janetes

So helpful. I appreciate Affinity's great support and education. Among my 5 best purchases in the past 5 years. Very pleased, very impressed.

That would be a great solution. Looks in it's in Photo but I don't see it in Designer. It should be that simple.

Not rotating the photo is the only answer I've found, glad I'm not alone. Once it's rotated, it's the point of no return. Something is going on because you find these odd selected areas you can't recall selecting and can't get rid of or work around. Thanks for responding!

Hi. Working in Affinity Designer. The selection brush works fine to select an area until I accidentally rotate the image with two fingertips on the trackpad. After that, the brush won't select. I've tried deselecting, going back in the history, making sure it's in Add mode, inverting pixels, stepping backwards to before that point, and selecting various layers. Nothing gets it working again and I can't figure it out. When this rotation happens, the history says : Raster Smart Selection Brush End Drag. Thank you for any suggestions.

Lower (Group) opens up into a list of Shape 1 (symbol). Each Shape 1 (symbol) has two child layers of circle (curve) and rectangle (curve). Oh yes, I see, it's the two together that make up the Symbol and all I want to do is change the stroke of the child layers with the rectangle. Ok, getting it. To change the stroke of the rectangle (curve) layer only, and leave the circle (curve) layers as they are, might there be a way to do that?

Thanks for working through this, R C-R. I'm learning. I think it forgot it was a symbol. The shapes switch over individually just fine, but not as a group. Is there a way to check or remind it to act like a symbol?

What happened was that the size of the stroke around the long rectangles somehow got up to 25pt, so the whole background was blue. In bringing it back to 0.2 pt, the shapes reappeared just fine. Rather than adjust them one at a time, which I'm happy to do, in the interest of honing my AD skills, is there a way to adjust all those layers at once? I tried to Select one, then Shift/Select the next one but the first one just de-selected. Thank you.

I esp appreciate the help learning and these tips are working great. Going along nicely, I've managed to disappear the larger rectangular strips. So sorry about this. I haven't deleted anything and have been through the Undo sequence and History but can't seem to retrieve them. Possibly I've somehow selected them and made their Stroke into None, but where are they? Upper and Lower are the circles and Small Squares are the squares, but where is the symbol for the strips? This may be an impossible Q for you to answer remotely and I can upload the file if I can't resolve my own error. Thank you.

Thank you. I was referring to the menu items suggested by MEB. I'm in AD. I will fill in the squares with different colours. I use the rectangle tool to make the shape, add a fill, duplicate the shape, move it down to the next square, and give it a new fill colour. The text will be numbers beneath each square of colour. The squares show me where to position the rectangle when I move it. For Export, I hide the grid background. The file you made is very useful. If you could tell me how to delete all the red fill and leave the gray squares outlines, it would be great. When I hide the small squares layer, the gray outlines disappear as well.

Thank you. I've attached the file. The Menu items that you suggested are greyed when the file opens, because each line is a vector? Might there be another workaround? If I were to duplicate the view of the file and work with that perhaps? The CAD program that created the file uses those vectored lines to design a die that will cut the rows into strips, but I don't need them for my work, which is to fill in each square shape with a colour. I appreciate your help and time. V1700196-Oct20-17 copy.afdesign

Thank you. Do you mean that when the file opens, rather than View>Rotate Left, which is what I have been doing that rotates the canvas and results in text being typed vertically, I should have been in Document Setup > Dimensions and made sure that Portrait is not checked. I tried that but it didn't work. Is there another way to rotate a document?

In the forums, it appears as though the answers to my Q are to use a Frame Text tool, but the topics are a year old and I wonder if I've missed something. The canvas opens in portrait mode and I want to work with it in landscape. I can rotate it but text enters in the original orientation, so 90 degrees deviated from how it will be used/read. Many small segments of text throughout the canvas are needed. Can you suggest the most expedient solution? Thank you.

Thank you for how helpful everyone has been. Selecting all the layers and finding stroke in the Colour Studio wasn't working. I want to learn this and have attached the file. The idea with this file is to colour all the squares (which I've been doing in a single layer, or so I think), and then remove the blue background (which is the imprint for a die cutter to cut the file into strips of 6 squares that will then be riveted together to make a fan). I thought I could select the coloured squares, and since it's one layer, I could make them a slice, and export them together, but no success so far. As you've said, I'm not clear on the basic file structure and how backgrounds work. A good workaround would be switching all the squares to pale grey and leaving them included in the exported file. Thank you.

Thank you! Yes, clicking on the grid line selects it as an object, and changing the stroke to grey works fine. Since the grid is made up of many separate objects, I tried selecting several at a time but the stroke option disappeared. No problem to do it one at a time though. I'll study about adjustment layers, that solution seems like a good way to do it in one step.

Thanks everyone. The blue grid is already made, in a .cad file, I believe, by the die cutter. He sends it to me as a pdf, and it is a vectored file. I was hoping that changing the lines from blue to grey would be simple, and it probably is if you are given enough info. I appreciate that you're like the doctor asked for a diagnosis with no patient to examine. I'll work on it, may yet be uploading that file