Is there a scalpel or scissor tool in Affinity Designer yet?

[Krolly]

I find the only way to cut an image into two separate sections at the moment is to redraw BOTH sections. Copy paste and deleting the nodules I don't want, still leaves the half image as a compound shape and 'release compound' greyed out.

Has a workaround been found please?

[firstdefence]

There is no scissor tool, no knife tool in Affinity Designer, The only method I know of is to add a node where you want to break the curve and use the break curve icon in the context menu of the node tool

 

[Greyfox]

6 hours ago, Krolly said:

I find the only way to cut an image into two separate sections at the moment is to redraw BOTH sections. Copy paste and deleting the nodules I don't want, still leaves the half image as a compound shape and 'release compound' greyed out.

Has a workaround been found please?

.. or if it is a closed curve or shape you want to cut, you could draw another closed curve across it and use the subtract function.

 

 

[MKM Pottery Tools]

As people have noted, there is no direct equivalent to the knife tool in Adobe Illustrator.  However, the subtract and divide tools (upper right on the toolbar - part of the Boolean tool set) can be used to accomplish what the knife tool could accomplish.  Not quite as convenient, but still efficient. As you will find, perhaps even better once you get used to it.  Select what needs to be divided, make sure you ungroup all of those items, then draw a narrow (or wide) box over (on top of) the area that needs to be cut.  Select all the items and choose divide (or subtract).  It is important that all elements be ungrouped.  This method gives quite a bit of flexibility in terms of cutting parts from a bigger whole, or cutting out or dividing sections.  In some ways, it is better that a simple knife.  For trimming designs that stick out past a particular 'box', it works great.  

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, MKM Pottery Tools said:

... then draw a narrow (or wide) box over (on top of) the area that needs to be cut. ....

The drawback with this approach for many use cases is it removes a small amount of the shape(s) to be sliced apart, equal to the width of the box (rectangle). The only method I know of that avoids this is the one @firstdefence mentioned above in the first reply to this topic, adding & then breaking nodes where the cut should be made.

[Krolly]

I haven't tried any of these workarounds yet, but I thank you all for helping. I'll save this information for my next diagram. I've been drawing bird skeletons and it would help enormously to be able to copy sections of a shape to put a defining line over a coloured area. I'll never close another shape until I've copied it into a new document while it's still a line! Trick is to remember.

Grey Fox's workaround looks like it cuts a shape but leaves you with two enclosed shapes, which of course is not really what I'm after because I'll be stuck with a line across my artwork that I can't easily cover up.

[thatGuy]

you can use a curve without stroke to divide without creating a gap

edit - never mind, no need to disable the stroke here.

[Krolly]

Thanks thatGuy.

In your example, I end up with 2 'closed' shapes. Each one has an unnecessary (in your case, curved) line, joining the lines I want to superimpose over my shape.

What I want to end up with (using yours as an example) is (using the right-hand brown panel) the top line, the vertical line and the bottom line. The curve that joins the top line and the bottom line will appear in my diagram.

Say I draw a convoluted shape with a black outline and blue full. Then I want to (for the sake of argument) put a parallel line inside a section of the convoluted shape. Just a line which doesn't join back up to itself.

With Illustrator, I copy, paste a section of the copied shape, clear any 'fill' colour, and I have a black LINE with a start and a finish (and is not a closed shape) to lay over the blue shape and which matches the section I have cut it away from. 

Put it this way. I want to click on the section of line between two nodes – hit delete – and have that bit of line disappear, breaking my shape into a line. 

Surely a clever software developer could make that happen?

 

[sambader]

I found a post on this back in 2019 which claimed that a knife tool was on the roadmap... seems it never made it!

None of the workarounds work very well without quite a lot of extra work.

The 'break curve' command seems to only be available on an adhoc basis (I'm sure there some sort of logic to when it can work and when it can't but I haven't figured out what that is).

 

[Alfred]

20 minutes ago, sambader said:

The 'break curve' command seems to only be available on an adhoc basis (I'm sure there some sort of logic to when it can work and when it can't but I haven't figured out what that is).

The ‘Break curve’ command doesn’t work with parametric shapes (drawn with the Rectangle Tool, Ellipse Tool, Polygon Tool, etc). You need to ‘Convert to Curves’ first.