Jesse Morris

I use Affinity Designer to lay out a lot of designs which I bring over to a laser cutter. With contours now I can just do a couple test cuts, and then just select everything and adjust the whole multi-piece design to just make everything 0.015" bigger or whatever to account for the laser kerf! This is amazing and now all my stuff will fit together better and the middles of the letters won't fall out of my stencil font text as readily. I had a process for doing this before but it was awkward and destructive. This is much much better! Thank you!

Well, I had no idea the "Transform objects separately" toggle existed, and that is certainly a big helpful step in this. Thank you. The rotation is for sure a separate part of problem. Though I think actually in my real life scenario I ran into the labels may be square enough and far enough from the edges that it doesn't matter (they were just A1, A2, ..., A13, up to j1, ... j10) - and I could've shrunk them down to fit (maybe nudging the few that popped out of their containing shape). I guess what would be nice ideally would be to be able to go in the Transform pane and type *= -1 to fix it. Strangely I can say W: *= 2 to double all of them, but it looks like if I do R *=-1 it calculates the delta in rotation of the one I last selected, and rotates them all by that same amount, rather than negating the rotation angle for each of them truly independently. I kind of feel like that part might be a bug since IMO my intent is clear and it works differently from the scaling fields of that pane.

yeah but like I'm wondering if I can select all of them and then do something to mirror each separately, or if I have to, one at a time, select, flip, select, flip, select, flip. I did just realize I can assign flip to a keyboard shortcut which makes this slightly more bearable. Previously it was "No thanks, I'll just read the backwards text" level of inconvenient

I have a design that I'm going to laser cut from the back. That means I have to mirror it (flip horizontal). However there are labels for each piece that I want to be marked on the pieces back. So I want those text elements to be in the positions and orientation they are in when I mirror the whole design. However, the text is just etched rather than cut, so doesn't go through, so I would like it to read forwards. Can anyone think of a convenient way to do this? I've attached a simplified example - but I want to do this with a design with hundreds of labels, not just four.

I use Affinity Designer to make designs that I send to a laser cutter. All the laser cutter software I've ever used is stupid and bad*, and doesn't support clipping paths. So if I want to put shapes inside other shapes or crop them or whatever (e.g., hello.svg ) I can't just do that the reasonable way, I have to do a bunch of manual steps that are a big hassle, export the file, and then undo them. I have some clunky workarounds figured out for some situations, but it would be an enormous benefit to my workflow if I could just check a checkbox saying "bake clipping paths" in the export profile, and have it automatically do that. One of the cases I don't have even a clunky workaround for is open paths, so this would open up a lot of possibilities for me. * I believe this is also an issue for Cricut, and a lot of other vector-based CNC tools.

Why would this be deliberate? I don't understand why I have to choose between being able to see my low-contrast or light stroke stuff, and having the main purpose (in my use) of groups enabled. I do a lot of design for laser cutter stuff, so I often have large shapes (or groups) with a very light stroke, so outline view has been very useful to me in previous versions. Which I think didn't do this. I tried what you suggest and it mostly works, though when the group is half in outline and half in vector sometimes clicking the vector side selects just a constituent object, though most of the time it selects the group. That is very strange. Anyway, after I figured out what was going on, just toggling outline view with the hotkey is easy enough, and honestly easier than sliding the divider back and forth.

I think this is a change in 1.9. I'm used to and expect groups to behave the way the documentation says: If you click on any of it it will select the group, and you can option-click or double click to select internal elements. This DOES work normally with 1.9. However, when I switch to Outline Mode, it seems to stop working - clicking inside a group just selects the single element. Steps to reproduce: New document, make two squares, group them, clear selection, click on one (group is selected). Go into outline mode, clear the selection, and click on a square. (Just the single square is selected) Leave outline mode, and things go back to working normally. This is neither the behavior I expect nor want, so I think it is bug.

I'd like to be able to include symbols inside compounds. I can put the symbol inside the compound in the layers panel but it doesn't seem to actually contribute to the compound, and I can't adjust the add/subtract mode. This would essentially allow me to parameterize features of a complex curve, which for what I'm doing (designing stuff to laser-cut) would be extremely useful.