jackamus

I made a suggestion a long time ago that when selecting the ;Cycle selection box' we have the choice of making it permanent but according to the developers it was possible. Mt problem is that, for convenience of drawing, I drag a copy of a 'horizontal' rectangle to change into a 'vertical' rectangle but the height and width still follow the original horizontal rectangle. It gets worse when it is almost a square that you edit.

It would be much easier if the 'Cycle selection box' could be permanently selected!

I cannot disagree with you jackamus.

Thanks. I'll give this a try but I still think that disappearing handles when moving a guide is not user friendly.

A very good point and one that I missed at the time.
I then raised the issue again on 19 Sept 2019 and had a lengthy discussion with the developers. I was convinced that this feature did exist in the earlier versions of AD but was assured by the developer that it had never been a part of AD.
I believe that what happened is previously to AD I used a PC and DrawPlus which did have this feature. I found it to be a very useful feature for getting guide lines to snap to bounding box handles i.e. acting as centre lines to objects. One of the reasons offered was that it reduced 'screen clutter' I failed to see how that could be called screen clutter since nothing extra was being added - the handles were there and guide lines could be added. How much coding does it take to not have the handles disappear when moving a guide? To my way of thinking it is the removal of coding rather than adding it.
The only way I can get a guide line to snap to a bounding box handle is to guess its position and then check visually since it could be snapping to another out-of-sight object.. This especially applies to rectangles and circles/ellipses..
 
 
 

But it doesn't work with the handles on bounding boxes.

It would seem that starting this 'Guides' thread that I may have opened a can of worms for the developers!
There have been many suggestions about improving the versatility/usability of the current guide feature. I have basically copied and pasted all the suggestions into this one combined suggestion.
From jackamus
It would be useful to be able to set some locked guides (a different colour perhaps) whilst being able to use movable guides as well. Attached is a  file for having 4 different types of guide lines Guid lines.afdesign
The colour of the guides would be a default colour as well as a a user choice.
One of the suggestions I made some time ago was to be able to see an objects handles/nodes when moving a guide. I'm still waiting for that one.

From Aammppaa
The colour coding might be nice. 
A Guide layer.
Allow the user to export / print with guides visible.

Form CLCI
I also got a suggestion for guides. When you use Guide Manager and click the guide's coordinates, be it horizontal or vertical one, the guide itself should get highligted (maybe change color) so you know what guide you're working with.
Also, multiple guide selection in Guides Manager pane would be huge improvement.

From Nicky G
I also find the use of this panel for guides to be nice, but uncomfortable.
1. As you say you should highlight the guide in focus with different color
2. selection and movement of several guides (as if they were grouped)
3. Creating Guides rotated at user-defined angles
4. creation of vector shapes (any form) in guide, as happens in Ai.
5. possibility to open the guide panel by double clicking on the guide itself. (it would avoid the GUIDE DISPLAY / MANAGEMENT step)
6. Possibility of selecting and direct highlighting of the guide on the drawing table and moving the guide ALSO through the XY axes inside the panel visible on the screen Transform.
It would speed up the numerical displacement of a guide (as happens in Ai). I
In my opinion it would also be useful, by pressing at the same time as dragging the guides, for example CTRL, to activate a SNAP of the guide on the numerical notches of the ruler,
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7- 8 mm.
And depending on the Zoom, it is possible to hook the guides to intermediate sizes 0.5mm - 1mm - 1.5mm - 2mm - 2.5mm ....
Higher zoom even with 1/10 mm notches etc ...
1.1mm - 1.2 - 1.3 ....
Dragging without the CTRL key the operation remains the same as now.
From catlover My only remaining beefs about the guides are these two:
1. they should extend all the way to the rulers
2. the user should be able to choose the color
Other than that, the devs did a cracking job with the guides.      
 
 

Before I offer this as a suggestion for the 'wish list' I thought would ask if it is feasible.
 
Many of the people now using AD migrated from Illustrator I, on the other hand, migrated from Serif's DrawPlus. DP had a load of really good features that AD haven't yet adopted and one of them was being able to use a bitmap fill. These were all manner of textures like rock, wood, gravel, pebbles etc and I used many of these in geological drawings.
 
Is it possible to create bitmap thumbnails of various textures that could be expanded, as opposed to enlarged, to maintain a high resolution and apply to objects as a fill? I imagine the texture to be very large in size but cropped down to thumbnail size to fit a menu.
 
If someone wanted to draw a gear made of say beech wood, then they select the Beech fill and apply to the object and then expand or reduce the texture to the degree of resolution they so desire.
 
If this is not practical for AD developers then perhaps, working in conjunction with a third party company, textured plugins could be created for downloading. I know that there is no immediate plans for AD to use plugins but when there is would this be a feasible feature?
 

I've got it now!  and I've no idea why I didn't get it before! The first instruction given was to open 'Colour' in 'Studio" which I did but no colour wheel. This time I did get the colour wheel.
It must be my age again!
Thanks guys.
 

I've got it now!  and I've no idea why I didn't get it before! The first instruction given was to open 'Colour' in 'Studio" which I did but no colour wheel. This time I did get the colour wheel.
It must be my age again!
Thanks guys.
 

Ah yes! I know what you mean now!  Once upon a time if you walked into a bank with a mask on the staff would push the alarm button. However today I guess that they would politely ask you first what it was you wanted - to make a deposit or a huge withdrawal?

LOL Brick?
This thread is likely to get closed by the moderators like the last one did!

I agree.
This is the file I started in DP and then saved as a pdf and opened it in AD. You can see the nightmare it would be so I abandoned it. 
SS_Jaguar_2.afdesign

In that past I raised the issue of why AD did not have as many features as the old PP8? I was told that transferring PP features to AD is not easy because of the the two different OS - Window s and Mac. However now that there is a Windows version of AD does this have the same features as the old PP8?

Adobe still provided a very competent and mature alternative - not just an almost featureless newborn program that still struggles with vector operations and vector output after five long years. That is the main point.
Adobe killed a competitor leaving the old customers few competent alternatives. Serif killed their own child but left old customers with MANY alternatives. Unfortunately these alternatives are developed by competitors.
Some companies do it right and more elegant. When Corel acquired Gravit Designer they kept it alive as a separate product. I even got a discount as an old timer. I am not naive - things may change - but I am not worried either.

Wunderwaffe talk.
Its dead. Serif abandoned the Plus range. You cannot purchase it anymore and no updates will be provided except the ones you described. It is a retired product and it is a fact. If Affinity can’t deliver you cannot purchase Plus. Further any file saved in the old Plus formats cannot be migrated to Affinity. It is simply history smd not an option.
And now “generations of designers” can wait for features to re-emerge in the pre-school Affinity range and for features like expand stroke or divide to reach an acceptable level. It is like waiting for “the year of desktop Linux” !!
Generations of non-hobbyists do not have a choice here. Have fun waiting forever for a fork and knife in front of a dish with food. 

Nothing, period.

That's an interesting comment. How do the developers work out will produce the best revenue?
Why not up the price of AD so that there will be enough revenue to create the best features? I would happily pay more for a serious upgrade. I could go for a competitors program but I'm not willing to retrain myself, at my age, to some thing new.
 

It sounds all very vague and 'company man' type jargon.
When you say, "what worked and what did not work previously." If it wasn't there to start with then it is meaningless.

So basically what seems to have been said is that the Beta version is only cosmetically different from AD 1.8.3. and only useful for testing fixes.
So the bottom line is that the old DrawPlus8 is still a better graphics program than AD even with its frequent crashes. I wonder how many AD users have even heard of Serif's DrawPlus and don't realise what they are missing?

I did once and that is why I bought a Mac!

People seem to be reacting to wrong link! Click on the photo in my second message.

I've been using AD since it was first published and been a regular participant in this forum.
I have used AD to create the calendar shown below for a crowd funding project. The calendar feature 12 my paintings.
here is a link.

I've been using AD since it was first published and been a regular participant in this forum.
I have used AD to create the calendar shown below for a crowd funding project. The calendar feature 12 my paintings.
here is a link.

Duplicating would appear to be the best choice for me.
I have done this before but by accident! I started out with a load of pdf pages and wanted to add more using AD. I was able to make the existing pdf pages into artboards and then as I progressed with more pages I 'copied' a previous page and deleted its content and added new content also I added a page number.
When I finished my work space contained 40 artboards corresponding to the layers. If I needed to edit one page I just zoomed in to it and edit it. This may not have been the most efficient way to have done this but I did get a good result.
However with the above advice I could do it again only more efficiently.