Kuttyjoe

We were talking about features. Read what moontan said, which is what I replied to.

AD is not relatively new. Most of AD is taken from Serif's now discontinued DrawPlus which was around for many years prior to AD. This particular feature was actually in DrawPlus. It was awful though. That's probably why it, and some other features that people continue to ask for didn't make it into Affinity Designer.

I've been demonstrating this problem for Corel for probably a decade already. I have a decades worth of examples of this feature not working in Coreldraw, including CoreDraw 2019. Corel isn't fixing it. I'm not excusing Serif. I'm offering some perspective. That perspective is basically, don't hold your breath waiting for this to get resolved. I think a lot of people coming from Adobe took for granted that things just work properly, and that software is reliable and high quality. When trying to switch to another product, we learn that this is not necessarily the case.

Even Coreldraw has this exact problem, but in Coreldraw it's much worse and has been that way forever.

Corel's Mac version is the kind of junk where you end up uninstalling it after just a few minutes messing with the demo. It's that bad. It's better to continue using the Windows version via Parallels or boot camp. As for the subscription model, every step Corel takes is in the direction of going 100% subscription as soon as they are confident that they can pull it off. But this should be the truth of any company that has making money as a goal. I can't fault them for that. I do fault them for selling really poor quality software.

I don't think so. I would have to guess that the reason that these things didn't make it into Affinity Designer was because the quality of those features was so poor that they didn't want to use them until they were made better. I can tell you for sure that the true vector brushes in DrawPlus were quite buggy. All of the brushes had some particular problems. Drawing slowly would create a line with a zillion jaggy anchor points. Movements such as "sketching" quickly, is almost certain to cause a serious glitch with a brush stroke which will freeze the whole program. And the true vector brush in particular had an additional problem where if you created a simple line, then zoomed in or out to some random level, the stroke would visually appear as if it's filled with a color. For example, if you drew a half circle, just the brush stroke, no fill, then zoom in/out, suddenly, you'd be seeing a fill in that shape. So these were very terrible quality tools. Additionally, DrawPlus had a very terrible vector tracing feature. None of the controls yielded any kind of predictable or repeatable result where as in something like Illustrator, you can pretty much get a good result with no tweaking at all sometimes. And lastly, the envelope warp tool was also just not good enough. For example, you can't constrain the movement of points directly vertical or horizontal therefore you can't really make a perfectly symmetrical envelope. I was really inadequate. I'm very familiar with these things because I actually still use DrawPlus all the time because even though those things are woefully broken or inadequate, there are still some redeeming quality about that program. The brush system is still better than that in Affinity Designer.

The funny thing is, I was begging Adobe to implement the level of image based brushes that were in Serif DrawPlus. Adobe implemented a very basic level of image brushes a few years back that is practically unusable and they've never revisited it. I keep DrawPlus around just for the image brushes. Both image and true vector brushes have advantages, but one big disadvantage of the true vector brush is that they can be so complicated that they are too slow to use. If I convert one of those to an image based brush for use in DrawPlus, it is able to work smoothly. Affinity Designer of course also has a lot of catching up to do to match the brushes in DrawPlus but that's not even on a roadmap so I don't expect that to happen. For now, the best image brush game in town is sadly in two discontinued programs! DrawPlus and Microsoft's Expression Design.

For me, they both take the same amount of time. If you're using keyboard shortcuts all the time, then your free hand is always at the ready. Pressing the X on the keyboard to switch fill/Stroke takes no time, unless you're having to look down at the keyboard over and over to find the X key and press it. That's not the case for me. My free hand is always in position so I can do it instantly. This one is not an issue for me. Either way is good.

Yep, even for $500.00, you don't necessarily get what might seems like such a necessary feature. People have been wishing Corel would add it, and making macros for decades. Corel still hasn't implemented. Meanwhile they're doing all sorts of other things, including creating the entirely new Mac version of Coreldraw. That feature is never going to come to Coreldraw. There's no reason to think that it will after all this time. The same is true with Affinity Designer. People begged for it in the days of DrawPlus, then continued begging for it in Affinity Designer. Anything is possible, but there's no reason to think that it's ever going to happen. Or maybe, you'll be retired before it happens. I've used that feature for decades and I've never felt that it was meager. People are begging Serif for it for 10 years. People were begging Corel for it for much longer. I don't know or care how long it takes to create the feature. I just know how useful it is, and that it's not meager in Illustrator. We may all hate the subscription model but we all must still be thankful that Adobe exists since they're the only company offering the features that everybody else is begging for! So what happens if Adobe goes away? Many people will go from getting their work done with expensive tools, to not being able to get it done at all because there are no other tools that can do the work.

I agree with you on this. Muscle memory depends on consistency and muscle memory is what allows us to work smoothly and quickly. Inconsistency causes a lot of wrong first attempts, then corrections which is distracting, aggravating, and probably a little bit wasteful of time.

Coreldraw also doesn't have it. It has a Find and replace that is extremely complex and time consuming to use. There are a couple 3rd party macros that attempt to plug this gaping hole but they're never as elegant as a built-in solution.

I can't really say, but people have been pleading for Select Similar/Select Same in Coreldraw for much, much longer than in in Serif software and Corel still hasn't implemented it. In the meantime, there are a couple of 3rd party macros that do it in Coreldraw. They're of course not as good as a built in solution, but they work. If it can be done by a 3rd party, then it certainly would seem that Corel could manage the same, even better. They're just choosing not to do it. Auto trace is currently in Serif's old discontinued software although, it was very poor quality. Sometimes though, you could get a good result with it. Mostly it works well for me when I created an image in DrawPlus such as using the brush tools, then rasterize it and vectorize it. Imported images tended to turn out terribly. But in this case, Serif is not having to use anyone else's solution. They could just improve their own existing solution. It's their choice though to do it or not. The smoothing tools are already there and they are honestly very well implemented. I still use DrawPlus because those old tools are more useful to me than the new stuff they added to Affinity Designer. DrawPlus also has a true vector eraser, which people have been asking for in AD.

I haven't seen a vector program that does that but there's an Illustrator plugin that creates actual halftone dots. It creates real dots rather than a halftone effect filter. But creating and managing actual vector halftone dots creates a ton of points and makes a document very difficult to manipulate. That's why Freehand and Coreldraw didn't display dots but a PS pattern instead.

I disagree. The current implementation of some features in Illustrator is a perfectly good goal to set sights on. I suppose you just hate Adobe, or hate subscription or whatever you hate, but this comment makes no sense. Designer is skeletal. Serif's marketing is largely based on getting away from the subscription model (read Adobe) so that's logically what should be reflected in the software. But it's not.

Same here. For garment printing production work, offset paths is indispensible and also unique among the various popular vector programs. Coreldraw has something that is kind of like it call contour. It's much more involved and doesn't work well for the 1 second offset operation that I do constantly.

This comment is interesting. Creators vs artworkers, or production artists. I agree with everything you've said here because I'm a production artist. Affinity software is not geared for that kind of work. It's exactly as you described it. It's good for built a design yourself, but it lacks the tools needed for edting any random art that you might receive from someone else. Even Coreldraw falls short of that kind of work. Only Adobe truly gets it done. Regarding the smoothing tools though, it's ironic that Serif's older product DrawPlus actually had not 1 but 2 smoothing tools, both brilliant and uniquely implemented. It's so sad that those tools are now lost forever along with quite a few other good things that were in DrawPlus.

Realistically, if you're a novice then trying to get software not made for complex color seps to achieve something usable, is like learning a subject in a class that is being taught in a foreign language. If you knew how to do color seps, then you could mess around with software like this and see what's possible. If you don't know how to do color seps, your best option is to give the print to a shop that has it's own art dept, or you could try one of the various automated systems that "attempt" to produce a good set of seps, but with those, you pretty much always need to have some skills to edit the initial results that they generate. Having said that, Serif's older programs like DrawPlus and PhotoPlus are somewhat better equipped for this kind of work since they were created in a time when print was king and it was the beginning of the whole desktop publishing explosion. The Affinity products have different goals, and different features. I've spent time experimenting with all of these programs to see what they have to offer. I can get any of them to do basic seps. Complex halftone separations is a different story. Even if I could do it, the amount of time necessary makes it impractical. If you want to learn color separations, use software that is made for this task. The oldest possible copy of Photoshop or Illustrator are fully loaded for this work. I'm talking, vintage 1990's software. The next best thing is CorelDraw and Corel Photo-Paint. Not as good for this work as Adobe, but still having real tools specifically for color separations. Serif's Affinity programs will likely never stray into that territory. Not unless do it yourself t-shirt printing suddenly becomes very popular in the world. I may spend some time playing around with that rat print and see what I can get.

Thanks for the reply. I’ve used DrawPlus for a long time but I find myself trying to use Affinity Designer on the iPad Pro in some different ways. I’ve never tried to sheer vertically in DrawPlus, I guess. I’ll have to give that a try.

Horizontal Sheer works nicely, but Vertical sheer is missing? At least I haven’t been able to find it. I think, either make the control to toggle sheer direction, (little H box and V box...just a suggestion), or maybe place a finger on the artboard, and the action for horizontal sheer becomes vertical sheer. That would be in keeping with the current methodologies in Designer.

That is probably among the first things I noticed about Affinity Photo when I first tried to use it. The tool I need, is not available in the particular persona so I needed to change personas to get that tool. And if I remember, I had to dig into one of the drop down menus on the top left to find the option I needed. It was a lot of steps.

+1 Yeah. I definitely agree with this one. It's like that on the desktop software too, and also in some other programs. I don't know why this isn't set up as optional but that long list of objects that automatically expands downward becomes a management issue with the rest of the layers.

Shouldn't hiding the studios also hide the toolbar on the bottom? It's odd because I can do this weird thing, mostly accidental, where I put my finger close to the left toolbar, then drag outward. This causes all of the interface to hide, including that bottom toolbar. It's weird because, it wants to come right back. But if I do it carefully enough, I can hold it a little, then tap on the screen with my stylus, or finger, and when I let go, the UI stays hidden. It all feels like something that is broken rather than done on purpose. In order to bring it back, naturally I tried to place my finger at the edge of the screen and drag inward. It doesn't work. With some experimentation I realized that if I placed a finger on either side of the screen, then carefully dragged inward with both at the same time, everything will come back! Like I said, it all feels very messy, accidental, not designed this way on purpose, because it's not something that I can do repeatedly and it requires very careful finger work, timing, etc. But at least, hiding all of the panels/studios etc should result in a clean, empty screen and that huge toolbar on the bottom really should hide with it. I mean, it's a very large toolbar so...

I posted these same problems earlier today as bugs. So, yeah I'm having the same problem(s)

Having only 2 Gigs of ram wouldn't disqualify it. The iPad Pro 9.7" only has 2 gigs of ram. On the other hand, having only 2 gigs of ram probably SHOULD disqualify both of them. At any rate, Serif, like a lot of developers are probably not too interested in Android. But I will say this. Apps like Infinite Painter on Android have a ton of features and functions and it abolutely flies on my Galaxy Note 8 phone. But then, my Note 8 has 6 gigs of ram. It's way better on my phone than on my old Android tablet with 3 Gigs of ram. So the idea of using Designer on a non-iPad tablet is not a bad thing at all. Android does have some better functions. There's a cursor that is always visible which is one big advantage. And the Samsung S Pen has a user customizable button on the stylus. With a fast, newish Android tablet like the Tab S3/4, it would probably be a very good experience.

I’ve been a Mac user since 1993, and I remember some applications having this exploded layout and still do, but frankly none of the programs I’ve used were like this. Adobe had this mode as an option, but always alllowed to have a background. That would have driven me crazy if I had to work with programs while looking at my desktop and folders, windows, etc in the background.