Kuttyjoe

I was complaining about that 10 years ago with Serif DrawPlus. I think it's not considered a bug and I wouldn't imagine that it will be changed after all these years.

That is true. It can not. But you say this with an attitude that suggests that there exists a thread where thousands of people have been angrily begging for this level of functionality and have been denied. If that is the case, I'd like to see it just to satisfy my curiosity. But what I really believe is that such a thread does not exist and that you are saying this because it pleases you to criticize Adobe, for whatever reasons you may have. It's cool. The facts came out and I'm personally satisfied with that. On a positive note, I just found out last night that Affinity Designer has a function identical to Illustrator's Transform Each. I was really impressed with that. I would even say that it is implemented better than Illustrator, at least for the first use. I'm not sure if it is subject to step and repeat like functionality like Illustrator. I should have tested it in AD before posting but I wasn't planning to post about it.

Trim is a geometry operation. If you have a number of overlapping vector shapes, you select them all and select Trim. The result is that each vector will remove any portion of another vector beneath it where they overlap. Visibly, it will look the same when done, but if you move a vector, there will be nothing underneath it, as it will have completely removed whatever was underneath it. The top most objects will remain unchanged. The closest operation currently in AD is Divide, but divide will cut all objects, including the topmost objects if they intersect the path of the objects underneath them. This particular operation seems to be kind of rare.

No. I said it can do 12" +2 and yield a correct result. It still can not do the trig examples you are giving.

Well. I suppose you should say that up front. CS6 is about 8 years ago. The measure tool absolutely does snap to point and line, and measures perfectly accurately when used properly. Maybe it's correct use is not obvious and maybe that's an area where Adobe could do better. I don't use it much, because I don't have much use for it. It does work though. Accurately. If one has the non-modal Transform Panel visible in both applications at all times then things would be equal if one needed to actually take the trip over to that panel. In the example being discussed above, Illustrator is allowing you to actually avoid the trip to that panel. You don't need to go to the panel, you don't need to click and drag a selection in the text box of the panel. You're avoiding several steps. And if you do the same more than once, then you become more and more efficient with each use. Kind of like step and repeat I'm not criticizing Affinity Designer. It is what it is and for $50.00, I'd only demand that it can do all of what it claims to do, and do them all well. But people trying to make the switch from Illustrator to Designer should not do it based on faulty information. And there seems to be a whole lot of people trying to make that switch.

No, it’s not. In Illustrator, at step number 2, you click, the dialog box pops up directly on the screen, the cursor is already in the text box and you just have to type the sizes. With Affinity Designer, you click/drag, then you move over to the transform box, click in the dialog box and drag to hi light the existing numbers, then type to replace them. The Illustrator way is considerably faster as it uses the mouse much less. And as you mentioned, Illustrator remembers the last setting so you just click then press enter because the same information is already there. All of Illustrator’s tools work that way, including envelopes, Transform Each (No equivalent for either of those in AD....yet?), offset paths, etc. They all remember the last setting used so the difference in speed is compounding the more you use it. It’s not a matter of being accustomed to Illustrator. Illustrator is just a whole lot faster in this specific area. Illustrator does that as well. You can do things like 12” +2 right in the transform box, etc. Useless? It does exactly what I expect it to do when I use it. Usually, that’s measuring things that are on angles. I don’t use it all that often but it does work. Adapting one’s muscle memory happens without trying, but it won’t necessarily mean that one will attain the same speed as in the other program. It shouldn’t stop people from reminding Serif what other software is like. Serif might see fit to add some of these ideas. Who knows.

You’re saying that if two programs are made by the same company, then they should work exactly the same way, or one of them is unintuitive. I can’t really understand that. But that’s what I was saying before about user experiences and expectations. My expectations and standards are much simpler. If a program can achieve a task easy, or fast, then you won’t ever hear me say anything much about it. As it is, Photoshop and Illustrator are both great at masking, fast and easy. If you’d not mentioned that they aren’t exactly the same, the idea would never have crossed my mind. If one did it very well and the other did not, then I would notice that quickly, but that’s not the case at all. So for me, that would be really nitpicking. I can’t figure out how what you pointed out is harming me. It’s not slowing me down. It’s not preventing me from doing the work. You say you’re getting pretty disappointed because, why? You say that you could work faster by using keyboard shortcuts, but you don’t. So, speed is not your goal. Working more slowly is not the problem. You’re not finding either software to be difficult to achieve a mask so that’s also not the problem. So what exactly is the thing that’s making you disappointed? Is it just the arbitrary notion of form, rather than focusing on function?

It's not that simple. User friendliness also depends on the individual user's experience, expectations, etc. And every program has some areas where it does well and others that need work.

It really is a shame about DrawPlus. It had a whole lot of problems that never got resolved before it was abandoned, but it had a couple things that id did really well and that's what I continue to use it for. It would be great if Affinity Designer would have inherited all of DrawPlus, and maintained the same workflow. The brush tools in Designer look exactly the same on the surface, but don't work the same at all. It's unfortunate. Well, than god for Microsoft for maintaining backwards compatibility through Windows 10.

It’s not that other software doesn’t also create all of those layers, or sub layers for every single item. They definitely do. The difference is in how they’re managed and presented. Illustrator for example is making all of those sub layers, one for every single line you draw, but it’s not automatically showing them in it’s default settings. You could optionally let Illustrator behave exactly like AD. Coreldraw on the other hand does behave exactly like AD and has the same problem of the layer stack becoming quickly unmanageable. At least, for me it’s unmanageable. I can’t speak for everybody else. I suppose it is working fine for lots of people because I never see people making this complaint.

When AD becomes as good as Illustrator, it will have a price tag similar to Illustrator.

No, SVG is not the main purpose of anything. Maybe that’s your main purpose. I’ve no idea what AD’s primary focus is. Or Illustrator’s for that matter. I imagine that they’re trying to cover a certain amount of ground. Illustrator is of course covering absolutely everything while AD is covering a small subset of what Illustrator can handle. Last time I tried Inkscape, it felt like something I’d highly recommend to an enemy. But for you, I suppose it has wonderful SVG support, if not much else.

Trying to connect two nodes is very buggy. Make two simple separate lines with the brush or pencil tool. Select the node tool then select one node from each line. Start with the two that are closest to each other. Click the "join curves" on the toolbar and MAYBE they will join to each other. It gets crazy. Let's say that it worked as expected. Now, select one of those nodes and move it closer to the other node on the other line. Now select the same two nodes again, and try to join them again. Here's is what is possible to happen now. The two selected nodes WILL NOT join. The to unselected nodes MIGHT join. Or, the Node you have selected, and the one that it's closest to, though not selected, MIGHT join. And as you move the node around, any and all of those possibilities may happen. It makes no difference what you have selected. Selection, is only a factor when the two nodes are close together. When the two selected nodes are farther a part, all of those other crazy possibilities come into play. Compare that, to how DrawPlus used to join curves. While still holding the brush tool, you could freely select two nodes, any two nodes from either end, and drag one onto the other and they snapped and joined and became one!

At this point, Serif is no longer selling DrawPlus which had this feature. As I've stated before, it didn't work very well, which is true, but it's not useless. It's actually possible to get decent results with an image that is not too resolution. If you can acquire an old copy of it, you can access this feature and several other highly requested features that may or may not ever make it to Affinity Designer. In the meantime, you can get a copy online for for about $15.00 right now. I just bought a couple additional licenses because DrawPlus remains a critical tool for me that I can not replace with Affinity Designer or anything else. Anyway, DrawPlus had vector tracing, a Live Paint Bucket tool, a blob brush, Shape Builder, a True vector eraser, a knife tool, and the brush tools have a much faster workflow than AD. It would be cool if some other company could take over this software and continue to develop it, but I expect it will suffer the same fate as Freehand.

No denying that. Well, on the bright side, if you're young enough you might actually see some of these critical features before you retire. Maybe.

I strongly agree with this. Is a long time user, I have a set of primary panels open all the time. And right next to it I have a set of secondary panels as thumbs. I would not want to commit a lot of screen space to those panels, but I still want quick access to them and Adobe solved it very well with that system. Especially since there are key commands that can open those panels, and optionally, they can auto-close when you click away. In some cases, a key command will not only open the panel, it will also simultaneously place the cursor in a dialog, high light it's content, and allow you to immediately type new data. For example, the text dialogs work that way so you can change a font, text, and most characteristics by tabbing through the boxes and changing their content, without ever touching the mouse. It's makes for a supremely fast workflow.

It's not high end though, it's bargain priced. You can buy tools for $100.00 per tool, or you can buy a whole tool kit full of tools for $19.99, and discounted with a coupon. LOL Which toolbox are we talking about here, honestly? Not that I disagree about the need for the feature. I just think you are being unrealistic. For the price, I could imagine that this product is feature complete. I think that the reason these features aren't being added is because people are buying the product like crazy, without the features.

I've pointed this out before but even Coreldraw doesn't have this feature natively. There are macros that allow very similar functionality, but all that Coreldraw has is a very, very long-winded Find and Replace feature that makes you answer 30 questions if you want to use it, and it fails if you have any art grouped. LOL So, in order to use it you have to agree to ungroup all of your art. Coreldraw costs $500.00. So there's no rule on such features. Illustrator has it. I just learned today that Inkscape also has it. That surprised me but I suppose it's because they've heard the wailing of the children and it broke their hearts.

Flexible enough to let the user work as desired? Sounds great. In Coreldraw, You can create a document which is 300px x 300px, which is also exactly 1inch if I change the measurements to inches. If I press print, I get a 1 inch image. I can also make it any other physical size directly in Coreldraw while still being 300px. In Illustrator, this same 300px document is about 4 inches. Nothing you can do can make it 1inch or any other size except changing changing the pixel size. If you press print, you get a 4 inch document. If you export it to a jpeg, you get a 4 inch document. If you open it in Photoshop, it's 4 inches. Your problem is the same as most. You're happily making assumptions about things that you don't know. Here you continue making dumb assumptions about the final output. The final output may be multiple destinations. Coreldraw seems to be accommodating this. Adobe Illustrator seems to not be accommodating this. Of course, I can resolve this issue, once I get into Photoshop, but not within Illustrator and that's the point. Please respond after you've tried it for yourself. The guessing and assuming is not useful.

Speaking of nonsense. Your whole comment makes the assumption that anyone working with pixels will only present the image on a screen. Coreldraw and Illustrator are handling this in different ways. According to you, Corel has no idea what they're doing, after 30 years of doing it. But I'm sure you know better.

Resolution is always only applied to images/effects, not vectors as they are resolution independent. Here is the big difference between the two programs. Changing the rendering resolution in Coreldraw changes the physical document size so it's not only used for export. Changing the raster effects resolution in Illustrator does not change the physical page size. Functionally, Coreldraw seems to be more logical. For example, if you create a new document in both programs that is 300px X 300px, at 300ppi, Coreldraw will present you a document which is 1" X 1", if you view it in inches. This is logical. Illustrator will present you a document which is 4.17" X 4.17", which is incorrect. You can go back and change the rendering resolution in both programs, but in Illustrator it has no effect on the document size. Furthermore, when you export this document from Illustrator, at any resolution, you're still getting an image that is 4.17" x 4.17". If you render it at 72ppi, you can open this file in Photoshop, go to Image Size, uncheck resample, then change the resolution to 300 and finally you will have your 1" x 1" document, which is the correct size. This is the reason I say that they are doing things differently. Coreldraw's rendering effects deals with both raster effects like drop shadows AND physical document size. Illustrator only deals with the effects.

The reference to features is of course in Moontan's comment. He mentions features several times. I quoted that, and and responded to it. Logically, I'm also talking about features. Moontan didn't mention code. I didn't mention code.

Coreldraw has a document dpi, and Illustrator does not. This makes for a very real difference in how these programs handle pixels and ppi. Both will eventually have the right result but it can be confusing.

OK. It's cool.

Whatever. But this problem is hard to miss when you start working with something more complex than a circle.