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Pencil Tool Feature Requests (iPad and Desktop)


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I really like drawing with the pencil tool in Affinity Designer (especially on the iPad), but there are a few features requests that would make it that much nicer.

  1. The ability to continue a line by starting to draw from the end of an existing selected line.
  2. The ability to reshape a selected line by drawing over existing segments and replacing the shape of the line with the newly drawn shape.
  3. The ability to automatically close or connect a path by terminating the line on an existing node of the selected path(s).
  4. A way to minimize the number of nodes created by the pencil tool (smoothing settings, clean-up/minimize commands, etc). I often find that after I draw I line I have to go back and remove LOTS of additional nodes (and connect nodes/lines) in order to not end up with a big mess of unnecessary geometry as the composition grows in complexity. It's a very zen-like activity, but it tends to take A LOT of time and breaks me out of the flow of drawing.

I know many of these have been requested in various places in the past, just bumping them up again.

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My apologies. It appears that I am late to respond to this tag.

So at the time of me posting that, that was originally the case. However, Designer 1.7 introduced the "Sculpt" mode for the Pencil Tool. This can do what you are requesting in suggestion 1 and 2. For 3, it is a little tricky since you do not close a path the same way as in Illustrator. You have to kind of redraw both ends as you connect them for them to close properly.

And for 4, yes, I agree that can be frustrating. There may not be a way to reduce nodes in a fashion that does not reform the shape too much, but there are two things I can suggest. One: You can start off drawing the shapes with the brush stabilizers. They allow a drawing mode in which you pull on a string to reduce shaky hand movements. It may or may not give you the result you are looking for, but it does give more precision, which I like. Two: After the shapes are drawn, you can use the "Transform Mode" of the Node Tool to transform nodes; not shapes. This means resizing, skewing, repositioning, and rotating. I understand this does not reduce nodes, but what this can do is map out your ideal shape before you start removing them.

Seeing how we are talking about the Pencil Tool, I hope it is not invading your topic to explain what I want. Something that I personally want more than anything for that tool is a way to toggle post-correction. I would like a feature that allows the user to decide how much a line is corrected after drawn or even have the ability to toggle it off.

The website is still a work in progress. The "Comics" and "Shop" sections are not yet ready. Feel free to connect with me and let me know what you like or what can be improved. You can contact me here, on my contact page, YouTube channel, or Twitter account. Thanks and have a great day!

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  • 1 month later...

I've been working in Illustrator on the iPad recently and I'm really impressed with two things they've done:

  1. auto-close paths when the last node is within (~10px tolerance) of the first node. This is so much nicer than having to explicitly close the path using the 'close' button or directly join the two nodes together using the node tool.
  2. convert node type to 'sharp' when drawing is paused in place (with the pencil still down) for roughly 0.5 sec. The app then provides (oddly satisfying) feedback that the node has been converted to a sharp point and you are then free to continue drawing with that same line/curve/shape from that sharp node.

I've no doubt Adobe will seek to protect their investments in their UX, but much like the now ubiquitous 'double-tap to undo' I'm sure we'll start to see new conventions emerge over time.

Oh, and the smoothing, node deletion and simplify geometry commands are so, so good. I hope deleting nodes within a path in Affinity will one day take into account the existing geometry and attempt to preserve the shape while removing the unwanted nodes.

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4 hours ago, Bryan Rieger said:

Oh, and the smoothing, node deletion and simplify geometry commands are so, so good. I hope deleting node within a path in Affinity will one day take into account the existing geometry and attempt to preserve the shape while removing the unwanted nodes.

Well, guess what, Designer trying to preserving the shape when deleting nodes is kind of implemented. No way as good as in Illustrator, CorelDRAW, Inkscape or other vector programs. But it is not enabled by default. Argh.

And the keyboard shortcut on Windows is.... Ctrl + Alt + Backspace. Mac Alt + Delete. Worlds apart. So I had to google it - I had once again forgotten all bout that illogical shortcut. 

It is not possible to assign another shortcut for it - but you can assign a keyboard shortcut for the cat tool

image.png.d9878a4b12533809dc25c45c1625be81.png

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
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12 hours ago, Jowday said:

Mac Alt + Delete

For me it does the same as a simple Delete: it just removes the node(s) – and changes the shape.

MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2

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11 hours ago, loukash said:

For me it does the same as a simple Delete: it just removes the node(s) – and changes the shape.

The Affinity apps on macOS are ignoring modifier keys when used with the Backspace key. They've had that regression for many months and it persists into the 1.9 release candidates. I've mentioned it before but nobody at Serif responded.

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1 minute ago, anon2 said:

Affinity apps on macOS are ignoring modifier keys when used with the Backspace key

Hm, I see.
Not on text though: fn-delete (forward delete), option-delete (delete word) or command-delete (delete line) work as expected.

MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2

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  • 1 year later...

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