erdteil

For the creation of infographics, for example, it would be great if both Designer and Publisher would have a connector tool included in the toolset. It should be fully editable in all its style elements like stroke width, pattern (e.g. dashed), color, and shadow, start and end arrows, curve type (straight, steps, curves), connecting to each other, creating style presets, adding text, and everything else you can think of being helpful 🙂

Good to know, thanks.

Great! Same here. Good old FreeHand when vector graphics were in its infancy… Yes, I am aware of the gradient workaround, it is probably the most convenient but has also its downsides – as you mentioned. It would be helpful if the gradient panel offered a list of all markers in stacking order with a numerical field (of course, a list entry must be created automatically when a new marker is added)… It should be added that the colour gradient panel should be resizable as in Illustrator. And for the gradient tool snapping (in 10% increments) wouldn't be so bad…

@loukash, thanks for your reply. Maybe I should have mentioned that I work with Illustrator for almost thirty years now (which, of course, doesn‘t mean I know every detail). However, the Width Tool and the dashed stroke workaround are exactly the options you have in Illustrator, and none of which is satisfying.

Hi MEB, Illustrator's width tool comes close to what I have in mind, although it lacks numerical input and, even more important, you can't set the width to zero(!). Illustrator will always draw a hairline. Here is an example created with the pressure feature in Designer. Compared to Illustrator the width is in fact zero when you set it to zero (yeah!). However, adjusting the length is quite inconvenient due to the small size of the pressure graph window, and the lack of numerical input. Also, it is not easy to set a straight stroke end. multicolored stroke.afdesign

Hi MEB, yes, I am familiar with the tools. But I can't see how this applies to my question. With the pie tool, you can create the desired effect by adjusting the inner radius so that the shape looks like a stroke while it is, technically speaking, still a surface. None of the other shape tools, let alone the pen tool, gives you the option to adjust the stroke length. What comes close is the pressure option in the stroke panel. However, this is a workaround without having the option to adjust the stroke length by percentage or millimeter.

Yes, good idea! However, the stroke cannot be transparent, instead, its blend mode must be set to "erase". Gap between fill and stroke.afdesign

The ability to adjust the distance between fill and stroke would be a great feature!

It would be fantastic, not to say revolutionary, if you could specify the length of a contour of open or closed paths as a percentage. A tool with which the position could be marked interactively directly on the object would also be conceivable. For example, you could create circle segments or multi-colored contours.

Does not work for me either. Neither copied text from Notes, Pages, even Illustrator is recognized in each of the Affinity apps.

You can use the pressure curve to achieve the desired effect (except the rounded caps — though with some tweaking…), as you can see in the screenshot.

On the other hand it is much easier in Designer to reduce the width to none using the pressure curve. Also it is less accurate just because of the size and the lack of a numeric input Field. By adding this, the curve would be much more accurate than the Width Tool in Illustrator (which I use a lot) which, in fact, isn‘t accurate at all (you cannot add a value, e.g. 50%, either).

Stroke alignment would even be better with the ability to set an offset value instead of outer, center, inner alignment.

As you can see the above screenshot is from Designer for iPad, and in comparison to the desktop version there is a difference in effect as you can see in screenshot below. This shoul be fixed, at least. An option to edit points on the graph by numbers like in the curves for color correction would add more control to the editor. And what I also miss is the ability to adjust the stroke position (center, left, right) for open paths! Illustrator also can't do this, however, for some reason InDesign does!

Thanks for the work around. I just discovered that the graph width editor does what I was looking for. However, a simple slider using a range between 0–100% would even be better.