mintcar

I do not follow JET_Affinity's counter argument. I am indeed old but I never used Illustrator's boolean operations before merge was available. But the concept of dividing and simplifying paths based on color is not something that originated with Illustrator. It was an integral part of how Flash worked, and I think it's a very intuitive way of thinking about paths. I think some way of simplifying artwork by separating colors into shapes would be really great for Affinity Designer, because it's so easy to work with compared to boolean operations. It's both faster and more intuitive. And it is aligned with how print production works. And it's an easy way of reducing the amount of anchor points in an illustration to reduce file size. What's not to like?

First I would like to say that Affinity Designer is awesome and improving all the time, and I now use it almost as much as Illustrator. As far as I can tell there is no real pathfinder in Affinity, though. It's a very essential function in my opinion, and I hope you can find time to implement it eventually. This post explains what I mean: In addition, Illustrator has a pathfinder tool that lets you click on intersecting paths and merge them in any combination you like. I'm sure you can understand how powerful and intuitive this becomes when you want to prepare a graphic or logo for production. You can simply select your mess of overlapping shapes and paths and flatten them into something presentable with a single click. Or you can do something like this.

Is there any way of doing this in Affinity Designer? It's a must-have feature for me.

What happens in this video happens to me too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6VFBiDyHKk I'll try the process mac_heibu outlined above to see if it works, but I just can't understand why the process in the video doesn't produce a pure black fill in the pdf! I think we need a separations preview function in Affinity Designer. Until we have that, serious print production will not be practical.

In my work I use smart objects a lot when doing pack shots for packaging design. In Photoshop you can apply effects and distortion to a decor that has been added as a smart object to make it look like it's part of the pack shot: then you can replace the smart object with a different decor and keep all the effects. Is it possible to do something similar with Affinity Photo?

I second the sentiments in this thread! There surely is a big demand for this. Illustrator has unbelievably poor tools and is still the best choice for creating professional quality graphs for print. Every corporation and government body needs to put out yearly annual reports and I'm willing to bet a lot of the bigger ones hire agencies that use Illustrator to make the graphs, even though the tools in Illustrator are ridiculously dated. It really doesn't matter if it's made a part of Designer or Publisher: either way it'd be a big leg up on Adobe.