Alignment sometimes incomprehensible

[abra100pro]

See movie - I often experience this also with objects within an artboard - they align in an unforeseeable way. 

And please give new or copied artboards new names automatically. Documents with 15 "Artboard1" end up in more work than necessary.

[abra100pro]

Sorry, my english! It is not the ALIGNMENT - it is the SNAPPING to other Artboards or objects.

[Dan C]

Hi @abra100pro,

Thanks for your screen recording provided and our apologies for the delayed response here!

Firstly, Snapping in the Affinity apps will be controlled via your personal snapping settings, which can be found in the dropdown menu to the right hand side of the Snapping icon.

Could you please provide a screenshot of your snapping settings here?

Secondly, in regards to Artboards names, when using the Artboard Tool to create artboards, you should see each artboards number incrementally increase, however when copy and pasting artboards, the previous name will be kept exactly, leading to multiple artboards with the same name.

What method are you using to create these artboards please?

Many thanks in advance

[abra100pro]

Thanks, @Dan C

I use these settings: 

And I almost everytime copy an artboard with option and dragging it. This is very essential to my workflow since I very often design online ads for multiple formats. Making a new artboard from scratch is not applicable for me. Although it might sound a bit edgy it would be a very nice and welcome timesaver to have an upcounting number added to each copied artboard.

BTW: The snapping settings are a story of their own - AD does not keep the exact dimensions of artboards at export when the artboards placed on the canvas have not integer x-/y-pixel values. This is something I reported months ago and I long to see fixed.

[Dan C]

4 hours ago, abra100pro said:

I use these settings: 

Thanks for this, however I'm looking for your settings in the dropdown menu next to this magnet icon, this should look similar to below -

 

4 hours ago, abra100pro said:

And I almost everytime copy an artboard with option and dragging it. This is very essential to my workflow since I very often design online ads for multiple formats. Making a new artboard from scratch is not applicable for me. Although it might sound a bit edgy it would be a very nice and welcome timesaver to have an upcounting number added to each copied artboard.

Thanks for confirming that for me, I certainly understand your workflow and I can see how this option would be beneficial. I'll be sure to log this as a suggested improvement with our developers

4 hours ago, abra100pro said:

AD does not keep the exact dimensions of artboards at export when the artboards placed on the canvas have not integer x-/y-pixel values. This is something I reported months ago and I long to see fixed.

This has been reported previously but our developers have confirmed this is the expected behaviour if the artboards position is not whole values - though I do understand the frustration that can be caused by this, and an option to always force artboards to whole values would also be beneficial, so I will include this in the above log!

[abra100pro]

@Dan C Thank you for your feedback. My snapping popup looked like this - gonna try your setting.

 

Thanks also for your feedback on the "artboard on canvas has influence on export" issue. I really burn for a feedback on which this makes sense: an artboard has x- and y-values (not width and height but position on canvas) that are not integer numbers and this leads to a not controllable shift in the artboard's dimension at export. 

So I place a 300x600px arboard on the dark canvas at - say - X = 1302.4px and Y = 300px 
I export the artboard and get a file (png, jpg, pdf,... no matter) of - say - 301x601px - that doesn't only cost me a ton of attention and time but makes no sense to me.

I really would love to understand in which situation this is an expected behaviour. Maybe I'm stupid and I can't see the obvious - always willing to learn ;-).

Thank you in advance.

 

[Dan C]

Thanks for the screenshot provided! I'd recommend making sure the bottom 3 options in your screenshot are ticked and then try snapping once again - does this now snap to the correct location?

On 1/17/2022 at 11:08 PM, abra100pro said:

So I place a 300x600px arboard on the dark canvas at - say - X = 1302.4px and Y = 300px 
I export the artboard and get a file (png, jpg, pdf,... no matter) of - say - 301x601px - that doesn't only cost me a ton of attention and time but makes no sense to me.

I really would love to understand in which situation this is an expected behaviour. Maybe I'm stupid and I can't see the obvious - always willing to learn ;-).

When viewing this as a document with a singular Artboard it's understandable that you wouldn't expect the X&Y positions to matter, but as documents can have multiple Artboards, the X&Y positions are then required to export the file. Currently the app has no way of discerning that 'only 1' artboard is being exported, and therefore the app exports the Artboard including the part pixel alignment of the Artboard itself, which in turn adds an additional pixel to each side of the export.

As mentioned above, it's currently logged with our developers as an improvement to ignore the X&Y position when exporting a singular artboard only, to reduce this happening at export

[abra100pro]

23 hours ago, Dan C said:

Thanks for the screenshot provided! I'd recommend making sure the bottom 3 options in your screenshot are ticked and then try snapping once again - does this now snap to the correct location?

When viewing this as a document with a singular Artboard it's understandable that you wouldn't expect the X&Y positions to matter, but as documents can have multiple Artboards, the X&Y positions are then required to export the file. Currently the app has no way of discerning that 'only 1' artboard is being exported, and therefore the app exports the Artboard including the part pixel alignment of the Artboard itself, which in turn adds an additional pixel to each side of the export.

As mentioned above, it's currently logged with our developers as an improvement to ignore the X&Y position when exporting a singular artboard only, to reduce this happening at export

Thank you - please be aware, that this also happens, when several or all artboards are being exported via the export persona. Please help me in making it clear to the developers that this a (time consuming, error-prone) bug, not a feature.

[MEB]

Hi @abra100pro,
If you use a regular document without artboards you don't have to worry about its X,Y coordinates. Just use File > Export and the dimensions will be correct.

If you need to use artboards and the Export Persona you do have to worry about their positioning. There's a few settings in your workflow that aren't helping here. In the main toolbar make sure you have Force Pixel Alignment enabled and Move By Whole Pixels (the icon in the middle) disabled (in your screenshot it's enabled). This last setting keeps any fractional values your object may have (being its X,Y coordinates or its width or height) and as such if for example you move (or transform) an object which has a x coordinate of 4,65 it will always end up with a coordinate of X,65 because that setting only allows you to move integer values. With it disabled objects with fractional values will be rounded to integers which is what you want.

When duplicating artboards, don't use option/alt + dragging. Option/alt overrides snapping and thus also overrides force pixel alignment thus you may end up with the artboards in fractional positions. To avoid this use cmd+dragging instead which also duplicates the artboards but honours the snapping settings thus keeping the Force Pixel Alignment active. Hope this helps a bit.

 

[abra100pro]

Thank you @MEB, I really appreciate the info and help - good to know.

However, if you could change this without having to rewrite the codebase of AD it would be so helpful. IMHO the impact the position of an artboard on the canvas has when exporting is just really weird. It makes no sense at all (userwise, I haven't written the application code). I deal with a lot of artboards, 10-20 are not seldom. I move them around like a maniac - changing here - oh I need more space - moving others over a bit,... This seems to me like a creative, modern way of handling lots of information on lots of artboards. When designing ads this is the way to go.

On the other hand, the settings of snapping/alignment you suggest work great for this issue, however it comes in the way when moving objects within artboards (as I use it) therefore it seems quite unpracticable to change theses settings everytime I want to move an artboard "out of the way" and rechanging them again to work with objects.

I hope you can see, why this is so important to me. BTW: I got files rejected by the customer quite a few times in the past, only because the ad is 301x601px instead of 300x600px - today I countercheck every single output (Imagine: exporting 32 slices - checking them all through - ouh, I need to improve something; back into the layout - exporting again, checking again.....)

Pleas consider making the gift of an easier day for me (and maybe lots of others).

[Old Bruce]

57 minutes ago, MEB said:

When duplicating artboards, don't use option/alt + dragging. Option/alt overrides snapping and thus also overrides force pixel alignment thus you may end up with the artboards in fractional positions. To avoid this use cmd+dragging instead which also duplicates the artboards but honours the snapping settings thus keeping the Force Pixel Alignment active. Hope this helps a bit.

Here on Mac I find that if I use Option at the beginning of the duplication/move process then let go of Option (basically as soon as I see there is a duplicate) the snapping is turned on again.

[Wosven]

On 1/20/2022 at 7:14 PM, abra100pro said:

IMHO the impact the position of an artboard on the canvas has when exporting is just really weird. It makes no sense at all

Same for me. It's like when putting different pictures, pages and drawing on your real desk, their position there isn't important... It's only important when needing to export the whole content, but basically, it's as rare as the need to export by spreads in APub.

Reversing the behavior between those 2 would be better.