probably help, but we may need more information.

[Why can't I add these expanded strokes to a single object?]

I’ll assume that by “add these expanded strokes into a single object” you mean “with all of the child layers of the Layer layer selected, use the Geometry Add functionality to obtain a single Curves layer”.

You seem to have lots of little ‘strange’ shapes in that design which could be causing a problem, see attached image.
Tidying it up a little might help.

Note: Trying the Shapebuilder Tool on those selected layers gives a “Shapebuilder failed” message.

[Pixel grid]

Your document UOM is millimetres rather than pixels so that might be the first problem.

Your curves have stroke widths that are not integer pixel widths so that’s probably the second problem.

Your curves have “Align: Centre”, so unless you have stroke widths divisible by 2 pixels, that’s probably another problem.

Edit: Also, none of the individual curves (that I have looked at) in the Curves layer are individually aligned to the pixel grid, so that’s probably not helping, but I don’t know what you want to achieve.

As for snapping, we can’t see what your snapping settings are so we can’t tell if you are using the correct settings for what you want to do.

[Zoom In and Zoom Out set to... F15 and F16?]

You might not have seen that I recently edited my earlier post to give extra information about F15/F16 being for tablet zooming on Windows.

[Zoom In and Zoom Out set to... F15 and F16?]

I see the same shortcuts (F15 for “Zoom In” and F16 for “Zoom Out”) in the Photo/Miscellaneous section of the Shortcuts but, in the “View → Zoom” menu I see “Zoom In” is Ctrl+= (equivalent to Ctrl++) and “Zoom Out” is Ctrl+-

However, in the Photo/View section of the Shortcuts there is a “Zoom → Zoom In”, set to Ctrl+= and a “Zoom → Zoom Out” set to Ctrl+-

I’m wondering what the difference is between the “View” Zoom In/Out and the “Miscellaneous” Zoom In/Out.

Edit: Ah, I’ve just found out that F15 & F16 were added for tablet zooming on Windows: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/138904-affinity-publisher-for-macos-192/

Maybe those options in Miscellaneous should be renamed to “Tablet Zoom In” and “Tablet Zoom Out” to make that clear.

So this looks like it’s not a bug, as such, but rather some confusingly-named options.