Newbie from Illustrator to Affinity Needs

[perrya]

Affinity designer is a great emulator of Illustrator, but I think some future updates or maybe add-ons should include swatches for various terrain types for those who use it to make maps, like forest, hills, cities etc. Plus, standard map symbols. Maybe swatches can be created but I have not figured it out. Illustrator is a great map maker and more focus should be given on those tools etc., similar to Illustrator. To me, Affinity tends to be more of a Photoshop thing.

 

[fde101]

If I am correctly interpreting what you are asking for, the Styles panel should be able to do this.

If you have terrains as raster (bitmap) images and want to use them as fills, use the Fill tool, and with the object selected, and Context set to Fill (on the context toolbar), set Type to Bitmap - you are then prompted to select the image to use as a fill.  Once you have adjusted it the way you want it, with that object still selected, choose Add Style from Selection in the hamburger menu in the corner of the Styles panel to create a style which can then be applied to other objects.

[perrya]

I see, I have encountered another issue. I downloaded a map drawn in AI as SVG. It all worked out. The document layout was automatically chosen (checkered BG) is much larger than 11x17" map. I created a PDF and the output included everything (not what I wanted) including the map (see image). Unlike the PDF output in AI, where only the map was output, Affinity outputs everything. In document setup, I have tried just making the checkered BG to 11x17 so that the map is the same size, but that does not work. Maybe because the map was imported has something to do with it. It's important because the PDF will be printed out but now the paper size is much larger than 11x17, which renders problems for downloading the PDF and printing big time.

[fde101]

Make sure the outer border of the map (I am assuming there is a rectangular object of some sort representing its shape) is a snapping candidate (refer to https://affinity.help/designer/en-US.lproj/index.html if not familiar).

With snapping to object bounding boxes enabled, use the artboard tool to drag an artboard around the map, snapping to its borders.

Then when you export, make sure the export "Area" is set to the name of the artboard (if there are no other artboards in the document, that should be the default).