VECTOR text perspective shaped: WHY NOT POSSIBLE?

[teo balsamo]

I have been using Affinity—Designer, Photo and Publisher—for some years.

I daresay time has come to have a tool for distorting some VECTOR text on a perspective grid INSIDE Affinity Designer.

It is inconceivable that this cannot be performed and we are obliged to go through Affinity Photo which makes the job in bitmap format only.

Why?

[GarryP]

This sort of functionality has been requested many times and there are lots of threads discussing this:

I see you have been a member of the forums for over two years. Did you not see any of these threads in all that time?

[teo balsamo]

Dear GarryP,

if I had found those threads thorough I would never feel any need of posting a new one.

No questions, Affinity Designer misses an important feature. All those workarounds are really boring.

More important, what I am asking for is a SPECIFIC tool INSIDE Affinity Designer which could work with VECTOR text

Edited July 9, 2021 by teo balsamo

[GarryP]

Okay, apologies for my mild sarcasm, but just doing a quick search in the forums for “vector perspective” (without the quotes) would have given you the list I gave, and more.

As you have probably seen in those other threads, vector warp/perspective functionality has been requested many times so Serif are very much aware that people want it.
However, since Serif don’t usually tell us their plans these days (for good reasons) we can only wait and see what happens in the future.

My own personal opinion is that 2.x will need to have some really special new functionalities to get most users to pay for the upgrade so I wouldn’t be surprised if this sort of thing comes in then, but we can only hope. (I have no affiliation with Serif so that’s just my personal opinion and no-one reading this should take that as a statement of fact; it’s just me with my fingers crossed.)

[teo balsamo]

No worries.

As I wrote above, I went all through the threads. The first occurrence of this topic was on 2016. The answer by developers was that they had planned to introduce a tool in the future. How much further ahead did they mean it to be?

Since there is a perspective tool for bitmap images in Affinity Photo, for what reasons not any correspondent tool was developed for vector curves for Affinity Designer in so many years? Is it too complicated? I don't know. You can stretch a vector curve as much as you want but if in Affinity Designer you convert art text into curves and try to combine all the letters into one single curve, even by subtracting them from a rectangle for instance, so as to have a masked lettering, every single letter keeps on behaving as an independent letter.

This is quite frustrating.

OK, I am not a professional graphic designer, I do things for myself and a few people. But I have been stuck for two days on a stupid banner.

I think that another thread on the same topic is just a good idea.

Edited July 9, 2021 by teo balsamo

[GarryP]

I have no idea about the relative complexity of raster warping versus vector warping but my uneducated guess is that it’s probably easier to warp pixels, as vectors are way more complex than pixels.
Imagine moving a dot of colour from one place to another versus recalculating all of the nodes and control points of a vector.

Also, warping pixels is probably more familiar to more developers than warping vectors so the techniques might be better documented.
They’re both probably horrifically complex to do well either way, and if Serif want the software to look good then – if they are working on it – they will probably not want to put it into the software until it’s good and ready.
Can you imagine how many complaints they might get if it doesn’t work well, especially when you consider all of the people who have been asking for it for a good while?

Personally I would rather wait for a good solid implementation than get something ‘sloppy’ quickly.

[Dazmondo77]

52 minutes ago, GarryP said:

Personally I would rather wait for a good solid implementation than get something ‘sloppy’ quickly.

Now I have VectorStyler to take on vector warping and a whole manor of other missing stuff, I totally agree, I can get stuff done and pasted back into StudioLink, and crack on with work without a deal of moaning, yes it would have been great to have had missing features years ago, but corners may have been cut and something great is needed to 'slay the dragon' but if vector warping / distortions are anywhere near as good as VectorStylers (which is really fluent and snappy) it will be worth the wait (as long as it's not another seven years)

[Boldlinedesign]

@Dazmondo77 I've been really focused on the rapid development of vectorstyler over the last year, especially as affinity has been very slow to add (standard) tools necessary for me to ditch illustrator completely. Vectorstyler has made great strides recently and I've been starting to do more of my work there. You've mentioned how easy it is to swap designs between affinity and vectorstyler; I'll have to try that out more. I'm hoping as I purchase my next computer, to swap completely to to vectorstyler and affinity completely

[Oval]

On 7/26/2021 at 3:55 AM, Boldlinedesign said:

Vectorstyler has made great strides recently

and for 95 $ we can align and distribute objects along shapes, create and use vector brush styles from any group of vector objects, use interactive elastic warp effects, bend and stretch objects along shapes, trace images, …  NOW!

[walt.farrell]

38 minutes ago, Oval said:

and for 95 $

But that only includes one year of maintenance and updates.

[Pšenda]

On 7/9/2021 at 2:50 PM, teo balsamo said:

I think that another thread on the same topic is just a good idea.

Sorry, but it's not a "good" idea, because it's against the rules of the forum.

[Boldlinedesign]

11 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

But that only includes one year of maintenance and updates.

Yes that's true, but you get to keep using the existing  app version in perpetuity without paying for the updates if you so choose. I paid affinity half that amount years ago for their app, but we've gone five plus years with minor updates to the toolset. I could update vectorstyler every other year reducing the cost and still getting all the tools I need. 

If people are more worried about money than features, than they can wait for affinity. To me, vectorstyler and affinity together pack a solid one two punch. 

Essential basic tools are still missing after years of requesting from affinity designer that would keep me from being able to switch entirely to affinity. Vectorstyler offers all the essential basic tools affinity still lacks. 95 dollars once a year for that is a bargain.

 

[Boldlinedesign]

12 hours ago, Oval said:

and for 95 $ we can align and distribute objects along shapes, create and use vector brush styles from any group of vector objects, use interactive elastic warp effects, bend and stretch objects along shapes, trace images, …

vectorstyler offers things even illustrator lacks, much less affinity. Everything you mentioned, affinity still lacks after years of requests and vectorstyler already offers and does well. I love affinity and use it for what I can, but it's hard to wait years for things vectorstyler added in half the time

[GarryP]

One thing that might be worth noting is that VectorStyler is – as far as I can tell – the only application which NumericPath produces, and it is only available (until the Windows beta is ready) on one operating system.
Serif have three different applications, which do different things, on three different operating systems.
With that in mind, any comparison of ‘work done within a certain time-frame’ is probably a little unfair, at best.

[Boldlinedesign]

@GarryP You make a valid point that NumericPath has chosen to focus exclusively on one application where Affinity has developed three as well as two versions for the ipad as well. Vectorstyler is officially released for Mac already and the Windows version of Vectorstyler is as ready to go as the mac version. If I understood correctly, there were a few requirements the windows version had that have taken time to either add in or wait for approval on from Microsoft, etc. My point being, the Windows release only slowed by a few extra hurdles required of it that Mac does not have - not because the Windows version is less developed or otherwise “ready”

I can give Affinity more patience and grace in terms of expectations because they are doing three full prgrams on three operating systems (windows, mac and ios).
It’s harder to understand the logic of skipping crucial basic tools to focus on things of less importance to the average user. It’s hard to understand why basic features are requested for years and years with no sign of being added. Nothing Affinity seems to be focused on is bad - I see great value in the ability to register my apps and get my purchased brushes and assets across different devices, I see the value in the recent examples of speed boosts with thousands of layers, etc. Meanwhile, I’m wanting to warp text, I’m wanting to be able to use the merge boolean operation without TONS of node artifacts to clean up. I’m wanting pure vector brush options, blob brush, vector eraser... these are the things I use DAILY in my work. 

I’m sure Affinity has a grand plan - I can see it in the universal file format for example that can be used and edited in all three apps. I’m sure the focus on speed boost for 1.10 lays the groundwork for more efficient tools in the next version, etc. The issue to me is that Affinity does not seem to be addressing these things at all or barely, leaving users without a viable app they can rely on exclusively for professional work. Vectorstyler has lots of room for improvements, but it can be used today for professional work. I can accomplish tasks now completely inside Vectorstyler. The same cannot be said for Affinity

[GarryP]

I think this comes down to the age-old battle of one person’s ‘essential functionality’ is another person’s ‘feature bloat’.

For example, I don’t think I will ever use the Develop Persona in Photo, and every enhancement to that will be wasted on me, but I do understand that lots of people use it on a day-to-day basis. Just because I don’t use it doesn’t mean that it’s not needed.

Just do a forum search for the word “essential” and you will see how many things various people think of as essential: vector warping; auto-kerning; footnotes; various export formats; automatic captioning; PDF accessibility; auto-zoom; dashed line scaling; additional baseline grid alignments; snapped dimension lines (and those are only a selection from the first search page, of 80 pages, and they’re only the ones which use the specific word of “essential”, rather than “must have” or “need” or “vital” or anything else).

Basically, there is no way for a finite number of developers to work on so many things other than for someone to prioritise them in some way. Therefore, work done in one specific area for a time means no work done in another specific area during that time.

Someone in Serif has to prioritise these things and then we get what we get when they’re done, if they ever get done.

That’s all we can hope for, and it’s all that we’ve got, and that's fine by me.