Dimensioning tool, please!

[rt-it]

This is about the only thing that still prevents me from ditching Corel Draw in favor of Affinity Designer. 

The ability to add configurable snapped dimension lines ( that auto-dimension as needed) is essential to my use case...

[DutchDude]

Yep. Need it!! 

AND a way to adjust the drawing to scale. So that I can measure meters on an A4 page.

[Rayzorman]

I don't understand why dimensional tools aren't provided. Any drawing usually starts with dimensional requirements and then as the project progresses it is often necessary to make measurements or re-scale ensure that key features are within bounds.  Please Please Please add a full set of dimension tools.

 

[AffinityMakesMeWonder]

I don’t know why my earlier reply been deleted by Serif, but, I must insist that you can’t compair 700$ Corel Draws functionalties with Affinity Designers (25-50$)...

You pay more for Corel Draw just BECAUSE it has the tool you need...

But, for me, Affinity Suite is more than enough...

[Patrick Connor]

@AffinityMakesMeSmile

This post by rt-it (and it's subsequent replies) are in the Feedback section. The users here are asking for a new feature to be added or expressing surprise at the current feature set or functionality. That is the exact purpose of this forum section.

Your earlier post was hidden as you effectively told a user off for asking for a feature using the mechanism we have provided for users to do that, and was out of order. Your more recent post is much better as it explains why they may be disappointed when features are compared side by side, but I would suggest users can request whatever they like irrespective of how much Serif chooses to charge. Just because the Affinity Suite is "more than enough" for you does not mean that it is finished, or we would not have the feedback section.

Please do not post into the feedback section telling others that they are wrong to ask or expect changes. That is not what other customers should do.

[TXTnPIX]

Allow me to second that emotion. Setting scale units is a key feature in drawing anything that doesn't live on a piece of paper. Even large scale printing (billboards, posters, wall art, vehicle wraps) is difficult to do without some reference to measurements in meatspace. I'm just getting started and loving the software as a whole (leaving Corel Suite after 18 years) but I instantly had to pull out my calculator to dimension a floor plan I'm working on for an event venue.

Add my vote in favor of adding the ability to edit the scale units on dimension tools in Designer!

[TXTnPIX]

As an aside, the way I work around no dimension setting on other software, and something that works well here, is to set up a drawing space big enough to handle your drawing at an easy scale to manage in your head (e.g. .1" = 1" or 1" = 1' or that metric thing  ) then after the drawing is done, scale the whole thing to something that fits on the output medium you need to print on. Much faster than getting out the calculator every you need a new measurement. (The project I mentioned above was an existing document that I brought over from CorelDraw to use in a document, so the page was already done and I didn't want to tear it all apart.) It seems that max sheet size is 71.111ft x 71.111ft (2167.47cm) which gives you a lot of room to get to an easy-to-convert scale.

[MikeK36]

On 5/27/2020 at 11:44 AM, DutchDude said:

Yep. Need it!! 

AND a way to adjust the drawing to scale. So that I can measure meters on an A4 page.

Definitely!

[rt-it]

Any hints about progress on this?? ( its been a year now...) yay or nay, on the grand scheme of priorities, will we see this in a year?

[telemax]

+1 again 

 

[Jay K Elemenopy]

Adding my voice to this request!  I've been promoting Affinity to my design team, BUT the one single holdup for companywide adoption is scaling and dimensioning.  We do work that must often go before public review commissions, requiring a standard printed sheet size with a scale so a rule can be placed directly on the drawings to verify questions the commissioners might have.  We are strapped with using a VERY buggy Corel install on multiple workstations, creating as many corrupt files as good ones.  The entire design pool is miserable using Corel, but there is simply no better option. Affinity is SO CLOSE I could scream.  Our drawings also go straight to production, the vector files are use directly by the CNC machines and the drawings are used for verifications and hand-manufacturing. The production team uses scale rules as well to verify undimensioned specs.

Let me be quite clear about this: Affinity, you are losing out on MASS ADOPTION of Designer as a production tool for this ONE SINGLE FATAL DRAWBACK.

I'm your biggest fan and rather desperately want to use Affinity exclusively, but until then, any industry that makes proposals involving permitting commissions/dimensioned manufacturing drawings is going to say no thanks. I know enough about your program to understand there are difficulties in implementation. (Clearly scrapping the whole kernel is not desirable) But, please understand what is on the other side of this development. BTW, I would expect you could charge over 100$ just for an optional plugin that works. Advertise in trade mags and you quadruple your market share in a month or less. My field, Signage, is a $12 Billion industry in America alone with over 92,000 employees. A significant portion of those people are designers creating scale drawings. Sign companies are notoriously cheap, and Corel is already testing our ability to buy licenses for every production station that uses live drawings.  If a company as crappy as Corel can figure it out decades ago...               lookin' at you Affinity.

Scaling.

Dimensioning.

Please.

[Darryl W]

I too have joined the legions abandoning corelDraw. My work does not involve as much design work as it used to, but I occasionally still need to produce a technical drawing with dimensions. I am "getting by" with the line-arrow function, but it is tedious and clunky. A dimension tool and the ability to adjust the world scale would pretty much complete my needs for 99% of my drawings and designs. Anything extra would be gravy. 🙂

[loukash]

On Mac, the Intaglio app had such a Dimension tool with snapping to objects.

Unfortunately it's been apparently abandoned, and the purgatorydesign.com website is now parked.
It's still downloadable from web.archive.org/web/20200914164613/purgatorydesign.com/Intaglio/download.html but you cannot buy a license. (I bough it many years ago in an app bundle, and for me it was particularly useful to convert "antique" vector Mac PICT documents to PDF.)

Intaglio can open or import PDF as editable curves. But for some reason it cannot properly display text objects when exported as PDF from Affinity. (@Patrick Connor: any idea why?) Use Print > PDF > Save as PDF to export via MacOS Quartz PDFContext instead.
You cannot copy & paste from Affinity to Intaglio but when finished with the dimensions, you can then copy & paste vice versa, including the dimension labels as editable text.

It's a "dirty" workaround, but if you already have Intaglio, it will do the job relatively quickly in case you need it to get done now.

[mdriftmeyer]

Blender has this feature. To have this feature for CAD/CAM, isometric top, front, side and 3D projection (really 2.5d) and leveraging brushes for shading would give the Suite blueprint scale production and Publisher a huge lift in technical publishing

[loukash]

On 3/17/2021 at 11:16 AM, loukash said:

the Intaglio app had such a Dimension tool with snapping to objects

Speaking of which, the newest version of EazyDraw can import Intaglio documents – which are based on SVG.
And, EazyDraw seems to have quite excessive dimensions tools:

I've never liked the user interface though. But it would get the job done.
The trial version is only limited in how many objects you can create.
Also, currently they have an attractive crossgrade offer for Intaglio users, so perhaps I'd even buy a license.

SVG also seems to more or less work as an interchange format with Affinity. Oddly, not via clipboard though.

As for stability… well, on Catalina I made the demo version crash or hang (and thus having to force quit) about every 10 minutes within the last hour so far.

[nolamike]

Just another strong encouragement for adding dimensioning tools and setting the document scale, including with feet-inches units (OK I won't get greedy). This really would open Affinity Designer up to a whole new audience. One that is a little starved for a good solution right now.

—Former Intaglio user looking for a new home

[Johannes]

They are almost there 😉 just ...

[loukash]

38 minutes ago, Johannes said:

just ...

… baking them, to use the Affinity jargon.

[v_kyr]

LibreDraw part of LibreOffice (freeware) offers this too ...

• LibreOffice Draw Dimension Lines Part 1 (Dimension Layer Tab)

• LibreOffice Draw Dimension Lines Part 2 (Dimension Line Dialog Box)

• LibreOffice Draw Dimension Lines Part 3 (Dimension Line Scale)

[loukash]

54 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

freeware

Sure, but… the UI/UX is so utt bugly that I always use it only as the absolutely last resort when really everything else fails…

[v_kyr]

On 4/8/2021 at 2:33 PM, loukash said:

Sure, but… the UI/UX is so utt bugly that I always use it only as the absolutely last resort when really everything else fails…

Other people may feel differently, as there are many LibreOffice, Gimp, Inkscape etc. users around. It's also always a matter of personal taste and what people are used to. - However, fact is that LibreDraw offers some features Affinity Designer is missing and Dimensioning is just one of them.

[rt-it]

Libre office being OPEN SOURCE,  I expect that this should give the Affinity developers a little headstart on developing this much-needed feature! 😀

[Rob Pereira]

On 2/26/2021 at 9:55 PM, Jay K Elemenopy said:

Adding my voice to this request!  I've been promoting Affinity to my design team, BUT the one single holdup for companywide adoption is scaling and dimensioning.  We do work that must often go before public review commissions, requiring a standard printed sheet size with a scale so a rule can be placed directly on the drawings to verify questions the commissioners might have.  We are strapped with using a VERY buggy Corel install on multiple workstations, creating as many corrupt files as good ones.  The entire design pool is miserable using Corel, but there is simply no better option. Affinity is SO CLOSE I could scream.  Our drawings also go straight to production, the vector files are use directly by the CNC machines and the drawings are used for verifications and hand-manufacturing. The production team uses scale rules as well to verify undimensioned specs.

Let me be quite clear about this: Affinity, you are losing out on MASS ADOPTION of Designer as a production tool for this ONE SINGLE FATAL DRAWBACK.

I'm your biggest fan and rather desperately want to use Affinity exclusively, but until then, any industry that makes proposals involving permitting commissions/dimensioned manufacturing drawings is going to say no thanks. I know enough about your program to understand there are difficulties in implementation. (Clearly scrapping the whole kernel is not desirable) But, please understand what is on the other side of this development. BTW, I would expect you could charge over 100$ just for an optional plugin that works. Advertise in trade mags and you quadruple your market share in a month or less. My field, Signage, is a $12 Billion industry in America alone with over 92,000 employees. A significant portion of those people are designers creating scale drawings. Sign companies are notoriously cheap, and Corel is already testing our ability to buy licenses for every production station that uses live drawings.  If a company as crappy as Corel can figure it out decades ago...               lookin' at you Affinity.

Scaling.

Dimensioning.

Please.

You just said everything I would.

Scaling, Dimentions and Macro or Scripting.

This are the features that would move my company from CorelDRAW to Affinity. Without doubt.

[Knotty]

My trial period has run out and I will not be buying it unless they add dimensioning, (at least as good as Draw Plus that I continue to use).
I have been with Serif since the start and this is the first real disappointment.

[billcook13]

Please add dimensioning and scaling to Designer.