affinity designer Artwork for greetings cards

[William Overington]

I recovered a copy of fantastic.pdf from the forum thread, opened it in Affinity Designer, and, as the font is installed, I could get a png out of it straightforwardly.

Yet it was huge!

So I have, as a test, made a reduced size one 1800 pixels wide.

If readers want to have a go at the process the fonts are available from the following links by using a right-click to download to local storage.

https://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/SONNETRL.TTF

https://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/SONNC047.TTF

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

William

 

[William Overington]

By viewing the fantastic.pdf document in Adobe Reader I have found that it was produced at 25/07/2014 09:42:42.

William

 

[William Overington]

Some readers may have seen the following thread.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/147165-locsencubes/

I have got the idea that I would like to produce a landscape greetings card with two locsencubes at angled views (is that the correct term?) such that the one on the left shows a view with the English text panel and the language-independent symbol panel; and the one on the right shows the language-independent symbol panel and the French text panel.

I have been looking at the possibility of using Microsoft 3D Builder to make a model of the locsencube, exporting two PDF documents by using Print to PDF, then opening the PDF documents in Affinity Designer, extracting the image files and then combining them in an Affinity Designer canvas of a size suitable for producing a greetings card.

Thus far I have not been able to find out how, or if, one can texture a cube in 3D Builder. I have previously managed to texture a flat surface, but that may have been by using Paint 3D.

Maybe I need to do four individual rotated panels and patch them together in Affinity Designer.

Has anyone here used 3D Builder and Paint 3D in a similar manner please?

Or is there a way to produce what I want using just Affinity Designer?

William

 

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

Or is there a way to produce what I want using just Affinity Designer?

Are you aiming for something like the attached?

Bonjour.afdesign

[William Overington]

Thank you.

Well, the technique used seems to be exactly what I am seeking. But the result is not quite.

I am wanting two cubes side by side, so four faces each with an image, two faces on each of two cubes.

The left image of cube 1 as Good day.

The right image of cube 1 and the left image of cube 2 each as the language-independent symbol.

The right image of cube 2 as Bonjour.

Yet if I knew how you produced your image I might be able to use the technique to produce the result that I seek.

It seems that you have rotated and sheared by the same angle but in opposite directions. That is clever.

The 30 degrees reminds me of isometric projection.

So can you explain how you did it, and how you knew that that was how to do it please?

Also I would like to put tops on the cubes so that they look solid.

Why is the bus or lorry or whatever it is in the background please?

William

 

 

 

 

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

So can you explain how you did it, and how you knew that that was how to do it please?

I can try to explain how to do it but I’m not sure that I can explain how I knew!

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

Also I would like to put tops on the cubes so that they look solid.

Yes, I realized that. I just wanted to show the angled faces with the content of interest.

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

Why is the bus or lorry or whatever it is in the background please?

You said you wanted a texture but I thought you might appreciate a locomotive instead. Copy it, restore the copy to full opacity and then deskew it and uncrop it to see image in all its glory.

[William Overington]

Having tried some experiments it seems that to get the result to look like a cube rather than a cuboid that I need to start with a rectangle that is 1 unit wide to root 3 upon 2 units high.

I am still experimenting with the top of the cube.

William

 

 

 

[Alfred]

Start with a hexagon and adjust to suit.

 

[William Overington]

Wow, that is clever.

William

 

[William Overington]

Ooh! Tesco's range of frames has gone overnight from almost none to lots.

https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/search?query=frames

Sixteen types listed online when not signed in but only eight types listed locally online, but including the two I want.

Interestingly Tesco lists four possible uses, but there is a fifth use, namely to use to store something in a drawer. So maybe for something that one wishes to conserve in a noticeable format yet not put on display, such as an invitation to a party or a sheet of A4 artwork which one has used for scanning for making a handwriting font.

William

 

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

Sixteen types listed online when not signed in but only eight types listed locally online, but including the two I want.

Now here’s an oddity! I see sixteen types when I’m not signed in but when I sign in the number of types increases to twenty.

Edit:

Quote

Interestingly Tesco lists four possible uses, but there is a fifth use, namely to use to store something in a drawer.

I see only two possible uses listed: “freestanding or hung on a wall”. If you store something in a drawer it could be regarded as “freestanding”, couldn’t it?

Edited August 25, 2021 by Alfred
Added observation

[William Overington]

1 hour ago, Alfred said:

Now here’s an oddity! I see sixteen types when I’m not signed in but when I sign in the number of types increases to twenty.

Edit:

I see only two possible uses listed: “freestanding or hung on a wall”. If you store something in a drawer it could be regarded as “freestanding”, couldn’t it?

Each of them landscape or portrait. This because the frames that I have used are fitted with two hook eyes and a thick card diagonal that can be used for freestanding. Storing horizontal in a drawer would not use any of the fittings. If one wishes one could use a self-adhesive label (not supplied with the frame) to add provenance information to the back of the frame, such as the date of framing or whatever information one chooses to add.

Well, storing in a drawer is not implied by the descriptions. Yet such could be a useful facility in some circumstances to make a piece of paper or card or even some piece of cloth or maybe something else flat into a noticeable heirloom rather than just keep it in an envelope somewhere where it might not be noticed. For an invitation or the like the envelope could be included too, perhaps behind the picture so not normally observed., 

William

 

[William Overington]

I was looking for something else, as mentioned in the following post,

https://community.serif.com/discussion/113998/localizable-sentences-the-second-novel?page=45#reply383510

and I found the following PDF document that I produced many years ago.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/locse010_art.pdf

The images in the picture are Serif clip art. The caption is using a font that I made years ago, possibly lost, though I did not think if that at first, but not to worry as will be explained.

So I decided that, as I now have the ability to obtain one-off nicely-printed greetings cards that I would try to make a jpg file and send off for a greetings card.

So I opened the PDF document in Affinity Designer.

Oh. A missing font. Would I like Arial instead?

No, no, no!

Fortunately the glyphs in that font are in a later version of the font, so I used that all was well.

For those readers who might like to try it out, the font that I used is available here.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/LOCSE977.TTF

I selected all and copied onto the clipboard. I then set up an Affinity Designer document of the size I need for the card by saving a copy of the third unicorn card with a new name, clearing the page and then pasting the image from the clipboard.

As a first try, and I may in fact use this result, I produced a design for the front of the greetings card.

I selected all, grouped, and then I used the transform panel to increase the size of the image by a factor of two both horizontally and vertically by doubling the values and inserting those numbers. I then centred the image.

Ah.

The glyphs in the caption were still the same size. So I had to double the point size manually, but alas the space before the giraffe's reply was much reduced in size, so I had to add more spaces.

So it looks quite good. I am trying to find a way to check whether I have got the space before the giraffe's reply as accurate a copy of the original as possible.

I expect that some (almost all?) readers of this post might wonder about the meaning of the caption.

Here is a link to a document which displays the glyphs and their English localizations.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/locse027.pdf

The idea is that the message is expressed in the image in a language-independent form.

The message could be sent electronically in a language-independent form using codes that can be found in the following document.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/A_List_of_Code_Numbers_and_English_Localizations_for_use_in_Research_on_Communication_through_the_Language_Barrier_using_encoded_Localizable_Sentences.pdf

I suppose that I need a document with glyphs to language-independent code numbers.

There is a document that partially does that, but I need to explain that to use each of those codes one needs to either use the number as it is but with an exclamation mark before it, as in, for example !123 or to use an integral sign followed by the digits each expressed as a circled digit character. In either case, use a space between the codes, for example !127 !983

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_the_novel_chapter_078.pdf 

William

 

 

[Alfred]

22 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Here is a link to a document which displays the glyphs and their English localizations.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/locse027.pdf

The idea is that the message is expressed in the image in a language-independent form.

1. It is obviously cloudy, so why is the giraffe’s reply to a question about that an ‘indefinite yes’?

2. Why does the poor ladybird/ladybug have only three legs?

[William Overington]

1 hour ago, Alfred said:

1. It is obviously cloudy, so why is the giraffe’s reply to a question about that an ‘indefinite yes’?

2. Why does the poor ladybird/ladybug have only three legs?

1. Because there is only one cloud in the whole sky, the sun is shining in a mostly clear sky, so the giraffe gives an answer to give as best an indication as possible within the available collection of encoded sentences as to the situation.

2. She is a ladybird. The fact that you can only observe three legs does not mean that she only has three legs. Three other legs are occluded from your view by her body.

William

 

[AdamStanislav]

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

Here is a link to a document which displays the glyphs and their English localizations.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/locse027.pdf

Wouldn’t it be simpler to use Chinese glyphs? There is more of them, so you can express more ideas. And there are plenty of fonts for them.

[William Overington]

1 minute ago, AdamStanislav said:

Wouldn’t it be simpler to use Chinese glyphs? There is more of them, so you can express more ideas. And there are plenty of fonts for them.

Well not as best I know because one would need to learn Chinese language structure.

My idea is that each glyph is a whole grammatically stand-alone sentence and is language-independent.

You might perhaps like the slide show that is available from the following web page.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_research.htm

William

 

[AdamStanislav]

2 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Well not as best I know because one would need to learn Chinese language structure.

Which is quite simple. That is why the system works not just all over China with all of its languages, but in other countries. And you do not need to know what the word is in Chinese, only what the glyph means in your own language. Chinese dictionaries exist for more languages than for the system you propose.

In a way, Egyptian hieroglyphics make more sense, but there are more Chinese dictionaries, and it is much easier to find any glyph in them.

[William Overington]

54 minutes ago, AdamStanislav said:

Which is quite simple. That is why the system works not just all over China with all of its languages, but in other countries. And you do not need to know what the word is in Chinese, only what the glyph means in your own language. Chinese dictionaries exist for more languages than for the system you propose.

In a way, Egyptian hieroglyphics make more sense, but there are more Chinese dictionaries, and it is much easier to find any glyph in them.

Well, I a a researcher and I am willing to reconsider my position in the light of evidence.

So if you wish you are welcome to provide some specific examples of how this would work using Chinese characters and English and French and there could be a discussion, with other readers also participating if they so choose.

I only mention English and French because my native language is English and I know a little French, and that may be fairly common in this forum, but other languages can be included as well if people so choose.

WIlliam

 

[William Overington]

When I make a custom greeting card using my artwork I like to add, using the facility at the website, to use the page where the greeting usually goes to include information about the picture, my name, and the date, as month year. I usually use the Garamond typeface at 12, 14, 16 or 18 point depending on much text I want to put in the card.

For the two previous localizable sentence cards I have included a localization into English.

As this card has much less text I am thinking of having a localization into English and a localization into French.

I am thinking of having the following.

It is summer.
It is sunny.
Is it cloudy?

Indefinite yes.

C'est l'été.
C'est ensoleillé.
Est-ce nuageux?

Indéfini oui.

So that is eleven lines, so adding a blank line, one line for my name, a blank line, one line for the date, gives a total of fifteen lines so I can probably add a note about the picture being made from clip art and the original electronic version being from 3 June 2011.

William

 

 

William

 

[Alfred]

3 hours ago, AdamStanislav said:

Wouldn’t it be simpler to use Chinese glyphs?

I suspect the problem for William would be that each ideograph in Chinese represents a single idea rather than an entire sentence.

[William Overington]

14 minutes ago, Alfred said:

I suspect the problem for William would be that each ideograph in Chinese represents a single idea rather than an entire sentence.

Yes, that seems a good way to put it.

Talking of Chinese, I saw that there are some free OpenLearn courses about Chinese. I have not looked at them, but I did notice them being available when I was looking at language courses.

https://www.open.edu/openlearn/

https://www.open.edu/openlearn/free-courses/full-catalogue

William

 

[AdamStanislav]

1 hour ago, Alfred said:

I suspect the problem for William would be that each ideograph in Chinese represents a single idea rather than an entire sentence.

And that’s exactly why it is superior to his idea. He can only cover a few hundred sentences that are not even that common and that are in the language (English) that is so hard to translate to other languages due to its idiomatic nature (I have never understood why in English you often have to say the opposite of what you mean, or worse something that has nothing to do with what you are trying to say, such as saying an idea is cool as if it was some kind of temperature, or to call something good bad, etc).

[AdamStanislav]

4 hours ago, William Overington said:

I am willing to reconsider my position in the light of evidence.

知者不言,言者不知

[AdamStanislav]

39 minutes ago, AdamStanislav said:

知者不言,言者不知

See how simple that is? Just four glyphs in different order:

知 ( = know) 者 ( = person) 不 ( = not) 言 ( = word)

Those who know, do not say. Those who say, do not know.