Designer needs hyphenation and better slice snapping for exhibition design workflow.

[Justinas]

I found great functionality of Designer in exhibition design, when I can maintain a generic view of a large wall of exhibition, while setting different export scenarios for different parts of general design:

• Parts must be printed with background and cropmarks in cmyk
• Parts must be cnc'd or cut without background
• I always need to maintain a general view for reviews, a small-sized pdf
• I often need to have parts of general design to use as textures in 3d software. Sometimes in different resolutions. 

Slices help me achieve this from a single, smartly constructed file, and in theory it is far superior than Adobe's Illustrator. 

So far, I have two issues with this. 

1. It is frustrating to break this workflow in cases where I have to deal with hyphenation. I have to finish-up hyphenated texts of exhibition in another software, and also break the well-maintained general view. 
2. It is difficult to get layer-independent slices in precise locations. If you draw a slice manually, snapping weirdly does not work. Precise positions of slices are essential in my case.

  

[Pšenda]

5 hours ago, Justinas said:

Precise positions of slices are essential in my case.

Transform panel you don't work? 

[Justinas]

27 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

Transform panel you don't work? 

When you have a complex layout, and want to have a slice containing, for example, one picture in it, you want to draw a slice around it and snap it precisely. |
It would be very difficult to use transform panel for that. 

Also, I know that it is possible select the object and create a slice from it in export persona. But this method creates a layer-dependent slice, which does not allow including objects outside hierarchy branch. Then I cannot have, for example, a separate layer for all picture frames and later switch it off to batch export pictures for printing, when you need no frames.  

(pictures and frames is just a simplified example, not an actual problem)

Simple snapping for layer-independent slices would easily solve all of this.

6 hours ago, Justinas said:

o

 

[Pšenda]

7 hours ago, Justinas said:

Simple snapping

I think it won't be that "simple".

The problem is that the current snapping method (grid, guides, object geometry, etc.) is for drawing objects, not for exporting them. That is, to export objects including their differently thick lines, including differently long shadows, etc. Thus, to be applicable, it would require a completely different method of snapping, including specific exporting guides, object border geometry, etc. 

[Old Bruce]

21 hours ago, Justinas said:

It is difficult to get layer-independent slices in precise locations. If you draw a slice manually, snapping weirdly does not work. Precise positions of slices are essential in my case.

I feel your pain and frustration. Why we can't use snapping in the Export Persona baffles me. A work-around which may not work for your particular case is to use the Designer Persona to draw rectangles snapped to what ever it is you want to snap to then set fill and stroke to transparent and group it with the rest of what you want to export select the group in Export persona.

Caveat: This fails utterly if the objects exceed the boundary of the rectangle/slice. As I said it may not work for your particular situation.

[Justinas]

@Old Bruce, My personal workaround is to create a slice from the background rectangle, which will be useless because it will contain only this rectangle and its children. But then you can draw a new slice, which will snap to the first slice. Second slice will get precise dimensions from the first one, and contain all the visible geometry in this area, which is what you need. After that, just delete the first slice. Ugly process, but does the job.

Edited March 26, 2020 by Justinas