Glitches (lines bubbling) in images when exported or expanded.

[lee baker]

Hi there, Affinity designer is great, but there's one problem that is really tripping me up when exporting for print. When I either expand a pencil line, or export to eps or pdf etc, I get horrendous 'bubbles' in what were straight lines. I've attached two images to show what I mean. In the attached images, the object simply had a thick black line going around it, but as you can see the lines have kind of exploded. This is happening all the time, and I now have to go through every document to make sure they're ok. Please can  anyone help with this?

[lee baker]

6 minutes ago, lee baker said:

Hi there, Affinity designer is great, but there's one problem that is really tripping me up when exporting for print. When I either expand a pencil line, or export to eps or pdf etc, I get horrendous 'bubbles' in what were straight lines. I've attached two images to show what I mean. In the attached images, the object simply had a thick black line going around it, but as you can see the lines have kind of exploded. This is happening all the time, and I now have to go through every document to make sure they're ok. Please can  anyone help with this?

 

[stokerg]

Hi @lee baker,

Could you attach your afdesign file?  It looks like something is causing the stroke to expand, but would really need the afdesign file in order to see why.

[lee baker]

Thanks ever so much for getting back to me. I've attached a flower head i've drawn. And you'll see that one of the lines in the centre of the flower, when expanded generates a bubble of black. I've also attached a video to show it happening. It happens a lot. At first I thought it was when I used the the pencil with pressure on, because that seems to generate some pretty weird spikey looking ends to lines sometimes, but then when I simply used no pressure with a simple pencil profile it still happens. My images are often blown up to a huge scale so any glitches massively show up. If you need other files to see, I can send. Cheers, Lee

Echinacea Head.afdesign

[h_d]

Not sure I can completely solve it, but in your echinacea the issue is with this curve:

 

To isolate the problem, I copied and pastedd it and moved the copy to a blank area of the artwork, then Expanded Stroke. I got exactly the same thing:

 

If I then Undo the Expand Stroke, select the Node tool and zoom right in on the right-hand end, the curve appears to extend past the final node:

At very high magnifications you can almost see a 'kink' in the curve. If you use the Node tool to adjust the positions of the handles, then you can 'unkink' it and Expand Stroke will work as expected:

  

But I'm not at all sure how to stop it happening in the first place. I suspect it may be down to the way you're drawing the curve, or an issue with your tablet - all I can really do is correct what you've already done.

Cheers,

H

 

 

[lee baker]

Thanks ever so much for having a look at this! Much appreciated. And I can see what you mean about the ending of the curves, which i've also noticed as a possible issue. I've tried using two different wacom tablets and on two different computers, but still the same glitches. Good to know there's a way around it, but often there are so many of them that it would take an age to solve it this way. I wonder if anyone else is seeing this problem? Hmmmm. 

[G13RL]

Hi @lee baker, As @h_d pointed out, the problem comes from the nodes added to the curve. The easiest thing to do would be to redo the small curve that is causing the problem, but you can simply remove those nodes to fix the problem.

[R C-R]

8 hours ago, G13RL said:

The easiest thing to do would be to redo the small curve that is causing the problem, but you can simply remove those nodes to fix the problem.

For that one curve that @h_d mentioned, you can just remove the handle on the bottom (red) node that makes it kink back over itself instead of that node itself.

[lee baker]

Hi everyone, thanks ever so much for all your feedback. I suppose my main question is WHY is this happening? I know its just a case of rectifying each glitchy curve, which is what I already do, but when there are loads it becomes a real problem. Should this be happening at all? Isn't this a programming issue that needs to be rectified, rather than worked around?

[G13RL]

10 hours ago, R C-R said:

For that one curve that @h_d mentioned, you can just remove the handle on the bottom (red) node that makes it kink back over itself instead of that node itself.

You're right, I don't know why I always tend to make things complicated when you can make them simple!🙂

[BofG]

6 minutes ago, lee baker said:

Should this be happening at all?

No. The whole idea of expand stroke is to give you a path that matches the appearance of the stroked line.

 

8 minutes ago, lee baker said:

Isn't this a programming issue that needs to be rectified, rather than worked around?

Yes, but this sort of thing has been an issue for a long time (years). There are similar issues with the boolean operators. Working around issues is sadly a common thing with Affinity.

Great software overall, but fundamental bugs keep getting kicked down the road whilst new features get added.

[lee baker]

2 minutes ago, BofG said:

Yes, but this sort of thing has been an issue for a long time (years). There are similar issues with the boolean operators. Working around issues is sadly a common thing with Affinity.

Great software overall, but fundamental bugs keep getting kicked down the road whilst new features get added.

Wow, that's not great. I really like Affinity Designer, its way more intuitive than Illustrator, but this particular issue has tripped me up massively on a couple of projects, so now I have to be extra vigilant and watch out for these glitches, in some very complex images.

[lee baker]

19 hours ago, G13RL said:

Hi @lee baker, As @h_d pointed out, the problem comes from the nodes added to the curve. The easiest thing to do would be to redo the small curve that is causing the problem, but you can simply remove those nodes to fix the problem.

Video_2021-07-22_133219_edit.wmv

Thanks loads for the video! This is pretty much what i've been doing :)))

[G13RL]

12 minutes ago, lee baker said:

Thanks loads for the video! This is pretty much what i've been doing :)))

You're welcome, but as @R C-R pointed out, there was a much easier way!

[BofG]

23 minutes ago, lee baker said:

now I have to be extra vigilant and watch out for these glitches

Sometimes these things are caused when nodes are spaced by less than 1 pixel (which sounds odd, but the expand stroke works off the pixel data not directly from the path). You can sometimes avoid the issue by simply massively scaling up the objects, doing the convert to curves and then scaling back down. I'd say that is a good first thing to try before delving into manually moving nodes around.

[lee baker]

13 minutes ago, BofG said:

Sometimes these things are caused when nodes are spaced by less than 1 pixel (which sounds odd, but the expand stroke works off the pixel data not directly from the path). You can sometimes avoid the issue by simply massively scaling up the objects, doing the convert to curves and then scaling back down. I'd say that is a good first thing to try before delving into manually moving nodes around.

I'll give that a try! Thank you