Cutting Circles fails sometimes in Affinity Designer (mac + win)

[Marcocampo]

Hi Affinity Team,

I just encountered a bug in Affinity Designer (1.8.4 on Mac as well as the newest 1.8.5 Windows Version) when cutting a circle with another overlaying circle. Which sometimes works, but also gives unpredictable falke results instead of a clean cut. The chance is somewhat 50:50 to succeed, or not. Please take a look at that, thanks. I made a small vid of my case, and attached also the afdesign-File.

cut-circles-issue.afdesign

[MEB]

Thanks Marcocampo,
We are aware a few boolean operations still fail in specific circumstances or with specific objects types/operations. We hope to keep improving them as we move forward with the dev. I've added your file to our report to be tested against new builds/code. Thanks for reporting it.

[lepr]

There is a workaround for that example and many other failed Boolean operations: hold down option/alt key when invoking the Subtract (or other Boolean) command to make a good Compound object. If you need a single Curve or Curves object as the result, apply Convert To Curves command to the Compound object.

[Hangman]

It seems that Boolean operations are a bit of an achilles heel for the affinity suite (hopefully an area that will be recified/improved in the v2.0 release), not sure why but they seem to be one area that have failed to be fixed over multiple releases despite widespread reporting of issues. The option/alt workaround is interesting and works well, why is that and what is the addition of option/alt actually doing that the standard boolean selection isn't and why is, whatever the option/alt workaround not the standard operation for boolean operations if it works as expected?

Just curious?

[lepr]

1 hour ago, Hangman said:

It seems that Boolean operations are a bit of an achilles heel for the affinity suite (hopefully an area that will be recified/improved in the v2.0 release), not sure why but they seem to be one area that have failed to be fixed over multiple releases despite widespread reporting of issues. The option/alt workaround is interesting and works well, why is that and what is the addition of option/alt actually doing that the standard boolean selection isn't and why is, whatever the option/alt workaround not the standard operation for boolean operations if it works as expected?

Just curious?

The 1.8.0 release of the apps was touted as having improved Booleans, but the reality was that it almost completely wrecked Booleans. Subsequent updates saw some improvement but Booleans are still less reliable now than in version 1.7.3. (Your example works in 1.7.3 without the Compound workaround.) I suspect that the more reliable code from 1.7.3 is still used for creating Compound objects in 1.8.4/1.8.5 and in the current 1.9 beta.

[Marcocampo]

Thanks anon2, that workaround solves that problem for me, for now. Let me say that this is the first issue for me with Designer over the last 16 months, since I switched from CS to Affinity. It took less that an hour to get a response as well as a solution. This is great, and I appreciate that !

To talk about Designers qualities: I did another thing with circles, much more complicated, with no problem at all. With an earlier version of designer btw. Maybe you're right considering a step back with the boolcode … but I am not a programmer.