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With still no way to trim the Designer canvas to the objects, how do we export without border regions?


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Such a simple task: I just want to export an icon with no extra pixels around it. The document has space around the icon.

At first I could find no succinct and exact way to either get rid of the surrounding canvas, or select all the objects and create a slice, artboard, or any other discrete entity that can then be selected in the Export persona. But, if you select the "artboard" tool, there is an option on the toolbar to "insert artboard," and next to it you can change the size to "selection."

Again, this is a fairly obscure rigmarole in place of, say, a context menu on the canvas or in the layer list that would allow you to "create artboard from selection." Also, there doesn't appear to be a way to resize an artboard by dragging and snapping its edges to objects, even with the "artboard tool." True?

And then there's the fact that the creation of artboards itself is (in this case) a workaround to a crippled "slicing tool." I would have expected the slicing tool in the Export persona to be able to do the same thing with slices. But nope; it doesn't appear that you can even make it snap to objects.

Is there some better way that I'm missing? Thanks!

Screen Shot 2022-02-11 at 3.33.27 PM.png

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1 hour ago, Stokestack said:

Aaaand we're back to the ol' problem of not being able to set the canvas color AND you can't set objects as non-printing/non-exporting, so in a case like this without the black square you wouldn't be able to see the shapes you were working with or exporting.

Work with a transparent background.

2 hours ago, Stokestack said:

Is there some better way that I'm missing? Thanks!

Why don't you just group the two items that you want to export and group them.

1495560637_ScreenShot2022-02-11at6_10_43PM.png.c163782bde0b75dc56323cc22985a509.png

Or is it the three items you want to have exported, just select the three items and group them.

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I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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Thanks for the suggestions. The transparent background is a pretty lame workaround if you're working with white or light-grey objects. There's no excuse for not letting us set the canvas color, but people have already complained about this and nothing has been done.

The grouping suggestion turned out to be unnecessary. I started a new drawing similar to the example above, and discovered in the Export persona that there's a "create slice" option in the context menu... but only when you're NOT using the Slice tool! 🙄

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28 minutes ago, Stokestack said:

set the canvas color

Use artboards whose color can be set as for other objects.

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26 minutes ago, Stokestack said:

I did, but it showed up in the export.

Yes, that goes without saying. If you do not want the background color to be exported, you can turn it off before exporting, or create a Slice only from the exported object / group of objects in the Layers panel of the Export Person.

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On 2/12/2022 at 12:44 AM, Stokestack said:

At first I could find no succinct and exact way to either get rid of the surrounding canvas, or select all the objects and create a slice, artboard, or any other discrete entity that can then be selected in the Export persona.

How about exporting the area "Selection Only" …

1032188371_exportareaselectiononly.jpg.274b98e0e0c3527c610108b1aadda238.jpg 

…or using the icon button to exclude certain layers from appearing in an export?

222099725_ADslices3.jpg.dc5f830ac523ff0ad30b7572dbcba693.jpg

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6 hours ago, Stokestack said:

and even more importantly a way to set objects as non-printing.

Just use the settings in the Layers panel of the Export Persona.

Screenshot_2022-02-14-00-33-00.thumb.png.185a5c3ba39ca20cda807a24dd3af4a2.png

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Thanks.I expect that this will affect child objects too, though, won't it? If so, you can't do this to an artboard.

So this means creating a rectangle that's the same size as the canvas, setting its color, moving it to the back of your composition, and then setting it to non-exporting in the Export persona.... right?

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12 hours ago, Stokestack said:

Thanks.I expect that this will affect child objects too, though, won't it? If so, you can't do this to an artboard.

So this means creating a rectangle that's the same size as the canvas, setting its color, moving it to the back of your composition, and then setting it to non-exporting in the Export persona.... right?

Or... Before switching to the Export Persona just set the Artboard's colour to transparent or None.

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I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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56 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Or... Before switching to the Export Persona just set the Artboard's colour to transparent or None.

If you set the Tools panel in the Export Persona to show 2 or more columns, you get this color selector in it, including the set-to-transparent button:

593824903_Toolspanelcolorselector.jpg.e1255eb414d4e191083808c52768b940.jpg

So you can select an artboard in that persona & set its fill to transparent there.

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5 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Or... Before switching to the Export Persona just set the Artboard's colour to transparent or None.

... which was meant by this sentence:

On 2/13/2022 at 11:29 AM, Pšenda said:

If you do not want the background color to be exported, you can turn it off before exporting,

 

18 hours ago, Stokestack said:

So this means creating a rectangle that's the same size as the canvas, setting its color, moving it to the back of your composition, and then setting it to non-exporting in the Export persona.... right?

Not necessarily. If you select an object / group of objects in the Layers panel of the Export Persona, and create a Slice from them, only the selected objects will be included in the export.

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9 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

... which was meant by this sentence:

On 2/13/2022 at 4:29 AM, Pšenda said:

If you do not want the background color to be exported, you can turn it off before exporting,

I think like me some of us thought you were talking about the Make Item Visible in Export button in the Export Persona's Layers panel, which is not the same thing as setting an artboard's fill color to none or transparent.

Using that button is probably the better choice in most workflows since it is non-destructive, whereas changing the artboard's fill color is.

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5 hours ago, Pšenda said:

Not necessarily. If you select an object / group of objects in the Layers panel of the Export Persona, and create a Slice from them, only the selected objects will be included in the export.

This appears to be the least painful method of doing what I want. Thanks. It still means having a colored object behind everything else, which you have to remember to turn off if you want to print without it (see the lengthy threads requesting a "do not print" option on layers). But for exporting it's not too bad.

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8 hours ago, R C-R said:

you were talking about the Make Item Visible in Export button

No, one must understand the context of the information. First we talk about setting the color,

On 2/13/2022 at 9:15 AM, Pšenda said:

Use artboards whose color can be set as for other objects.

and then turning it off,

On 2/13/2022 at 11:29 AM, Pšenda said:

you can turn it off before exporting

that is, settings the transparency.

The possibility of disabling / removing objects from the export is discussed only subsequently.

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4 hours ago, Stokestack said:

Thanks. It still means having a colored object behind everything else, which you have to remember to turn off if you want to print without it

No. I may not know what you really want to achieve, but I have the color Artboards set ("The transparent background is a pretty lame workaround if you're working with white or light-grey objects"), what I want to export ("trim the Designer canvas to the objects, how do we export without border regions") I have encapsulated in a group,
image.png.f821274386c007f8a087144bc44542b6.png

and then in the Export persona I create a Slice from this group.
image.png.e463fa3ca2110c98772fa9ac8fa2cfb5.png image.png.8866a75d1a6f29e533cc336e3369eb44.png

The export then looks like this - it's without a colored background (I didn't have to remember or turn anything off), and it's borderless.
image.png.922ddc137714e9adbd51d87bf6989171.png

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1 hour ago, Stokestack said:

So if you print, the colored background doesn't show up?

The screenshot of @Pšenda's export (PNG, PDF?) doesn't show the blue artboard/background but the white colored rectangle.

Compare this example about slices, not exporting / showing content, though within their layout areas:

 

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15 hours ago, thomaso said:

The screenshot of @Pšenda's export (PNG, PDF?) doesn't show the blue artboard/background but the white colored rectangle.

Thanks for the reply, and the link to that other topic. But that's a screen shot, not a printout. There's another long thread of people requesting a "non-printing" button on layers, so we can do simple things like making templates and working around the inability to set the canvas color.

It's only related to exporting (in this thread, anyway) because any change you make to your composition to work around Designer's export limitations may mess up your workarounds for its printing limitations, and vice versa.

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55 minutes ago, Stokestack said:

But that's a screen shot, not a printout. There's another long thread of people requesting a "non-printing" button on layers, so we can do simple things like making templates and working around the inability to set the canvas color.

It's only related to exporting (in this thread, anyway)

I guess I misunderstand your point. While this topic is literally about export (not print) the discussed or recommended workflow using slices (and accordingly slice settings) affects export only, not print. So, setting up slices does not influence your print options.

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  • 3 weeks later...
1 hour ago, Stokestack said:

I selected three layers

Why should it be incredible when working with layers?

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