Cut path tool

[Apfel]

Hi! 

I'm looking for a tool that might be strait forward, but I can't figure it out.

I have a line with a black stroke, and a grey rectangle (see first image). 

I want to delete the rectangle from the line, so that it results in two lines to the left and right of the rectangle, like in the second image.

I can get something similar to what I want using "Expand stroke" and the "Subtract" tool, but I do not want to expand the stroke because I want to be able to change the stroke settings later.

Is there a way to do this in Affinity Designer?

 

Thanks for your input!

[firstdefence]

Yes,

1. Select the node tool
2. add a node to the line where it intersects the square
3. select both the added nodes and select break curve from the node tools context menu

You should end up with 3 curves, just delete the curve you don’t need.

[Alfred]

If you want to keep the original single line so that you can adjust it in one go, you can simply hide the bit in the middle.

1. Make two copies of the rectangle

2. Position one copy on each side of the original

3. Boolean ‘Add’ the new rectangles to create a Curves object

4. Set the Fill opacity of the Curves object to 0%

5. In the Layers panel, drag the line into the clipping position on the Curves layer

When you adjust the attributes of the single nested object, the appearance of both ends of the line will change simultaneously.

cut-path.afdesign

[JimmyJack]

Certainly learning what is available regarding cutting objects (and how to do it) is important:

But, Is there a reason you don't want to just position the gray square in front of the single line?

[Alfred]

2 minutes ago, JimmyJack said:

Is there a reason you don't want to just position the gray square in front of the single line?

A good question, @JimmyJack, and one that I forgot I had asked myself before getting diverted onto the task of working out how to use the clipping technique that I described in my previous post!

[Apfel]

Thank you for all the answers! Maybe I should have added some context on what I'm actually trying to do, but it's slightly complicated.

So I have a background pattern that consists of a lot of lines. I want to "cut out" an area of that background pattern, e.g. imagine I want to fill a circle with the pattern.

Initially, I used a mask for this, but then I found out that Affinity Designer then rasterizes the pattern when exporting! It won't rasterize when I remove the mask, so I had to find a different solution.

My solution was to take all the lines, expand the strokes, union the resulting curves, and then use the intersect tool to restrict the pattern to the shape I want.

I was unhappy with this solution, because I wanted to achieve this without expanding the strokes.

 

@firstdefence: The snapping feature of the node tool makes this a lot more doable manually, but I would have had to cut hundreds of lines in my case, which made that approach unusable. I learned something about the node tool though!

@Alfred: Wow, I totally didn't realise that just adding a curve to another curve makes the parent pretty much work as a mask! Affinity will export it without rasterizing, too. This is awesome, I definitely learned something new here; this approach works to solve my original problem. If someone else has the same problem, here would be my adjusted instructions:

• Create a rectangle the size of your document, set fill and stroke to transparent
• Subtract the area you want to hide
• Follow @Alfreds step 4 and 5

@JimmyJack: Yes, because the gray rectangle is just to specify the area I wanted to cut. I do not want to have it in the final design - the area of the rectangle needs to be transparent in the end.

 

To summarise: Thanks, you found a solution to my original problem!

However, I would still like to have a tool that allows me to cut lines using another line or shape. Maybe I should create a feature request, because it looks like it doesn't exist. I now know how to work around it in certain cases, but it's not too hard to imagine a scenario where the approach from above won't do. For what it's worth, in Inkscape, the tool I was hoping to find is called "Cut Path".

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, Apfel said:

@Alfred: Wow, I totally didn't realise that just adding a curve to another curve makes the parent pretty much work as a mask!

As @Alfred mentioned, this is known as clipping. The YouTube video tutorial Masking vs Clipping Layers by @James Ritson demonstrates the basic differences between masking & clipping. (The same video is also available here from affinity.serif.com.)

Something you might find interesting is to compare moving the parent layer around on the canvas using the Move Tool with & without the parent layer's "Lock Children" attribute enabled on the context toolbar.

For example, in the attached Clipping & parent locking.afdesign file, Lock Children is not enabled, so moving the "Parent" layer moves all of its children with it. But if you deselect that lock, only the parent layer moves.