Common Problems I've run into with specific questions

[kmaroney]

Hello whoever is reading this! I love Affinity, especially the non-subscriber status of the program and its multiple capabilities. However, I have run into some very annoying problems (much less than Inkscape though!) when switching from Adobe Illustrator. In my workflow, I have to use many graphs which I generate in R and then edit in something like Illustrator or, now, Affinity. This requires me to frequently make use of a text-aware tool, which used to be Illustrator. 

Here are problems I have run up against when using this wonderful software which I cannot for the life of me find the fixes for. Maybe some of the more Illustrator literate can help me understand what is going wrong and exactly how to fix these issues, because they seem like they should have simple fixes:

Issue #1: Automatic text grouping!

This happens SO often - when I open up a figure which has text in it, it will group the text in the widest range imaginable. Above there are only 2 pieces of text which are grouped - 1 is "FC Difference" on the furthest right side while another is "165" on the furthest left side. I have tried turning off "Group Lines of text into text frames" and it solves this type of long range grouping (which should still be detected as not being related!), but then randomly other text lines which are close together will all get grouped as below (replaced some text with filler for this):

In order to separate out these lines I ultimately have to delete that line from the group and create a new line of text. Is there some way to separate them out from this grouping (before it's suggested, "Ungroup" doesn't work because it is not detected as a group in the first place!). 

Issue #2: Whatever this is

 

It should look like this ^                                                                          but instead will sometimes look like this ^                                            And here is a close-up ^

What is happening here? These are individual pie charts with circle shapes around them, but in image 2, they instead (it looks like to me) have individual boxes as well. I don't know why they are so radically different while being basically the same kind of figure. I noticed that if I select the "black square" that is there, I can just set fill to 0 and it goes away, but there are sometimes 100s of these to remove (and I don't know why they're getting added in the first place!) - any ideas on what to do here? Can I just select everything else of the same parameters as this object on the screen at once somehow to remove/unfill them all?

Issue #3: No "Live Paint"

This has already been pointed out on a few posts where the answer was that a feature like this has not been implemented yet, but those were very old (at least 1-2 years old) so mayyyybe this has since been included? Any thoughts on this or whether there is something to be done on this front? For example, let's say I want to make some figure with very strange dimensions by drawing lines and coloring in the intersections - what is the easiest way to do this aside from clicking every individual line and joining up the ends (provided they don't disappear randomly!) and then doing divide?

Issue #4: Is there a way to tell Affinity to automatically just save the document as the same file type it was when it was opened? I do many of these things on a shared Google Drive and don't want to clutter it with .affinity files if I can avoid it, so it is somewhat frustrating to have to export and rewrite every time I want to change some small thing. I know it may seem... unnecessary to change, but am just wondering while I'm asking all these things if I can just change that default somewhere/where. 

 

I realize I can probably spend around 20-50 hourss looking at every single tool in Affinity to try and diagnose some of these and I'm sure I would in time, but one of the things besides the price that drew me to this program over Illustrator was the intuitive nature of it. I am sure there must be some easy fixes for these things that don't involve just deleting things or editing every single shape one by one for around 30 mins to an hour. Please, enlighten me if you are able to and have run into these problems before 

 

Edited June 26, 2020 by kmaroney

[kmaroney]

Just bumping this - if noone has answers, that's fine, but just asking the questions. I don't really use forums much, but figured I'd give it a shot

 

[firstdefence]

Hi, what file type are you exporting to and then opening in Affinity?

 

[kmaroney]

Hey firstdefence. Mainly pdf's I generate through R. For the most part, I use Affinity to edit, simplify, and enhance. 

[firstdefence]

#1 I don’t think you can do much about the text that you haven’t already done other than experimenting with the PDF export options in R Studio.

#2 Are the black squares a separate object behind or grouped with the small pie charts?

#3 As far as I am aware there is still no live paint.

#4 There is no setting to tell affinity to save a file back to what it is, after editing a PDF it would need to be exported as a PDF

 

 

[kmaroney]

Hey firstdefence,

1: I don’t have this inefficient text grouping issue in Illustrator, but maybe that’s just one downside of it to Illustrator (there are plenty of pluses for Affinity that Illustrator doesn’t have also).
2: yes, and they are only created behind some of the pie charts, regardless of whether the pie chart consists of multiple sections or not. The only solution I’ve found is to select each one and set fill to 0. Was hoping there might be a more efficient way to do this, like select all object of similar dimensions and filling in the document?

3: Big sad, but understandable

4: That seems like it should be a feature, but thanks for pointing out that this is not something to worry about. 
 

Thanks for responding to my post.