misc33

What you're saying makes perfect sense, but it's not working for me when the objects are grouped. Attempting to select with the move tool on the canvas simply selects the entire group, and all I can see is the outer most bounding box of that group. I'm dealing with hundreds if not thousands of layers, and I really need to be able to click on the object I can see (an individual country, in my case), to edit it. I'm not seeing any marquees when I click and drag. Nada. I have the edit all layers button pressed.

Sorry to ask such a basic question, but I've searched and searched and can't work it out on my own. Probably staring me in the face, but I really need help with this one. The promo blurb for Affinity Designer says it "intuitively edits objects within groups without ungrouping". I'm working on a very complex map vector with many many layers, and I can't for the life of me figure out how to select just one object in a group for editing, from the artboard. If I can find it in the layers panel (almost impossible most times) then I can select it, but I really need something like AI's group select tool. Also, I'd really like to delete portions of the vector map so I can work on individual countries. How do I do this on the canvas itself? I'm used to being able to use the direct selection tool, draw a marquee around the unwanted area, then just press delete. This isn't working for me in AD when I use the node tool. Please help, before I give up and go back to AI - not something I want to do!

I suspect that new muscle memory pathways will be forged, and you'll soon find it quick and easy to press esc without thinking or even looking while you do so. That's how it's working for me; I'm slowly but surely learning to press esc and can find it without looking now.

I really want to know this too. AI makes it easy - hopefully there is or will be a way to easily do this in AD.

I had this problem too, and could find no way to solve it UNTIL I realised that the photo has to be a raster layer before these tools will work. Bingo - problem solved.

I picked up some tips from watching you work, thank you for posting this video!

I'm in the same boat, sandfraulein. With Illustrator you can have text inside a frame, then specify the distance from the text to each edge as well as colour the stroke/fill if desired. Having to draw a border around every single box not only takes more time, it also does indeed introduce the strong possibility of inaccuracies occurring. I think that a good workaround might be to draw a rectangle (or other desired shape), then to to Layer --> Convert to text frame, and add type. Controlling distance from the edges of the frame can be done in the Paragraph palette. I just tried this out, and it falls apart unfortunately, because it won't let you add a stroke to the frame, only the text. At least doing it this way you'd still have a frame to snap to, which would solve the inaccuracy problem. This really needs to happen - might be worth a post in the feature request section.

Wow, I didn't know Illustrator could do that with the pencil tool! Thanks for the info, nickhughesart. I've been using Illustrator since the early 90s and am now stuck on CS5, so I really hope this feature works with my version. This will speed up my workflow dramatically while I wait for AD to catch up.

+1 on offset path function from me, too. I use it for making background patterns and really need it to be quick and easy to do over and over (like ripples around a subject shape).

I can see that the timeline has been pushed back....beta by the end of this year, with final release in 2017. It's going to be worth the wait, but in the mean time I am in the position of having to downgrade my iMac from El Capitan to Yosemite, because InDesign CS5 has stopped working. This is a major pain in the neck! Will Publisher be able to open InDesign files of varying versions? Will everything be editable, or will it be the same as opening Illustrator files into Designer?

That looks great! Did you do the small illustration in AD?

Live trace is the one thing that is keeping me in Illustrator. That and the line width tool, though live trace is more important. I illustrate educational materials for children, and live trace enables me to convert a small-ish simple line illustration into something that can be used on a poster, in seconds. No trace, no deal! I am very much looking forward to being able to jump ship over to Affinity.

(Hope it's ok to comment on an old post, I'm new here) The second link isn't working - "Join Curves always joins end to end". It would be wonderful to see details tutorials for using the pen tool to join separate lines and curves. This issue is the main thing keeping me in Illustrator at the moment. If I can't use the pen tool to click on one open node to activate it then click on another open node on a separate shape to join them, I'm spending way too much time and it's a deal breaker for me. BTW, what Alabaster is trying to do sounds to me more like something for a pathfinder function. Can AD do that? Combine two closed shapes that overlap into one closed shape that doesn't show the overlapping portions?