Affinity Designer - A wealth of suggestions for improvement from three years of intensive productive use!

[ChristAlix]

I come from the 3D design environment (Inventor, 3DSMAX, Rhinoceros 3D, Maya, Adobe Illustrator) and have to create very detailed 2D drawings for my clients.
My problem was, until the release of Affinity, the zoom factor of Adobe Illustrator and Acrobat Reader (max. 6400%). With PDFs, even if I wanted to, I could not zoom in to the smallest detail (10000 - 100000%) and therefore had to create several detailed drawings of a draft for each presentation. This is of course an expensive and time-consuming task! 
The zoom problem has been a thing of the past since I started using Affinity Designer, but now there are more requests from me and my customers.  
Up to now I was able to split a single drawing in a document "as a kind of detail preview" into a whole series of artboads and when I double-clicked on the corresponding artboard it was displayed "full screen" so to speak. This was perfect and saved me a lot of work. Furthermore I was able to inspire my customers for the Affinity Designer and also win them as Affinity customers, because they needed the program like a kind of viewer "in the demo version" and so they entered their design improvements "in the purchase version" as comments in the same document.
I also created assets for the customer comments (dimension lines, dimension arrows, text fields, hatched areas etc...) and embedded them directly in the document so that the customers could always work in the same style. So that the font looks the same, I gave them an OpenSource standard font (osifont - IS0 3O98 specification). So far everything works fine.

Now to the customer wishes:
1. the dimension lines, which I embedded in the asset are built up horizontally and vertically and do not contain a dynamic value display. So the customer cannot measure anything and has to orientate the dimension lines himself and enter the measured values manually. Drawing of dimensioning including dynamic value display which can be changed afterwards is a welcome addition!

2. also not every customer is an admin and accordingly, the fonts included in the package cannot simply be installed in their operating system. A possibility to embed the font into assets in such a way that they are temporarily mounted into the system at runtime (like the narrow-bed fonts in PDF) would make it easier to distribute or share AD files with customers without pre-installed fonts. And best of all, the ability to install the fonts from within the document at a later date, wow, that's it! 

 

Now to my wishes:
3. it would be great if you could create a "New Document" among the document templates even without format limits, i.e. with "infinite" dimension or format less, like in Adobe Illustrator. I know that if I add an artboard, the external document limitation (AD has already implemented it practically) is thus removed. But to do without the limitation from scratch would increase creativity and you can choose the right page format afterwards! 
With the slogan: Creativity must have no limits!

4. so far AD has only solid colors, gradients and bitmap as fill color, but filling in the form of hatching (45°, 0°, 90°, cross etc...) is missing. This would simplify the tedious creation of hatching and patterns 1000 times.

5. under "Snapping" I also miss that you can set fixed angles and angle steps. It's cumbersome to have to readjust every time in the Transform field.

6. creating diagonal guides with fixed and variable angles or even converting drawn lines into guides would make AD unrivalled in Illustrator.

7. function for drawing dynamic link lines / arrows, e.g. to display (ER-diagrams) data-relationship diagrams is generally missing.

8. as I share my drawings with clients, I would like to protect certain layers, artboards or even the whole document from editing. A password protected function like in Acrobat, that you can protect pages, print function, editing with a password would be useful to protect the "intellectual and artistic property & copyright"!

9. and finally, as already mentioned 100000000 times DXF / DWG import and export function!

 

Now some of you will say that the proposals have already been made and that they are very CAD intensive.  And I agree, because Affinity has given us a tool that is not only limited to illustration, font & logo design, but can be used for many different tasks. I personally find newer and newer areas of application in AD, because with each version the horizon of what is possible increases. And let's be honest, every illustrator and designer is also a developer and engineer, these are parallel and not opposites, because one complements the other!

If one of you has managed to read all this, my greatest respect with kneeling!!!

 

[fde101]

Separate feature requests should be split up into separate threads so they can be discussed independently rather than everything getting mixed up in one pace.

As many of these are duplicates it would be better to comment on the existing threads than to create new ones and scatter the conversation for a given request all over the place making it harder for people to find what they are looking for.

 

#2 - try a font manager such as FontBase

[ChristAlix]

Hello fde101,

thank you for reading my report and thank you for pointing that out. 
As I have already written in the title, this is a "A wealth of suggestions for improvement from three years of intensive productive use" and not, I have "a" suggestion for improvement here. Also, it's just a little bit confusing to find the right thread(s) for my improvements, because there are many with the same or identical suggestions instead of one consolidated thread per suggestion.
But as I said, I have summarized my experiences from the current productive environment here which essentially overlap with the suggestions here in the forum and this as far as possible with many keywords, so that it is easier to find and assign it in the forum. 

In addition, I think that unfortunately there is still a long way to go before the programme is accepted in the professional sector or really gains a foothold. There is still a lack of proven tools to simply keep up with the (big "A"). But in order to overtake the (big "A") and the consorts, you need not only proven but also more innovative tools!
I already have over 25 years of experience in graphic design, GUI design, engineering, software development. I've been a (big "A") customer from the beginning and am forced (by the industry) to stay in the Creative Cloud subscription. I can tell you that my customers ( from the engineering sector) basically only require 5 data formats: 
10% Adobe PDF (pdf), Encapsulated PostScript (eps,epsf, ps)
20% Adobe Illustrator (ai, ait)
30% AutoCAD interchange file (dxf)
40% AutoCAD Drawing (dwg)
whereby the last three (ai, dwg, dxf) are preferred for the reason of subsequent modification or editing. 

I use Affinity Designer not because I don't have any alternatives but because I like to think outside the box and it is different and varied from the software I use. And because I can perhaps contribute something to the maturing of the program from the beginning and grow with it.

One day I would like to be very happy if a customer would ask me to create an *..afdesign file (as an established format) "of his own accord"!