Friksel

Hi everybody, I just stumbled upon this and I cannot understand what this is and what this is for. I can't find it in the Designer help. It's this structure: I created an empty layer and moved an object on top of the layericon to crop it. I wasn't expect this to do anything, 'cause there isn't anything inside the layer to crop. But for some reason it DID add a crop/clip-layer to it. And it's giving strange results I don't get (look at the video in the attachment). Suddenly the icon of the layer changed into a folder icon and the childmask isn't masking the layer, but the layer(s?) under it. And to make it even more weird, when moving the layer underneith it this layer is making the first layer again.... strange It doesn't really make sense to me so far. This way it looks like we can mask layers underneath it, but is it really meant to work like this? Can we rely on this to be a feature, or did I perhaps hit some bug here? I am intrigued. Anybody knows how this feature is called, what's it for, when could we use this and is there some information about it somewhere in the help or elsewhere? And why did the icon change into a folder/group-icon? screenrec.mp4

Alright!! There happens to be a button to do exacly what I want: 'join curves'! And it's just next to the 'close curve' button. Nice! :)

Hi, I find myself wanting to connect two different open curves to merge them, but so far can't find a way to do this. Basically what I'm looking for is some tool like the binary add-operator for closed path, but then for combining all anchor points of curve A to the anchor points of curve B. Or something like 'close curve' but then with two different curves. Does anybody here perhaps know if there is a way to do this in Affinity Designer?

@Sean P Ah okay, I didn't know that. That makes a lot more sense then the way I constructed the document now indeed. I sent you just a simplified version of the full document. Changed it here and it works fine as you explained now. So this one can be closed. Thanks for your effort and quick response.

@Sean P wordwrap problem.afdesign

@MikeW Thanks for your reaction. If that's the case here the font should not show up in the application.

For some fonts problems arise in Designer in the font style dropdown. As you can see in the images below Windows shows the several types of the Bahnschrift-font the correct way, but in Designer there's only a list full of 'Regular's for this font. The font is included in the attachments. Bahnschrift Bold Condensed.otf

@Sean P Here's a screencapture. At first I just write text after existing text. You can see wordwrapped-lines have a different leading then existing lines. Notice that the properties don't change in the Character panel. That's also the case when selecting the new lines, the properties remain the same wherever you click. After that I selected part of the textblock and pasted without styling (ctrl-alt-shift-V) a lorem ipsum. Here you can see also overwritten text get a different leading. I didn't record this, but I can tell you here that when I select the wordwrapped text (so with the wrong leading/line-height) and change the leading, the text indeed changes the leading visibly on screen. But still it's a different leading as set in non-wordwrapped lines for some reason. Hope this helps. wordwrap-problem.mp4

When text gets wordwrapped inside a textblock (or by pasting text into an existing textblock) all wordwrapped lines don't respect the leading and we're not able to set leading for those lines in the properties. The only way to get the right leading (as set in properties) on the wordwrapped lines seems to be to add linefeed-characters to ALL LINES by hand.

After using Photoshop and Illustrator in Windows for many years, even after months of using Designer and Photo I'm having a hard time getting used to the way the Color Chooser dialog works directly on colors. The fact that all colors are directly applied to the selected object without having to confirm this first is very confusing. I noticed that even on every little colorchange while the dialog is open a new undo-level is created.... The reason why I can't get used to this is: - In Windows dialog-boxes always need users to CONFIRM a change by design. But for some strange reason I don't get or know, Designer is not behaving conform this pattern on the Color Chooser, which is counter-intuitive to me. - The behaviour on dialog windows is even different per type of dialog inside Designer itself. So I noticed I couldn't get used to the alignment dialog, where suddenly there ARE cancel and ok buttons. That's inconsistent behaviour and so is confusing. - I found myself a lot of times confused on how to get the color back I had before I opened the Color Choser (which never works in the end). When I have the Color Chooser open I adjust the color 'till I get what I want, but every click I do creates a new undolevel and I never count the amount of clicks I did in order to know how many undo-levels I have to get back to get the original color back. This would not be a problem when there were just OK and Cancel-buttons in the dialog. This is what I would expect: A color chooser dialog with an OK and a Cancel button. After pressing the cancel-button the color is reset to the color the object had before opening the dialog and changing the color. I don't see any point in creating thousands of undo-levels just when trying out colors in the Color Chooser. I really tried hard to get used to this and use the software all day for the last weeks. Please, please, please, change this!! This is very confusing and inconsistant with the software itself as well as with other windows software. Thanks for considering this!

@Mark Ingram The extra group problem is solved for the opacity thing, so that's great, but there seem to be another situation where the svg-exporter generates additional (redundant) groups to the svg causing problems when using on the web with javascript. Just tested it with the latest beta, but unfortunately the beta got the same problem still. It would be very much appreciated if you guys could find some time to take a closer look at that problem too. In the interactivity/animation project I'm working on rightnow I have to edit the svg manually now because of this to change the svg output before we can animate it, and that's not a lot of fun Thanks a lot guys!

Nice one @Mark Ingram, when changing the opacity of a group doesn't create an additional group in svg export anymore! ("Fixed SVG export to avoid exporting spurious groups") Thanks a lot guys!

No problems with installing speeds here either, so it seems to differ per machine/software

Ah, cool. That's what I was looking for. I guess there is no indication for the direction or possibility to change which anchor comes first, but this already helps a lot and there are only two options for direction, that we can switch in designer if it's wrong. Thanks!

Yes, it's making files larger and therefore slower on internet. Especially for mobile browsers we want then to be as tiny as possible to minimize load-times. But next to that, it's the wrong question. The question should be: why is it in the output in the first place. It just shouldn't be there. And ontopic again: a lot of people, like me, just don't want to use an artboard if we only have one canvas, but we want to be able to crop the canvas/document.

Great question. Because I don't like to change the layer-hierarchy and add an artboard eventhough I only have one canvas (document if you like) I'd like to work on, just to crop the document. But more importantly: because it gets exported to the SVG, adding an extra redundant layer on the output as well... which BTW is not even acting like a layer in the SVG, but as a rectangle without any use... so the artboard shouldn't even be in the svg-export. But that's another thing. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?> <!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/1.1/DTD/svg11.dtd"> <svg width="100%" height="100%" viewBox="0 0 810 570" version="1.1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xml:space="preserve" xmlns:serif="http://www.serif.com/" style="fill-rule:evenodd;clip-rule:evenodd;stroke-linejoin:round;stroke-miterlimit:1.41421;"> <rect id="Artboard1" x="0" y="0" width="810" height="570" style="fill:none;"/> <rect x="30" y="30" width="670" height="480" style="fill:#ebebeb;"/> </svg>

I see so many people asking to trim the document here every time and I am one of them that uses trim documents a lot. Everytime I want to do this I use the arboard tool to crop and after that I move the contents of the arboard outside the artboard and remove the empty artboard. Although that's working fine, everytime we have all the extra steps just to crop the document to a region, which is basic functionality I'd say. I'd say if so many people want this feature and it's practically already inside the artboard tool, why shouldn't there just be a document-crop-tool next to the artboard tool doing just this without the extra steps to have the artboard and remove the artboard everytime afterwards? It seems like such an easy thing to add to the software which stops all confusion for newer users and adds something really useful a lot of people use on a daily basis. Just saying...

From a curve I'd like to know which anchor is first and which anchor comes second (to know the path-direction). Is there some way to view this in designer (like index-numbers next to the anchorpoints or something like that)? Thanks in advance!

I was afraid of that. Thank you for considering this

Hi @soterios, I agree with @MikeW that it's a personal thing. But I can tell you there are so many things better in Designer then in Inkscape I can only advise you to just buy the program. I'm sure you don't regret it. Designer is so much more stable, loads faster, got a much more professional - dark - interface, and a much better UI. A lot of Inkscape features are counter intuitive, but Designer looks a lot more like the best part of Illustrator, combined with some better vector editing from other tools. I'd say: just buy it, it's only around 50 euros and you get all free upgrades 'till next major version. The only thing I can think of that Inkscape has, but designer don't (yet), is image tracing. Bottomline: very intuitive and much more professional oriented and fast. --> And much much much more fun to use, so happy face and better designs! But these are just my 2 cents.

Designer strips all elements outside the document region. This is causing problems, because these graphics are placed outside the document bounds on purpose and are needed by css/javascript to move/animate them on screen: Because of this the following things we do a lot (that are possible using Illustrator) don't seem to be possible in Designer: - an svg-map (like google maps) which can be dragged by the user is always bigger then the document bounds - objects that must start outside the screen are always outside document bounds - a large graphic starting zoomed in, where a user can zoom it out does have curves falling outside document bounds - A 2d background, like a street with trees, panning behind a walking character to simulate the changing environment during the walk has elements outside document bounds - etc etc This happens in about 90% of our interactive/animation projects. Unfortunately this is preventing us to move from illustrator to designer. If this is not a bug, but done intentially, could you please consider changing this behaviour. Right now it seems to be impossible to export all objects, including the onces outside the document bounds. At least give us some control to make this choice ourselves, like this: I really like Designer a lot and want to move to Designer for all projects, but unfortunately this way we can't use Designer for a lot of interactive projects here. Thanks for considering this!

Wow, nice! I'm definitely gonna use these a lot!

Congratulations! Very much earned. Great products!

Nice!

[ per accident posted this by hitting enter, but can't find a button to delete this post... is it me? ]