Imported Inkscape plain SVG's not showing full canvas

[affinitysolutions]

I am migrating from Inkscape to Affinity Designer. In inkscape you can have a canvas that is much larger than the "page", the latter (letter, A4, etc.) being delineated by black borders. However, when opened in Designer, only the content within Inkscape's page borders shows. 

I tried enlarging the canvas in Designer but that only affects the limited opened content. Yes, I did save the whole canvas in Inkscape as a plain SVG, and all the data is there.

Is there a way I can open the SVG in Designer and access the entire saved canvas and not just the "page"?

[v_kyr]

Hi and welcome!

Make a copy of the SVG file and edit it in a plain text editor, edit there the "viewBox="0 0 xxxx.x xxxx.x" entry accordingy to the appropriate dimensions of the Inkscape canvas sizes. Save the SVG text file and retry loading it up in Affinity (and a webbrowser too).

[affinitysolutions]

That works well. I can now see all of the original Inkscape file in Designer if I drag the selection box around, and then zoom in on the part I want to work on.

As shown in the screenshot below, in my case I entered 1000 500 000 000. Strangely, typing in larger numbers does not increase the viewing area in Designer.

All up, there are four sets of digits, including the latter two sets of 0's I did not change. Could you please explain briefly how these interact?

[Greyfox]

7 hours ago, affinitysolutions said:

...Is there a way I can open the SVG in Designer and access the entire saved canvas and not just the "page"?

Perhaps an alternative is to simply open the Plain SVG in Designer, then use the Artboard tool to drag out an artboard a bit larger than the SVG bounding box.

 

 

[affinitysolutions]

The artboard suggestion works, but with one difference I can see. Unlike editing the SVG file, the viewing area becomes a fixed size. IOW any content not within it cannot be "panned" through the viewing area with the move tool. In terms of functionality, this probably does not matter. But I wonder if the overall content of a larger artboard might tend to slow the program.

[v_kyr]

3 hours ago, affinitysolutions said:

Could you please explain briefly how these interact?

See the SVG viewbox definition in order to understand what it is meant for ...

• viewBox

Quote

viewBox

The viewBox attribute defines the position and dimension, in user space, of an SVG viewport. 

The value of the viewBox attribute is a list of four numbers: min-x, min-y, width and height. The numbers separated by whitespace and/or a comma, which specify a rectangle in user space which is mapped to the bounds of the viewport established for the associated SVG element (not the browser viewport).

 

[Greyfox]

5 hours ago, affinitysolutions said:

The artboard suggestion works, but with one difference I can see. Unlike editing the SVG file, the viewing area becomes a fixed size. IOW any content not within it cannot be "panned" through the viewing area with the move tool. In terms of functionality, this probably does not matter. But I wonder if the overall content of a larger artboard might tend to slow the program.

You can resize an artboard at any stage, or you can add additional artboards as required. So if you make the initial artboard large enough to include all of the items in the original Inkscape file, and you then want to add something new outside of that area, either expand the artboard or add an additional artboard.  I doubt the size of an artboard would have any significant effect on performance, however the nature and amount of the content added to an artboard might have, as it might on an ordinary page. I haven't experienced any problems with this myself.