Beginner's questions

[Gargamel]

Hi all,

Currently taking Affinity Designer for a test drive. Look and feel is great, but I have a couple of questions:

- How can I change the size of my objects without using the keyboard? Virtually every graphics program I know has those little arrows beside the size, so you can add or take a few pixels without having to type. No arrows with Affinity, or did I overlook something?

- Im having a hard time configuring snappiness the way I want. I'm aligning a couple of cubes with a border width of 4 pixels. When two cubes snap together, they basically share a border, which is great (seems to be the default). When snapping a box to the corner of the page, however, the results are inconsistent: Sometimes I get a full border, sometimes half of it, sometimes none. This is an A2 page, which means it's scaled down on the screen - very hard to see. So I can't rely on my eyes, I have to rely on Affinity delivering consistent results. How can I achieve that?

- Lets say I draw a small forest, with oaks and pine trees. Is it possible to clone my pine trees for this, so that, when I make a change to one pine tree, the change is immediately applied to all other pine trees?

Thanks!

[GarryP]

Welcome to the forums.

1. You can change any numeric field value by using the mouse scroll wheel while the pointer is over the field. However, adding spinners (up/down arrows) might be a useful addition to help people who don’t have scroll wheels on their mouse.

2. Snapping in Designer has so many possibilities that it’s difficult to give precise instructions for many situations as it really depends on the exact circumstances. I think it just needs a lot of practice, which isn’t a very good answer. I still haven’t got the hang of it properly so maybe someone else has a better answer for you.

3. Symbols are a good way to clone objects. Just have a look in the Help for Symbols.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, GarryP said:

1. You can change any numeric field value by using the mouse scroll wheel while the pointer is over the field. However, adding spinners (up/down arrows) might be a useful addition to help people who don’t have scroll wheels on their mouse.

If you click into any numeric field in the Transform panel, you can then use the keyboard cursor up & down keys to increment or decrement the field value in one unit steps. You do not have to select (highlight) anything; the entire field automatically is selected (highlighted) when you press the key for the first time.

[gdenby]

Hi, Gargamel,

Please clarify. When you say  "border width of 4 pixels", do you mean the shape has a stroke width of 4? You may be getting confused by the apeearce of the stroke, which can be set to the outaside or inside of the shape, or centered on the shape boundary. The snapping is based on the shape, not the stroke. Try switch to outline view to see the base shape geometry.

[GarryP]

R C-R: Even though Gargamel said “How can I change the size of my objects without using the keyboard?”, that’s a nice tip. Thanks.

[dutchshader]

1 hour ago, GarryP said:

R C-R: Even though Gargamel said “How can I change the size of my objects without using the keyboard?”, that’s a nice tip. Thanks.

in that case you can use the scrollwheel on the mouse

[GarryP]

Which is part of what I said in my original reply.

[dutchshader]

3 minutes ago, GarryP said:

Which is part of what I said in my original reply.

Yep you did, must have scrolled past that part 

[Gargamel]

Thanks for all the replies!

#1 is solved (although I agree that adding spinners would be a nice addition for those on-the-road scenarios where a mouse is not available.

#3 symbols is exactly what I need, thanks!

Which leaves me with issue #2.

@gdenby: Hard to say because my interface isn't set to English, but that sounds about right: In the "shape" tab, I've set the stroke width to 4 pixels. 

When I snap the boxes to the document border, they effectively snap three times: Outer border, middle of border, inner border. I've played around quite a bit with the magnet, but have yet to find a setting that will restrict snappiness to just one of those three. It seems like setting the appearance of the stroke will only make a difference when I snap to other boxes - when I snap to the document border, it makes no difference.

[Gargamel]

EDIT: Never mind, #2 works now. Not sure what I did. Most likely the initial settings were wrong, then I did find settings that work for me, but since one of the other boxes was still in the wrong position, Affinity offered that snapping position as well. So it didn't snap to different parts of the border, but it snapped to different boxes.

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, dutchshader said:

in that case you can use the scrollwheel on the mouse

That would be a bit difficult to do if you are not using a scroll wheel mouse. 

But even if you are, depending on its sensitivity it can be difficult to alter values but single unit increments. Not so with the cursor keys -- one key tap equals one unit step.