GarryP

The attached video shows how to make a jigsaw using the Vector Flood Fill Tool (only available in Designer). Note: You can create the shapes in a different way to get different jigsaw pieces, I just used the pencil for quickness. Note: I’ve used the “Max Fit” option to make the image fit to the edges of the puzzle. Note: Once I have selected the image I drag the mouse pointer over all of the shapes, rather than just clicking, which would work but it takes more time. 2023-07-29 09-59-36.mp4

Fill them in with what? Solid colours, gradients, patterns, images, text? Have you looked at the Vector Flood Fill Tool ? See attached video for some examples. Was your attached document created with a beta version of software? I only ask as I can’t open it with 2.1.1 because it apparently contains features from a later version. 2023-07-29 09-25-48.mp4

Welcome to the forums @JohnDeGier I can’t remember hearing about this before so it could be a problem with either your machine/set-up or, possibly more likely, with one of the documents the application is trying to access. What happens if you try loading a recent document by using the Task Bar jump list? (With the application open, right-click on its icon on the Task Bar and choose a document.) What happens after you clear the Recent Documents list by choosing menu “File → Open Recent → Clear” ? If you then open a document, close it, and then try to do what you have been trying, do you get the same problem?

Yeah, shortly after I asked the question I thought “That was a bloomin’ stupid question!” but I was away from my machine so couldn’t strike it from the posting.

It seems like the OP has edited the post since I read it because that was vague too.

Interesting; thanks, I didn’t know that. Do the shortcuts work even though they aren’t displayed?

You should be able to change the gradient back to a ‘normal’ gradient by double-clicking one of the ‘nodes’ (called a “correction end stop”) which has two dotted lines coming from it – see attached video. 2023-07-28 09-27-36.mp4

A lot, but not all, of the Context Menu items have non-context-menu equivalents and, as such, are already available via keyboard shortcuts on Windows – see attached image (I haven’t set shortcuts for most things). I’m curious as to why they aren’t showing in your Mac image.

The title is a bit vague about which software you have – are they both in iPad, or is one on iPad and the other on desktop? – but you can open V1 documents in the V2 software – on any platform – but, as soon as you save a document in V2, you cannot then open that V2 document in the V1 software – on any platform.

Adding a realistic-looking ripple to most things, especially on water, would necessitate being able to manipulate the lighting of the scene along with the material since you would, I assume, want the light to realistically reflect off different parts of the material after the ripple is added. Look at a picture of a fairly flat water surface and then compare it with a rippled water surface to see the difference. For instance, have a look at this image: https://pixabay.com/photos/drop-splash-impact-ripples-water-1759703/ Notice how the light is no longer reflected in a (vaguely) horizontal line across the scene as it would be without the ripple. Also, if anything other than a flat colour (or simple gradient) was reflected in the water (or other reflective material), that reflection would also need to be manipulated, further adding to the difficulty. Since the Affinity applications have no sense of a third dimension or have any idea about the lighting or the ‘2D-transform-equivalents’ of the relative 3D positions of the things in a photo, what you are asking for would probably be very difficult to achieve.

That sounds like another good reason for having the icon, even if the user can’t do much about it if they don’t have Designer or Publisher. (Or if they can it’s probably not an ‘easy fix’, I'd have to think about it.) Yeah, it looks like the transparency has somehow become ‘semi-detached’ from the layer but still sort of there. (I think I vaguely remember having this kind problem myself a while back but I could just delete the layer and start again so it wasn’t too much of a problem in that case – I will have assumed that I did something wrong.)

Sounds good to me (but with icons to ‘match’ the FX and Lock icons). I’m pretty sure that this has been requested before. It might also be nice if this sort of thing was ‘rolled up’ with another request – which has also been made before, somewhere in the forums – to also show an icon if the layer’s Blend Options are non-default – another good tool for problem diagnosis. (Having said that though, that gives six possible icons, which may be too many to have in a row, so maybe they could be stacked in a little 3×2 grid. I’m sure there will be a good way to do it.)

Nice catch - that accounts for both of the problems that I was seeing. I agree that it might be nice if use of the Transparency Tool or Gradient Tool on a layer was shown somewhere in the UI. It would certainly have helped on this occasion.

I would say so, unless I’m missing some very important information. Try rotating the shape. If you use the Layer menu Rotation functionality the same ‘fill disappearing’ problem sometimes happens but rotating with the rotation handle has some interesting results. Also, try changing the stroke width. See attached video for an example of both. 2023-07-27 08-32-41.mp4

Just out of interest, does each square need to be filled with a particular manually-selected colour, or is there some kind of sequence, or would it just be ‘random’, or something else?

Thanks for sharing the SVG. Looking at the SVG code, the design is a single path. As such, there’s no way for the software to ‘know’, once the various curves have been separated, which curves are ‘with’ other curves, it’s just a bunch of curves ‘concatenated’ into one path. Other software may have some kind of neat functionality to automatically ‘guess’ which curves are related to other curves – maybe by calculating which curves are (fully?) enclosed by other curves – but the Affinity applications don’t currently have that. As has been shown above, in this case it only takes a couple of Geometry/Boolean function applications to ‘fix’ it, however this will, of course, become more of a chore when the number and complexity of curves increases. On the other hand, the Shape Builder Tool (in Designer only) seems to do a good job with this and it’s only a few extra clicks (but it still leaves a single Curves layer). This sounds like a good candidate for a feature request to me – some kind of “Separate into geometry” functionality.

Thanks for the document. I opened it but was told that some linked resources were missing, even though the Package Document dialog said that nothing was missing, so I can’t really test it properly. However, I did notice that the big image on the page-4/5 spread had Text Wrap set to Tight which was causing the text to not be displayed – don’t know if that’s part of the problem. I created my own document with a linked image, saved it and re-opened it, and the Tight Text Wrap seemed okay in that. Maybe someone else can figure out what’s wrong.

Welcome to the forums @Nivio It sounds like you have received a document that was saved in a newer version of Publisher. You can only open a document which was saved in an application which has an equal or lower version number than the application you are using. For example, with version 1.10.6 you cannot open any document that was created in any version 2 application. Can you check the version number of the application which the document was saved in? Note: There is no way for someone to save the document in a way that will make it compatible with a previous version of the application.

I think the point that Pšenda was trying to make is that functionality similar to what you have described has been requested many times before and that another new thread requesting the same thing was not really necessary. Being able to copy the measurement to the clipboard and then pasting it into the design would be less convenient than a ‘real’ dimensioning tool, the likes of which has already been requested. Placing new measurements in a group would be something the user could do with the existing functionalities, such as “Insert inside the selection”.

I think my point - for anyone reading this - is that (as far as I can tell) they are not trying to make the design containing the circles; the design with the circles is just a simplistic example of their actual starting position. Having said that, I agree that it’s probably not a great example since it doesn’t sound like its representative of the real problem they are facing, which we can only see with a real example of an SVG.

I think, by way of a simple example, the OP was giving us a way to see what the problem was without the extra complications of the real SVG. In other words, the circles example is not what they have to deal with, it’s just to show us the sort of problem they have.

Welcome to the forums @NightCabbage In your basic example, when you Subtract the large- and medium-sized circles you create a Curves layer containing two curves. Neither of these curves ‘understands’ a relationship with the other one; they are simply disconnected curves which happen to be part of the same Curves layer. Similarly, when you Add that Curves layer to the small circle you are creating a Curves layer which contains three curves, the two from the original Curves layer and another from the small circle. None of the curves in the new Curves layer have any relation to each other, they are all just separate curves. Thus, when you separate the curves you will get three separate Curve layers. If you want to create the shape you describe, but create it differently, then there are options such as Compounds or the Donut Tool, but, since you are working with curves which come from an SVG file then your options may be limited. If you can (legally) supply us with an example SVG and give us precise instructions as to what you want to isolate from that file then we can experiment with it to see what’s what. Otherwise we can only guess since each situation will be different.

Welcome to the forums @Bert Jakob I just created a test document where I: placed a Frame Text layer onto the first blank page; added Filler Text to the Frame Text; placed an image onto the page near the middle of the Frame Text; set the Text Wrap of the image to Tight (looks right); saved the document; opened the document. ...and everything looks okay. Can you share a document which exhibits the behaviour you describe? If you can’t share the document can you show us a video where we can see it happening?

As I see it, there are two separate issues: 1. features that Serif can handle/implement but have not yet done so; 2. features that Serif cannot handle/implement because of certain legal/ownership issues. For 1, they will probably get round to implementing these at some point as the software grows naturally. We just have to wait and see. For 2, they will probably never get round to implementing these unless Adobe lets them, which is doubtful. In this case there’s nothing to ‘fix’; it just can’t currently be done. A member of staff may give you a dropbox link which you can upload to, and they can then tell you which of these options (or a mixture of both, or something else) pertains to that particular file.

Can you: 1. tell us which brushes you were trying to import (e.g. filename and the name of the brush set); 2. tell us where you got them from (website, link, etc.); 3. show us what the error message is in a screenshot?