How to find out how many layers you have

[busynights]

Since my files have lots of layers, I was wondering if there is a way to find out  how many layers does my file consist of with out counting layers one by one ?

Appreciate your  assistance very much in this regards.

 

[Slammer]

27 minutes ago, busynights said:

Since my files have lots of layers, I was wondering if there is a way to find out  how many layers does my file consist of with out counting layers one by one ?

Appreciate your  assistance very much in this regards.

 

Yup! Layerhog here too, there is no better way than the old one, two, three, four....!

[Gear maker]

A bit of a short cut is to do an expand selection so all layers show. Count how many layers show on the screen at one time then click the bottom of the scroll bar counting how many pages exist and multiple that by the number per page.

It would be nice to be able to reach some statistics like the layer count.  Also the number of nodes in a layer.

[busynights]

15 hours ago, Slammer said:

Yup! Layerhog here too, there is no better way than the old one, two, three, four....!

Yes, that what I am currently doing... thanks for responding Slammer.

[busynights]

15 hours ago, Gear maker said:

A bit of a short cut is to do an expand selection so all layers show. Count how many layers show on the screen at one time then click the bottom of the scroll bar counting how many pages exist and multiple that by the number per page.

It would be nice to be able to reach some statistics like the layer count.  Also the number of nodes in a layer.

Thanks Gear maker, I guess we are stuck at this.! thanks for responding

[GarryP]

This is a similar request to the one here: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/125434-layers but my questions there have not really been answered yet.
The basics of my questions in the other thread are: What do you mean by layers? (Nested, masks, adjustments, etc?) And what would you do with a count of them?
Essentially, what would knowing how many layers there are give you that you don’t have now, except having a number.

[Gear maker]

5 hours ago, GarryP said:

This is a similar request to the one here: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/125434-layers but my questions there have not really been answered yet.
The basics of my questions in the other thread are: What do you mean by layers? (Nested, masks, adjustments, etc?) And what would you do with a count of them?
Essentially, what would knowing how many layers there are give you that you don’t have now, except having a number.

Garry, you are totally right there isn't a "need" to know these metrics.  At least in my case.  But when I have a drawing that I have spent hundreds of hours on and it has several thousands of curves, masks, groups, layers, etc.  There is just something satisfying to be able to put a number to the "size" of the drawing.  Was this the largest drawing so far?  Was the topo map larger than the Baldwin steam locomotive?  Just like when doing a topo map there have been several curves that have hundreds of nodes in each.  It would be fun/interesting to know how many nodes there were in one curve or another.

Sure it would be really interesting to break that count into the number of "curve"s vs. "curves" vs. masks vs. groups vs. adjustments vs... Heck we could even throw in how many gradients there were, or the number of shapes without a fill.  But just knowing the number of individual items showing in the layer panel would be a big start.  I think the number of entries in the layer panel would be about as far in the metrics as I'd care to dig.

Actually there is a bit of a reason other than "pride" or curiosity.  After a drawing gets to be a few thousand curves it gets really sluggish in it's redraw.  It then has to broken up into separate drawings that are merged together at the last stage of the project.  It would be handy to know the size of each piece to see if it is approaching the point where it needs to be split again.  Or if it's even possible to use a metric to determine this point.

Did that answer your unanswered questions?

 

[GarryP]

Thanks for the extra info’.

I can totally understand why someone might have some interest in how many layers there were in a document. I can imagine people thinking things along the lines of: “Wow, there are more than 1,000 layers in this thing.”; or “Has this really all been done with fewer than 200 layers? How on Earth did they do that?”. I’ve been interested in knowing the same thing myself on occasion, especially with other people’s work as my own work rarely hassles my machine in terms of complexity.

However, the thing I was trying to elicit by my questioning was whether there may be a good reason for knowing such information as part of many peoples’ workflows. For instance, and this is a partly-rhetorical question, is there some benefit that many users could get from knowing how many layers there were? I think you may have given the start of a possible answer to that with your example of having to split documents into smaller parts so as to help with redraw speed. (Even with my simple work I’ve had to do this on occasion.)

With this in mind, would it not be better to – instead of number of layers – have some kind of measure of ‘pressure’ on the software? By this I mean some value which the user could keep an eye on and check that it wasn’t getting too high, after which the software would start to feel sluggish? This ‘pressure’ value would probably not be related to the number of layers alone since fifty simple curve layers may be much less work for most machines than just five live filters.

Obviously, the user will be able to tell whether things are sluggish without this ‘pressure’ value but they might be able to use it to tell whether it was the software or the machine which was being overloaded in any particular instance. E.g. Low Pressure + Sluggish = Machine Overloaded (other background tasks may be causing the problem.) This sort of thing might also be useful for the developers to see where some further optimisation may be required.

I have no idea how this sort of thing could be implemented – especially difficult, I'm guessing, across three different operating systems – but I think it might be an interesting idea to pursue, up to a point at least.

Having said all of that, if there’s an easy way for the developers to tell the user how many layers there are and doing so doesn’t impact usability in any noticeable way then, I agree, having a ‘number of layers’ display might be an interesting/fun addition; I just thought that something similar but different may have more overall use to more people.

[lacerto]

(...)

 

[GarryP]

That sounds like a good reason why we should be able to check the number of layers (and some other things).
Maybe not something used by lots of people but I can see some situations where it might be very useful, when sending/exporting a file to be cut or engraved and the exact number of curves and nodes needs to be perfect, for instance.
I think I’m persuaded now. Thanks.

[Gear maker]

3 hours ago, Lagarto said:

Letting the user know the number of objects and nodes (points) at least lets them check that everything is transferred on file exchange (as below, between CorelDRAW and Adobe Illustrator):

Lagarto, the left one which I believe is Corel would be just about perfect to have in Designer.

4 hours ago, GarryP said:

With this in mind, would it not be better to – instead of number of layers – have some kind of measure of ‘pressure’ on the software? By this I mean some value which the user could keep an eye on and check that it wasn’t getting too high, after which the software would start to feel sluggish? This ‘pressure’ value would probably not be related to the number of layers alone since fifty simple curve layers may be much less work for most machines than just five live filters.

Garry, I have thought about something like this before.  Have you ever wondered if doing something one way was more efficient for the program than doing it another way?  Especially when you know the drawing will be large enough that you'll have slowing.  Does an outline use more rendering power than a stroke, or does a rectangle using the rectangle tool use more power to resolve than a set of 4 nodes, type of question?

[GarryP]

I have indeed thought about that sort of thing - to a small extent - but I think these sorts of questions can only properly be answered by the developers.
I am assuming that they have tools which can throw lots of different scenarios at the rendering engine to see which is faster.
The 1.9 betas have some benchmarking functionality so maybe something will come out of that.
If we users can get some kind of idea as to how to organise our documents better, to improve responsiveness, then I think that should be a good thing.

[busynights]

Many thanks for your responses regards to the subject of "How to find out how many layers you have" there were interesting thoughts and ideas put forward by many of you who responded, now its up to the developers to give us a overview of this.

[Amdival]

What scripting language does Affinity support? You should be able to simply iterate over the layers and return a count.

[walt.farrell]

20 minutes ago, AmDivVal said:

What scripting language does Affinity support?

None.

[Gear maker]

On 10/27/2020 at 1:22 AM, GarryP said:

The 1.9 betas have some benchmarking functionality so maybe something will come out of that.

I have seen a few comments about benchmarking how are these accessed?  I have yet to stumble across it.  Though I am mainly in AD and maybe it's in another application.

[Joachim_L]

1 minute ago, Gear maker said:

I have seen a few comments about benchmarking how are these accessed?

Benchmarking is only for APhoto resp. the APhoto persona in APublisher.

[Gear maker]

1 minute ago, Joachim_L said:

Benchmarking is only for APhoto resp. the APhoto persona in APublisher.

Okay, thanks.