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Can someone please explain how the pasteboard works in Designer?


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I'm confused!  In Illustrator, moving an object off the canvas, places it in sight on the pasteboard.

The other day, I asked on another thread in this forum how it works in AD.

I was told that I had to Insert an artboard before the pasteboard will work. Is that true?

So, if I insert an artboard, sure enough, objects will move off the canvas and remain visible in a pasteboard. However, they are only visible if they are 100% moved off, anything less, and the section on the pasteboard is invisible. Is that intentional?

Working with the document as an artboard causes issues when exporting to pdf as a whole load of stuff that I don't want relating to the artboard is output.  I tried to find a way of removing the artboard, but no luck.

Can someone explain how exactly the pasteboard works here, as to me, at the moment, it seems overly complicated, but I guess I may be missing something!

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After doing a bit of experimenting, I now realise that the stuff surrounding the document must relate to printing options. I can see that is switched off by unchecking include printer's marks and bleed.

I would still like to understand my points about the pasteboard in my previous post though.

post-12287-0-58135400-1447932861_thumb.jpg

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Hi imacken,

The Artboards are not finished yet and a few related features aren't still working as expected. With that said i believe the clipping when you have an object crossing the boundaries of the artboard is intentional and shows exactly what will be the output if you export the document.

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Affinity doesn't have a pasteboard area as such. You can achieve a similar effect by inserting an artboard but as you described the object will be clipped by the artboard until the object is completely moved off. This is by design.

 

What are you trying to achieve?

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Guys, thanks for that.

I kind of get the object being invisible till it is moved 100% off canvas.

@TonyB all I want, is to be able to move objects off the canvas without them disappearing from view, i.e. onto a pasteboard.

 

 

Then the only way in Designer is to use an Art-board.

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Tony,

Is there a particular reason you seem reluctant to implement a pasteboard? It seems like it's already there except that objects in this area are not visible. They can be selected (if you know where to click), edited and moved back into the print area when desired.

 

Artboards seem an indirect and potentially problematic way to achieve the simplicity of a pasteboard. My use of pasteboards is to store alternative elements, as a palette and as a place for notes. Sure, there are other ways to achieve this in Designer but they are indirect and abstruse compared to the simplicity and handiness of a pasteboard.

 

Byrne

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What do you expect the behaviour to be for the 'pasteboard' area in a non-artboard document?...

 

A. Two modes - one to show the document contents clipped to the 'page' area, the other to show all items without clipping

B. Objects which intersect the page area are drawn clipped to the page, other objects (those completely on the pasteboard) are drawn unclipped

 

A is achievable, B is actually a nightmare due to having to render the document differently to achieve the clip pushing/popping and we'd need to remove some optimisations. We already offer a solution that appears on face value to act like option B when you have artboards - but it's not actually doing that at all because the items in your 'pasteboard' aren't contained by the artboards, so aren't drawn conditionally within its draw. This is why you need to use artboards to achieve the effect you're after - because they make the document draw as though it shouldn't clip to the page area, but it has a number of containers (artboards) which do the job of drawing the contents with clipping applied so you can achieve both things (some content clipped, some content unclipped)

 

All I'm trying to say is that we must either consider having 2 modes (as per option A) or not doing anything at all. Option B has many downsides. The other day someone was asking why an object couldn't draw across multiple artboards - and this is basically a similar problem - it's all about the document being a pure, hierarchical model and in order to achieve the things you might think you want, you have to break the hierarchy and in doing so you invalidate a lot of logic that can be used to efficiently establish a number of costly things... We could make it do whatever you want, but it's going to get slower and clunkier in the process and that's why we may appear 'resistant' to some of the suggestions - it's because we know where the path leads and it's not somewhere we'd happily go.

 

Hope that makes some sense?

Matt

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No reason we can't add pasteboard support but it will not be easy as supporting pixel layers complicates things for us.

 

Until we support general pasteboard then art boards are your best bet if you want to see items off the page.

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I just don't see why this is so complicated.  All other apps like Designer, e.g Corel Draw, Illustrator and even Graphic, have this apparently simple facility, i.e. to see objects when off canvas, without having to revert to artboards or any other convoluted solution.

I am obviously talking through coding ignorance here, but I am pretty amazed by this missing, basic facility in Designer.

Are you guys saying this will never happen?

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Hi imacken,

From Matt and Tony's explanations this seems a technical "constraint" due to the way Affinity manages/renders the document/artboard. But what's the problem is adding an artboard to a regular document? It simply adds an area around the document where to place additional objects. Apart from the clipping when an object crosses the document/artboard boundaries, how does it differ from other solutions?

 

If it's a little convoluted to create an artboard for a regular document, maybe creating regular documents with an artboard already in place would make this more seamless and transparent? In the end it provides the same functionality as if there was a pasteboard.

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Yeah, I think this is one of those things that makes perfect sense on the development side but doesn't really make much sense from the user side.

 

The distinction between a "normal" document and a single-artboard document feels strange. Why shouldn't all documents start out as single-artboard documents? What's the advantage to not having a pasteboard by default?

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Hi MEB, I know what you mean, there isn't really a problem as such, it just seems totally counter intuitive to create a document, select the artboard tool and create an artboard, then select another tool when it shouldn't be necessary!  Why have anything to do with artboards when the user has no intention of using them?

Also, you lose the UI background colour when an artboard is created.  Trivial, but important to some.

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Yes, i agree wth you that currently it's a little counter-intuitive but i believe that's because this is still a work in progress. Those things will get fixed/polished with time. The artboards as clipping objects was just one way to approach/implement both artboards and pasteboard funcionality in a smart way. There's however a multitude of details tied to this that must be fixed until we can see it as a seamless experience. At least that's what i'm hoping for too.

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Matt, Thanks for the explanation.

 

Is the idea that you can compose in the second mode, essentially having a pasteboard, then toggle to the first mode (current implementation) for print or export? If so, sign me up! If not, see below.

 

I'm unclear about the second mode in option A. Does this still have a defined document area? If one prints or exports, from the Draw Persona, does the document area define the edges of the output? I understand there would be issues with objects straddling the document area, would they be ignored in the output?

 

This appears to more of an undertaking than I expected. I've been pestering on the basis of this seeming easy. I have other ways of doing what I need so please don't compromise or take time away from other priorities such as, say, arrowheads. ;)

 

Byrne

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Hi Byrne,

 

The idea is as you described in your first paragraph - we could have one unclipped mode for designing and a second that clips so you can see how it would output. I was simply trying to say above that if you want the functionality where it clips partially contained objects and doesn't clip objects off the page then that is a horrific thing to add to what is currently a beautifully simple document renderer and would take away a lot of the optimisations that we have made.

 

Aren't we all saying that we want option A from my options above? That's the one I've said is entirely achievable and doesn't dilute our hierarchy so we're happy to add... Option A is all that is offered by the other applications imacken mentioned, so I thought we would all be agreed now that it would be fine? :)

 

Thanks,

Matt

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Aren't we all saying that we want option A from my options above? That's the one I've said is entirely achievable and doesn't dilute our hierarchy so we're happy to add... Option A is all that is offered by the other applications imacken mentioned, so I thought we would all be agreed now that it would be fine? :)

Hi MattP, yes, I think we are saying that we want an option A, partly because as you said in your earlier post that the 'artboard solution' appears to offer option B already.

In Option A, when you say 'two modes', would it be a viewing option to toggle between the two modes, or a one-off decision when creating the document?

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