Mirroring a whole bunch of objects separately

[Jesse Morris]

I have a design that I'm going to laser cut from the back.  That means I have to mirror it (flip horizontal).  However there are labels for each piece that I want to be marked on the pieces back. So I want those text elements to be in the positions and orientation they are in when I mirror the whole design. However, the text is just etched rather than cut, so doesn't go through, so I would like it to read forwards.

Can anyone think of a convenient way to do this?

I've attached a simplified example - but I want to do this with a design with hundreds of labels, not just four.

[GarryP]

Unless I have misunderstood your requirements I don’t think it’s possible to do what you want non-manually.
When you flip the letter shape, the software cannot know your intent of keeping the internal text within the new geometry of the letter while keeping it ‘the right way round’.
In other words, the letter is just a set of curves and the software doesn’t know how to rotate and move the text to keep it ‘within’ the letter shape. To get your example you will have manually moved and rotated the text but the software doesn’t know how to do what you have done.

[Jesse Morris]

yeah but like I'm wondering if I can select all of them and then do something to mirror each separately, or if I have to, one at a time, select, flip, select, flip, select, flip.  I did just realize I can assign flip to a keyboard shortcut which makes this slightly more bearable.  Previously it was "No thanks, I'll just read the backwards text" level of inconvenient

[GarryP]

You can flip lots of layers individually – but en-masse – by using the Transform Objects Separately mode of the Move Tool but you can’t use the Flip Horizontal function, you need to take a little detour.

• Select all the layers;
• Turn Transform Objects Separately ON;
• Note which layer is selected for manipulation;
• Drag a vertical guide to the left edge of that layer (with snapping to help you);
• Keeping CTRL pressed down, drag the right-hand handle of the layer to the guide until it snaps.

See attached video.
It would be nice if the Flip functionality would work ‘properly’ when Transform Objects Separately was switched on but, until then, this is what we have, although there may be other methods.

[Pšenda]

3 hours ago, GarryP said:

but you can’t use the Flip Horizontal function,

Why not? For me works fine.

Edit: I see it. Unfortunately, Transform object separately does not work "separately", but like Flip an entire group of objects, Flip performs the entire group of objects, not individual elements.
Unfortunately, not even a year old "bump" helped 😞

 

[GarryP]

I had completely forgotten that I had already created a video for this workaround.

[h_d]

This works for me, requires Affinity Designer 1.9.

My labels all have the same colour text. This will be important later...

Turn off Transform Each Item Separately and group each item with its label (on re-reading, you may not need to make these groups, but I've done all the screen shots and I'm not going back...)

Select all the groups:

 

Use Layer - Transform - Flip Horizontal to create a mirror image of the whole thing:

With the layers still selected, Ungroup:

 

Click on just one of the labels and choose Select - Select Same - Fill Colour (this is why you need Designer 1.9, it's not available in earlier versions):

 

 

This will automagically select all the labels . Group the selected labels and choose Layer - Arrange - Move to Front:

 

Expand the labels group and select all the individual labels, but not the group layer itself, by clicking on the top label in the layer list and then. shift-clicking on the bottom one:

 

 

All credit to @GarryP for the next bit. Switch on Transform Objects Separately, drag in a vertical guide to the left-hand edge of the object that is selected for manipulation, hold down Command (macOS) or Ctrl (Windows) and drag the right-hand handle of the selected object to the vertical guide. All the labels should flip in place:

 

It's going to be quite tricky with more objects than just three, but it is possible.

Cheers,

H

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Pšenda]

17 minutes ago, h_d said:

but it is possible.

 and after flip 

[Jesse Morris]

Well, I had no idea the "Transform objects separately" toggle existed, and that is certainly a big helpful step in this.   Thank you.

The rotation is for sure a separate part of problem. Though I think actually in my real life scenario I ran into the labels may be square enough and far enough from the edges that it doesn't matter (they were just A1, A2, ..., A13, up to j1, ... j10) - and I could've shrunk them down to fit (maybe nudging the few that popped out of their containing shape).

I guess what would be nice ideally would be to be able to go in the Transform pane and type *= -1 to fix it.  Strangely I can say W: *= 2 to double all of them, but it looks like if I do R *=-1 it calculates the delta in rotation of the one I last selected, and rotates them all by that same amount, rather than negating the rotation angle for each of them truly independently. I kind of feel like that part might be a bug since IMO my intent is clear and it works differently from the scaling fields of that pane.