SVG layout Designer vs Publisher

[SteveG4789]

I have many layouts of grapes and fruit trees done in Serif Draw Plus. Attached is a sample. Now that Draw Plus has been discontinued, I need a program to take its place.

I can export the DPP files as SVG files then open them in either Designer or Publisher. Which program would be more suitable for this type of layout? My guess is it would be Designer, but I do not know. I know Inkscape will also edit SVG files. Of these three which would be the easiest to use? These are simple diagrams and I prefer ease of use to hundreds of features I will never use or need that make simple tasks overly complicated.

Thanks in advance for your help.

2019 Grapes Layout, 6, Hill_Original.svg

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

For that, probably Designer. But the could be useful functions you'd only get in Publisher.

Both programs have 10-day free trials available. You could get a Designer trial and play with it for a few days, then get a Publisher trial, and you can judge for yourself.

Note: the trials run for 10 consecutive days from the time you first run  an application after you've installed it.

[Old Bruce]

I am thinking the other way from Walt, my first choice would be Publisher followed closely by Designer simply because you could do several pages in one document for easy printing and producing PDFs for viewing several years all in one file, or export them page by page.

I may have a different idea of what many layouts means, is it dozens and dozens or 8 to 18 total drawings. Are they the same size? Is the size important.

With that much text I would want Publisher's find and replace abilities. The actual graphics contained would be fine with either application. Use some Global colours and you are looking at consistent documents.

[SteveG4789]

Thanks Walt and Bruce,

I do not need trials since I already own Affinity Designer, Publisher and Photo. They look like great programs if you know how to use them. Your comments are helpful since I am a beginner with these and feeling around in the darkness.

For layouts, I have a dozen for each year going back to 2015 and they are all the same size - one page, although the orientation is landscape on some and portrait on others. 

Multiple years in one document might be nice, but not a deal killer.

Find and replace for text would be great, as Bruce said for Publisher. Also, being able to change the font in multiple text boxes at once is almost essential.

Attached is a screen shot from the open source SVG editor "Inkscape" - I am a rank beginner in this as well. Like Serif Draw Plus, frequently used objects can be stored outside the print area – which is a great help. Publisher can also do this, but Designer just gives red squiggly lines instead of the objects. This kind of rules out Designer - perhaps it is an issue with "dark mode" in the app.

Inkscape can open multiple documents and it is easy to switch between them with Alt-Tab, and Publisher opens multiple documents in tabs. Either is good.

It is essential to save my files as SVG. I do not want to get stuck again with a proprietary format like I did with Serif Draw Plus and again find myself in the situation of needing to convert all my files again down the road.

One issue I am running into with all of them is my text blocks are no longer contiguous. Each line appears to be its own text box, so they do not flow from one line to the next if you edit them. With hundreds of text blocks this is a MAJOR problem. Is there any quick way to return these, for example 12 individual test lines, into one text box? I looked though all the menus and cannot find any way of doing this - very frustrating.

Another issue is if I create a new text box with multiple lines it is fine in Publisher until I export it as a SVG file. When reopened, all the lines are again converted into individual text boxes. However, if I do the same thing in Inkscape, it maintains the text box on saving and reopening. In addition, all my objects not in the printable are deleted by Publisher and Draw Plus (but not Inkscape) when I export as SVG from Publisher. So, unless I am doing something wrong, it appears Serif Draw Plus and Affinity Publisher both share these same flaws with SVG exports, and Inkscape appears to be my only option for my layouts given that from this point forward I will only save as SVG and not proprietary formats.

What are your thoughts on this? Have I done something wrong here, or am I correct that text boxes will revert to individual lines, and objects outside the print area will vanish if exported to SVG in Publisher or Draw Plus?

Thanks again for your help in my struggle to work around finding an alternative to my orphaned Serif Draw Plus layouts.

[thomaso]

I don't know about DrawPlus but maybe there are two kinds of text objects? This might influence the way they get opened in your SVG as either text frame or as a masked text layer. Those clipping rectangular (Curve) objects would increase the total number of objects (layers) and make it useless complex, if you work this way / with SVG).

8 minutes ago, SteveG4789 said:

It is essential to save my files as SVG. I do not want to get stuck again with a proprietary format

The SVG format is more limiting than PDF. Though it's initially developred by Adobe it is not a proprietary format. Also PDF is more spread than SVG, it may contain more types of content and there are more apps around which can display or open PDF, which makes PDF a lot more flexible.

5 minutes ago, SteveG4789 said:

With hundreds of text blocks this is a MAJOR problem. Is there any quick way to return these, for example 12 individual test lines, into one text box? I looked though all the menus and cannot find any way of doing this - very frustrating.

Try a sample with an exported PDF and open this in APub. Different to opening an SVG you will get asked for text handling, whether you prefer visual layout accuracy or text editability, including an option to keep lines of text in paragraphs. Though I am not experienced with either, DrawPlus and SVG, I'd recommend to use PDF as transfer format – and Publisher as Affinity app, because its text features maybe more useful here than the rich illustrating features in AD.

[walt.farrell]

39 minutes ago, SteveG4789 said:

Also, being able to change the font in multiple text boxes at once is almost essential.

All of the Affinity applications can do that, if you use Text Styles for your text. You just change the definition of the style, and everything that uses that text style changes.

41 minutes ago, SteveG4789 said:

Like Serif Draw Plus, frequently used objects can be stored outside the print area – which is a great help. Publisher can also do this, but Designer just gives red squiggly lines instead of the objects. This kind of rules out Designer - perhaps it is an issue with "dark mode" in the app.

Use Artboards. Or if not using Artboards, turn off View > View Mode > Clip to Canvas.

42 minutes ago, SteveG4789 said:

One issue I am running into with all of them is my text blocks are no longer contiguous. Each line appears to be its own text box, so they do not flow from one line to the next if you edit them. With hundreds of text blocks this is a MAJOR problem. Is there any quick way to return these, for example 12 individual test lines, into one text box? I looked though all the menus and cannot find any way of doing this - very frustrating.

SVG does not have the concept of paragraphs, I think. If they are important to you, that's not an option either.

If you want to maintain paragraphs, try PDF instead. It, too, does not really have the concept of paragraphs, but if you Open a PDF file in Affinity you'll have an option to keep the lines together, which should do what you want.

45 minutes ago, SteveG4789 said:

and objects outside the print area will vanish if exported to SVG in Publisher or Draw Plus?

Yes, it's certainly true that objects in the pasteboard will not be in any of the exported files. You can only keep them if you save in the application's native format.

[v_kyr]

53 minutes ago, SteveG4789 said:

Another issue is if I create a new text box with multiple lines it is fine in Publisher until I export it as a SVG file. When reopened, all the lines are again converted into individual text boxes. However, if I do the same thing in Inkscape, it maintains the text box on saving and reopening. In addition, all my objects not in the printable are deleted by Publisher and Draw Plus (but not Inkscape) when I export as SVG from Publisher. So, unless I am doing something wrong, it appears Serif Draw Plus and Affinity Publisher both share these same flaws with SVG exports, and Inkscape appears to be my only option for my layouts given that from this point forward I will only save as SVG and not proprietary formats.

Well Affinity's SVG handling (it's SVG import/export engine) is limited to the plain SVG basics, so to say just a core subset of the whole SVG spec. Inkscape in contrast uses SVG also as it's main file format, thus is also much more SVG spec conform here (like webbrowsers and their SVG handling) and additionally supports some own app custom SVG specific add-ons.

In other words, in terms of SVG capabilities and handling, there are differences like night and day between Inkscape and Affinity here!

Probably your best choics for document exchange between DrawPlus, Affinity and other third party apps would be the PDF document format here, since Affinity has it's limitations with the SVG format in import/export and certain SVG commands!

In case of SVG text handling see for example SVG <text> here, especially there also the example3 which shows text on several lines via the <tspan> element.

[SteveG4789]

Thank you Walt, Bruce, Thomaso, and V Kyr,

PDF works! Thank you.

From DrawPlus, I published as PDF-X3 and the text boxes stay intact when I open them in Affinity Publisher. There were several options in DrawPlus for PDF publishing, but the PDF-X3 exported without changing the spelling of some of the text. I could also turn on bleed if I wanted the objects outside the print area.

In addition, I can export as PDF, then reopen the PDF in AfPub for further editing. This gets me away from proprietary format gotchas like what happened with DrawPlus.

I do not understand the concept of Artboards. I looked though the Help but that did not help. I thought of putting all my frequently used objects in a PDF, then just copying and pasting from that as needed. Then I do not need to worry about the bleed space disappearing if I make an error on saving.

It looks like neither DrawPlus nor AfPub export via the SVG <tspan> element thereby yielding individual lines rather than text blocks. No worries. PDF does the job needed as you have all indicated.

This is great and gets me off to a good start. Everything is editable inside Affinity Publisher. Now that I know Publisher is the best option for my layouts, it is just a matter of going through the tutorials and learning how to use it efficiently.

Thanks so much for getting me off to a great start.

[thomaso]

8 minutes ago, SteveG4789 said:

I could also turn on bleed if I wanted the objects outside the print area.

Good idea! – Did it work with large bleed dimensions to contain all objects in the workspace?

Note in APub the workspace area to the left & right of pages is sort of endless while it is quite small above & below. If you increase the bleed size massively you can achieve this way a larger workspace above & below too (but if you reduce the bleed size to normal for export objects above and below might create a mess if they appear on pages above/below).

Once you imported a PDF in APub you can change the bleed dimensions without losing the objects in the workspace.

11 minutes ago, SteveG4789 said:

I do not understand the concept of Artboards.

Artboards are a mixture/combination of pages and layers (objects). This can make them confusing but also very flexible, for instance you can place artboards on other artboards, nesting them this way (parent-children). Also, different to pages, objects aside an artboard get moved in the layers panel off the artboard layer, too, and appear between artboard layers, they don't belong to any artboard (different to Apub's pages). In AD all objects of the entire document (of all artboards + workspace) are listed in the layers panel – whereas in APub only the objects of the current page/spread show up in the layers panel (incl. their master page layers). So while pages don't appear as objects or layers in APub, artboards are rather container objects and someway similar to Layer or Group layers.

[SteveG4789]

thomaso said, Did it work with large bleed dimensions to contain all objects in the workspace?

SteveG said, Yes it did. Attached is a screenshot with a 2" bleed.

Regarding artboards, unless I still misunderstand this concept, I think I figured it out. See attached screenshots. Under "Assets" on the left side of the screen I used the menu to create a "New Category" and named it "My Layouts." Then I selected an object in the layout and in the second menu selected "Add from Selection." This added the object to my "Assets." Now I can drag them from here to any layout. Is this what is meant by "Artboard?"

      

 

[thomaso]

2 hours ago, SteveG4789 said:

Under "Assets" (...) I can drag them from here to any layout. Is this what is meant by "Artboard?"

No, an Asset is a layout item (of any type and complexity) stored in the asset panel for easier use of copies of it. – Artboard, Canvas and Page/Spread are related to each other and describe the layout area, like sheet of paper in physical, analog artwork. Their different terms became invented because of their different attitudes and behavior and are related to certain apps, roughly spoken: artboard -> AD, canvas -> APh, page/spread -> APub. By default they all are rectangular, blank (white or transparent) and always in the background of your layer hierarchy. Though each Affinity app has its own way to handle them (e.g. to create, define, arrange them) you can open each of the different Affinity documents in the other 2 apps, possibly with the option to turn artboards into pages for instance.

For your work with the wine diagrams in APub the differences are not relevant. In APub a single of this layout areas is called a page, a set of two facing pages is a spread.

[R C-R]

4 hours ago, SteveG4789 said:

Is this what is meant by "Artboard?"

No, The simplest way to think of artboards may be as a device to permit you to have more than one individual canvases in one document, each one sizable independently of any of the others, placed wherever you want in the workspace, & in whatever order you want in the Layers panel.

Some uses for them are mentioned here, in the "About Artboards" help topic.

[Wosven]

On 7/3/2021 at 4:54 PM, thomaso said:

Though it's initially developred by Adobe it is not a proprietary format.

Just for the sake of Adobe not being the only creator of every file format…

At the time, to avoid reviving the different HTML formats incompatibilities, W3C created another group to work on a vector format for graphics, and since different formats were already created by compagnies, they worked together to create SVG.

 

Quote

SVG was developed by the W3C SVG Working Group starting in 1998, after six competing vector graphics submissions were received that year.

Sodipodi (Inkscape's parent), was created from the start to use SVG as its native file format.

[/end of digression]

[SteveG4789]

Thomaso and R C-R, thank you for clearing this up about Artboards.