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Lorox

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Everything posted by Lorox

  1. I totally agree with this request. Something like the Shapebuilder Tool would be a HUGE addition to Affinity Designer in terms of ergonomy and speed of workflow. I actually ignored the tool in Illustrator for some time as I already had other established ways (Pathfinder etc.) of combining shapes, but when I finally took up using the tool I was amazed how easy and intuitive it made the process. Even though I try to use Affinity Designer ever more and really want to prefer it to Illustrator I always find myself missing that super helpful tool every so often! So please, please give AD version 1.9 an equivalent to the Shapebuilder Tool.
  2. You mean the paragraph decoration? Check scale with object there. Yeah, I guess it's actually called that way (maybe I came up with "embellishment" by mistake). I hadn't noticed that "scale with object" option there and I'll check later – thank you, though!
  3. Before I forget: Two things I noticed when scaling text frames via the scale handle 1. Why do we only have ONE scale handle (at the bottom right corner)? Regarding the position of a text frame on the page it may well be more convenient to scale from another corner, I'd say. As all corners are otherwise basically equal in terms of handling an object/element it seems only natural to request Affinity to add scale handles to ALL 4 corners of a text frame with a coming update. Doesn't it? 2. When scaling a text frame with the scale handle the text and its attributes are seemingly scaled wholesale (as desired). But as this seems to be the case with most inline formatting and text styles as well (font size, line height, indents etc.) I noticed that an underline within my text (being in fact a paragraph "embellishment") remained at its original line thickness and had to be adjusted separately afterwards. Is this by any means intended or is it just a minor bug?
  4. Hi Dominik, this actually sort of (but not quite) does what I need, although I'd prefer (maybe by habit...) to first set the page/document to the new size and then adjust the elements or building blocks separately and – for precision – numerically. Sometimes there are certain elements on the page that for some reason or other I actually don't want to scale exactly like the majority of the other elements – so having the page/document size right as a start and then being able to scale numerically feels a lot better for me (especially when I – e.g. – want type within a text frame go from 12pt [before] to exactly 24 pt [after] and not to 23,87 or so – which might well happen if just adjust the dimensions in Spread Setup and let this compute the scaling percentage...) However, you can get pretty close (as to my example) by first dialling in exactly double measurements in Spread Setup and let it do the automatic and exact 200% scaling of all elements and then adjusting single special elements manually. When you have that sort of document where the bleed is actually included beforehand within the page size (as most online print services like to have it) you may have to adjust the overall Spread Setup a second time to correct the included bleed which often stays at acertain value (say 3mm) regardless of the document/page size being A3 or A2. Furthermore I find that when doing the scaling (of a text frame) manually (because you cannot do it manually for the reasons discussed here) it may by helpful to use some dummy element which CAN be scaled numerically instead, though, and use this to snap some guides to it which then again can be used to snap the text frame to them when doing the manual scaling. This seemed a lot more relaxed to me than moving my hand/mouse/pen in those microscopic increments when trying to exactly hit that certain scaling percentage you're aiming at.
  5. But what can I do if I want to scale numerically to an exact percentage? Always having to do it manually doesn't seem quite satisfactory as sometimes it's actually a bit hard to move the handles exactly by small very small increments to achieve a certain exact scaling percentage.
  6. I think being able to choose between the two sorts of handles (thus deciding how the scaling should be done) is basically a good idea. I wonder, though, how do we use this when transforming numerically via the Transform panel? My recent problem was like this: I had completed an A5 sized flyer layout and then the client also wanted a version in A3 size (meaning just a scaling of exactly 200%) as a "mini poster". As all the proportions of the elements on the page – including textframes ond their content – should remain the same I'd find it the easiest way if I could just select ALL the elements on the page, set a scaling of 200% in the Transform panel and press "Enter". This, however, doesn't work as doing it this way only scales the text frames as containers but not the contents (text size etc.). Obviously you cannot discern between the 2 sorts of handles when doing it this way – but on the other hand, if you do it manually using the handles it's sometimes hard to move the handles really precise enough to get the scaling percentage absolutely right... I sort of seem to rememer that when doing such a thing in InDesign it helped when you just grouped all the elements before applying the numeric scaling – this way the apperance of the elements (including any text formatting) was scaled keeping all the original relations (as if it were an image or like when you set a scaling factor for printing). Is there really no way to do this in Publisher but the manual one using the outward "Scale" handle?
  7. I see – I faintly remember that "resetting" the bounding box of previously rotated objects by a similar method proved useful sometimes in Adobe Illustrator, too. What I do not understand, though, is why this empty "ghost space" is not taken into account when I select all those elements altogether WITHOUT grouping them. It's there when I select a single one of these two (the diagonal red stripes on the right; or the the group or the layer containing them) but it immediately disappears when I select any single or multiple other with it (even if it's just the second one giving us this effect). Is there any logic behind this?
  8. Sorry if I recently haven't quite kept up with new posts here. Having read all your friendly contributions by now, it seems to me that the behaviour I observed and made me start this topic is actually most likely an issue of how macOS handles temporary storage of data used by the apps. I don't really think by now any more that it is linked predominantly to the Affinity apps the use of which triggered my observations, nevertheless. Obviously the apps themselves DO use/need their respective disk space of about 1.7 GB on machines other than mine as well. Having been along when state of the art (at that time) graphic design apps used to be installed from a small number of 1.4 MB(!) floppy disks I wasn't really prepared to see a size of 1.7 GB as something not really out of the normal. My latest version of InDesign (10 years old...) takes only about 400 MB on disk. (I just noticed, however, that Acrobat 9 Pro, which is an old app, too, uses about 1 GB of disk space and has most likely done so for all those years! ) I also learned something about Time Machine that I didn't know before ("local snapshots"), even though I had been using it for about 10 years... Thanks for that! Anyway, I'll keep an eye on the issue, nevertheless and maybe come back to it later, if I encounter something that possibly deserves clearing or discussing. Meanwhile I've (mostly) shifted all Affinity apps work to my other, faster and newer iMac, where there's more available disk space, anyway. It's nice though to have that fallback option to the older machine with the Affinity apps as moderately older versions of macOS are still being supported – I highly appreciate that! When you have a system that's running smoothly (and is still safe enough) in general I find it extremely annyoing when you're sort of forced to have an OS update just because an update of some your main apps suddenly won't run anymore (or start being unreliable) on your favoured system. Eventually that's inevitable at some time – I know – but especially Adobe generally didn't care very much about backwards compatability. So it's good to see Affinity hasn't been so demanding in that respect so far...
  9. Yeah, exactly. The diagonal "cross" of the thinner red lines actually isn't a cross in a strict geometric sense. If you made all of the 4 thin red lines run diagonally all over the flag you'd get a real diagonal cross of double line thickness.
  10. Hi Garry, I created a new set of screenshots, where all relevant panels are visible. (They seem to be very large in the post - maybe that's due to the retina screen...) The document (100 mm x 50 mm) itself is entirely empty except for those elements/layers you see in the screenshots. So it's quite a mystery to me where that "ghost space" is coming from that's added top and right when the group or the layer is selected instead of the individual elements.
  11. Hi John, as a matter of fact I didn't create that flag myself.. If I were to I'd probably do it different, too. But as the "problem" I noticed seemed somewhat bizarre and I have no clue yet why that is so, I just took it as it was/is.
  12. I just ran into some strange behaviour in Designer (which transports into Publisher): I've got a simple graphic of a Union Jack flag consisting of 13 individual curves and one underlying rectangle as a background. These are the only elements on their layer. When I select all those parts individually (and simultaneously) the transformation panel shows a size of – say – 100 mm (width) and 50 mm (height). However, if I group these elements (or just select the layer they're on) the measurements shown in the transformation panel change to 101 mm (width) and 52 mm (height). Accordingly the selection marquee grows a bit on top and on one side to match the new measurements – while the elements making the flag remain exactly as before. Does anyone know how this might be reasonably explained?
  13. As it happens I actually thought that nearly 2 Gigabytes really IS quite a crazy amount of disk space being unexpectedly taken/used while working on a simple single page (almost) text only document in Publisher... Having worked with the Adobe apps for decades I'm probably not used to a behaviour like this, while I, of course, do know that disk space and RAM usage by most apps has gone up significantly over time. On my startup disk I have usually a bit less than 20 GB of free space and seeing that shrink comparatively fast and/or unexpectedly I get sort of nervous – can't help it, as it seems... You're right: I guess it would be of great help to understand what's going on here if I could actually locate where those 1,7 GB go and thus identify the underlying routine. Maybe there's nothing to worry about after all. But so far I'm still at a loss at how to find out. As you will know with Spotlight you can actually search for files e.g. "last modified today" AND "file size bigger than..." but that didn't turn up any suitable results. So I'm just keeping an eye on it...
  14. Thomaso, that's an interesting thought – thanks for pointing this out, I'll check on that one for sure. I would have thought, however, that any temp or swap files would be cleared once I quit the app that's responible. In my case free space actually remained the same after quitting Publisher and Designer. It took a reboot to have free space back (though I'm not completely sure if it sums up precisely). As of today I notice that since first waking the iMac (which has 12 GB of RAM BTW) from sleep this morning and working a bit (about 3 hours but not using any Affinity apps) free space on my startup disk has dropped by just 180 MB (including maybe 60 MB of Firefox cache). According to Activity Monitor no swap is being used. So today about (only) 120 MB are more or less unaccounted for which is not that much but might add up eventually if I don't reboot for some longer time. Anyway I'll check on another machine soon where all the Affinity apps are also installed. Thanks to all of you who so far contributed freely!
  15. Curious about that 'Designer 173' item & how it differs from the one below it (other than it size). So actually the sizes of the Affinity apps seem to be like that and it's not some quirk just with my install. Thanks for checking on that! That „Affinity Designer 173.app" looks like something left over from the previous 1.7.3 version. Maybe you didn't just update that one but installed the 1.8 version separately?
  16. Is there actually an option in the Affinity apps to set a specific volume or disk partition to be the scratch/temp disk? If there is, it certainly has eluded me up to now... While working with Photoshop I always had set aside a 25–50 GB partition exclusively as a scratch/temp disk for Photoshop. Would be nice to be able to do this for Photo or Desiger as well!
  17. Hi there, as of recently I noticed that free disk space on my iMac (OS 10.11.6) gets mysteriously low. Keep in mind here: not on my data partition where all my "regular" files go, but on my system partition where the OS and just the applications as such live. I had a hunch before that I actually seem to notice free space going down when or after using the Affinity apps – just today I had about 1,7 GB less space on the drive after I had worked for an hour on a really small (just 2,9MB!) file in Publisher (and having used Designer inbetween to copy an illustration from there to my Publisher layout file). Even after quitting the apps and hoping to clear some of their (suspected) caches this doesn't change. When I look into my Applications folder I see that Designer, Photo and Publisher are by far the biggest chunks in there: each having just over 1,7 GB (well exceeding the system requirements for installing)! This surely can't be as intended, can it? I'm currently using Publisher 1.8.3, Designer 1.8.2 and Photo 1.8.2. Now I'm actually quite anxious to further use the apps for fear they will eventually eat up so much available disk space that I run into problems with my other apps. Has anybody noticed a similar behaviour on their machines or knows what to do about it?
  18. In a way... I'd say, though, that Mesh Warp is a actually bit too "delicate" – you'd be forced to adjust too many handles and or anchors to achieve those rather simple "straight" distortions I was thinking of. Perspective comes nearer but as you always have those 2D planes here (with several points interacting) it appears too difficult – to me at least – to adjust these to the actual (or rather represented) 3D perspective of the image. It would be so easy if for a quick and dirty rule of thumb distortion (or "perspective") adjustment you could just move each corner point separately. I guess anybody who's done this with Photoshop in all those past years will most certainly agree. You don't really want to resort to more or less complicated workarounds once you've experienced ways to do things straight and sipmle...
  19. Ah, thank you. I keep forgetting that. Maybe it's also some clashing of nomenclature: ”Quick Mask" and "Edit selection as a layer" – both used in AP for rather the same thing – at least sound quite different...
  20. Hi GarryP, thanks or pointing this out, but I actually already knew this is (currently) the (only) way to do it in AP when it comes to modifying just the selection boundaries (and not the pixels). I must say, however, that this procedure seems unnecessarily clumsy to me: going back and forth to the menu and so on... It would really be much more convenient if the function of "editing the selection as a layer" could be accessed by way of a context menu right at your active selection. This way you wouldn't be forced to leave your current area of work to travel across a 27" screen (or even to a second display where your menu bar is...).
  21. Thanks a lot – you're right! Seems like I accidentally never hit that sweet spot near the side handles where those double arrows appear... So that sort of works. It can be argued, though, if making the different transformation options directly (and temporarily "isolated") accessibly through a context menu isn't probably a more "general" and/or more easy to learn and eventually more ergonomic way. I always felt that properly equipped (naturally) context aware context menus are such a great help for an easy and effective workflow. They also speed up the learning of a new program as they – in the best case – offer you a good selection of options you might need just where and when you actually need them. In this respect the Adobe apps have done things mostly right, I'd say. Well... that said it should be stated that the whole (free) transformation business is not quite as bad as I thought before. My apologies to Affinity! BUT (as I said before): please add that option to move a selection's cornerpoints individually in order to allow distort freely – this is so useful in many situations! Sometimes you want to be quite drastic at distorting and sometimes you have just to make that little correction at one corner to get a selection aligned properly to some given perspective. It would be so easy IF any corner could be manipulated individually.
  22. Yeah, of course it's possible to Scale and Rotate (as basic as it is) – not different as in any design app I know. How to Shear with those handles escapes me, nevertheless. As far as I see I have to revert to the Filter menu to bring up that special Shear panel. Am I missing something here? For anyone who knows what you could do with Photoshop here, the options given by AP must be very disappointing. The workflow to accomplish more complex transformations seems to be really tedious and un-ergonomic to me. If it were just possible to move each corner point of a selection marquee independently to acchieve a free distortion (including "fake" perspective) this would already be a huge improvement over the current status quo. Given all the good features Affinity Photo is offering it's too bad we still have to wait for this very basic function...
  23. I – surprisingly – couldn't find anything substantial on this topic here, so I'll start a new one... (and I hope I haven't overlooked some feature of the app that actually would have made this request unnecessary) As it is, I dearly miss something like Photoshops's "Free Transform" in Affinity Photo. In AP the whole transformation business is – to me – rather clumsy and really not ergonomic at all. It can be really tedious to sort of "model" a pixel selection to certain shape by using a combination of scaling, rotating, shearing and distorting (free or in perspective). In Photoshop – which I'd really want to give up in favour of AP – it's all under your fingertips: just press CMD-T and with that context-menu "Free Transform" provides, you can do almost ANYTHING to your pixel selection (either including the selected pixels or not). It's all there under the right mouse button (or just a keyboard shortcut away if you're using a graphics tablet with a pencil) and you can go between ALL the different types of transformations I mentioned above without once returning to the menu bar or some palette. And when you're ready, you hit ENTER and you're done. This is simple, intuitive and just ergonomic and it's been there for years and years. With AP complex transforming is just annoying and unpleasant work to me. I my opinion it's really a strange idea to "hide" transformation options like shear and distort in the "Filters" menu – as these very ARE basic transformations and should be accessible (at least) from the "Transform" panel, if not – as in Photoshop – actually from a context menu on screen right next to the selection you're working on. I personally think it is quite an unreasonable demand in AP that – e.g. – for shearing you have to pull at some abstract lines in an extra panel far from the actual selection on the screen. If this could be adressed some time soon, working in AP would be so much more pleasant for me.
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