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[Aff. Designer] Please help! "Expand stroke" not doing anything...


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Hey guys. I've made a logo with vector brush strokes, and i need to make shapes out of the strokes. I select the curve layers that house the strokes, then apply "Expand stroke" from the menu. And... nothing happens - the layer(s) get(s) deselected, and i still have strokes.

What am i missing?

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If you were expecting ‘Expand Stroke’ to turn a brush texture into a shape, then I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood what the function is designed to do: all it actually does is to take a stroke laid down on a path and use the width of that stroke to create a shape. For example, if you select a vertical stroke which is 16 pixels wide and 48 pixels long, ‘Expand Stroke’ will give you a rectangle which is 16 px wide by 48 px high.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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I'm afraid you're right. How to solve my following problem then? Maybe you'll have an idea for a workaround.

I have to print this logo (that i did w- vector brushes) on a huge banner. The problem is that the dimensions are so big that the strokes get too thin (we know that Designer sadly doesn't scale up the brushes when you scale up the layer...)

I tried to export to all possible file formats, but can't get to export shapes - it always rasterizes.

Could you suggest an idea how to get the logo this big, without having to rasterize?

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13 minutes ago, sveto said:

Do vector brushes not export as vector shapes when i export a PDF for printing?

The only real vector brush in Affinity is Solid Pen which is basically a standard stroke. The other so-called Vector Brushes are raster images which get stretched or repeated along a path and, therefore, strokes painted with them cannot be exported as vector shapes and cannot be converted by Expand Stroke to a shape.

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Yeah, that explains why my whole workflow falls apart right now. I'm on a deadline, and can't export the vectors i need. Oh well, since Designer doesn't have a Trace Bitmap function, i'll have to vectorize with Inkscape again and reimport into Designer/Publisher...

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Hi @sveto, what @anon2 said - the issue is that so called vector brushes aren’t vector brushes. Lmao.

why serif decided to call them vector brushes is beyond my understanding - textured brushes would fit and wouldn’t cause dozens of misunderstandings.

I’ve actually found out after buying some of those brushes from affinity store. Yes, I was offered a refund but declined for I finally realized that I sadly can’t take serif/affinity seriously. Yet.

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Sadly. If anyone would for some reason look up my previous posts, it would quickly become obvious that i've had issue after issue with Affinity in the past. I'm not a hobbyist and need tools that i can rely on. Why i thought i could leave the Adobe ecosystem idk, but in hindsight, it was a bad decision. I'm back on Photoshop already, and who knows if i won't be needing Illustrator in the foreseeable future...

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  • 2 months later...
  • 2 months later...

Oh. You gotta be kidding me. The thing is - who zooms brushes to 3000% to realize those are probably high-res bitmaps? After he uses for a tool called Vector Brush and it even works in normal zoom ratios. I have been working on a client design, everything is done and suddenly I realize those files cannot be exported as vectors, because all the formats contain brutal pixelation. 

Honestly this is a big disappointment. And not a first one. I have been trying several times to switch to Affinity. But I have to keep taking it as the secondary option only, because I cannot rely on the product yet. I am very sorry. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Oh <sad face>   

I've been gradually gradually working through some of the simpler things I do in Illustrator to convert my work to Affinity.
As I am retired doing limited numbers of posters/tickets etc for political and charity organisations, the impact isn't as great as for a pro, but .......
having been used to Illustrator's Expand Appearance on brushes  as per the attached image ( line-applybrush-expand-styleit)  this is something of a shock.

Fortunately I keep an old Illustrator running (largely for the Scriptographer plugin) so I can go back to it when I want to do anything 'clever'.

Untitled-1.jpg

Win 11 PCs 64bit  Envy and Envy tablet + Filter Forge  Retired computer systems tester doing graphics for charities and politics etc.

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