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View objects outside artboard.


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Please fix this! I just got Affinity thinking finally i don't have to use illustrator anymore. But I'm so used to being able to play with the image by taking one image off the art board and trying with another... but now I can't... they're just... GONE?!?

If what you are saying is correct, I'm going to have to go through ALL my files from Illustrator and increase or add artboards, just so I can use elements I've already created. Otherwise I lose them all...  

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1 hour ago, Adventor said:

Please fix this!

What to fix? MEB said already that elements outside the page are gone in a PDF. Affinity and e.g. Inkscape are only able to read the PDF part. I wonder if there is any application (affordable, not high priced) beside the Adobe universe that is able to open an AI without the PDF stream?

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Windows 10 | i5-8500 CPU | Intel UHD 630 Graphics | 32 GB RAM | Latest Retail and Beta versions of complete Affinity range installed

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On 11/29/2020 at 8:36 PM, JGD said:

a textile/fashion designer, who wanted to lay some patterns spanning across several printed sheets, as you can see from the image she offered as an example and reproduced below.

Something like this, perhaps?

ade_multiartboards.png.379fd97ac1da04c382e63a95f4260b28.png

 

^ Every artboard will contain its respective part of the purple curve on export, "All Artboards" will contain everything.

The red and green artboard outlines are just added to illustrate the structure. (Blue is the bleed.)

To create the "All Artboards" artboard, duplicate all artboards first, convert each to object (only possible individually one by one, not by selecting them all, which can be a p.i.t.a[rm].), boolean add to make them one object, then convert back to artboard.

Caveat: New objects may want to "snap" into the next best artboard as a child. So perhaps you may want to lay out everything in the "All Artboards" artboard first as a nested layer, then when finished, move the "actual content" layer outside on top of the artboard layers stack.

More possibilities and options are available via Export persona and Slices.

Very flexible model.

On 11/29/2020 at 8:36 PM, JGD said:

The. Artboard. Model. Is. Broken.

There are a few bugs, as almost everywhere (not to speak of the apps from the company that rhymes with schmadobe), but…
Nah.
The concept is okay.
You just need to make use of the features it offers.

MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2

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On 11/29/2020 at 2:36 PM, JGD said:

a textile/fashion designer, who wanted to lay some patterns spanning across several printed sheets

Instead of laying these out as artboards, one option would be to create the entire design in one big artboard or page, then create slices for the individual pages using the Export persona, setting each to be exported as a PDF.

After exporting the individual slices, they could be combined using Preview (or if necessary then possibly Publisher).

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4 hours ago, fde101 said:

then create slices for the individual pages using the Export persona, setting each to be exported as a PDF

The thing with slices is that they will export as individual files. If you need a single multipage PDF file without resorting to third party workarounds or reimporting e.g. into Publisher and then reexporting, "page" artboards are the way to go.

Also keep in mind that trying to create slices from the scratch si a p.i.t.a. because they won't snap.

4 hours ago, fde101 said:

After exporting the individual slices, they could be combined using Preview

If you've exported as PDF/X, editing in Preview will break it. Unless you save using the pathetic built-in PDF/X-3 filter.

But anyway… that's what I meant above with:

On 5/7/2021 at 6:37 PM, loukash said:

More possibilities and options are available via Export persona and Slices.

 

MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2

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  • 6 months later...
On 5/7/2021 at 6:33 AM, Adventor said:

Please fix this! I just got Affinity thinking finally i don't have to use illustrator anymore. But I'm so used to being able to play with the image by taking one image off the art board and trying with another... but now I can't... they're just... GONE?!?

If what you are saying is correct, I'm going to have to go through ALL my files from Illustrator and increase or add artboards, just so I can use elements I've already created. Otherwise I lose them all...  

Same here, the exact moment you create an artboard you cannot see anything outside anymore. The 'clip to canvas' keeps to be disabled when working with artboards. What a mess!

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  • Staff

Hi @Graphic74,
Are you using Affinity Designer? If so you can still drag objects to the pasteboard area - they remain visible. Only objects that cross the canvas boundary aren't visible outside the canvas area (but visible inside). Objects full outside the canvas are visible. If you are having trouble can you post a screenshot of the application Window with the Layers panel visible so we can see what's going on please? Thank you.

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1 minute ago, MEB said:

Hi @Graphic74,
Are you using Affinity Designer? If so you can still drag objects to the pasteboard area - they remain visible. Only objects that cross the canvas boundary aren't visible outside the canvas area (but visible inside). Objects full outside the canvas are visible.

Yes, and thank you, that's help a lot ;)

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  • 4 weeks later...

Hi all,

I am completely new to AD and coming from Illustrator and I am really struggling with this topic. It is an essential part of my AI workflow that I can put reference images in the margin of my workspace and design pieces of my image outside the artboard and then drag them into the artboard to compose them/generate different versions/etc. 

I understand that the artboard acts as its own layer in AD and as long as my other layers are not nested inside the artboard, I can see them past the edges of the board. However, every time I create a new element or copy an element (e.g. by holding down command and dragging) it doesn't paste it to the same layer as the item I am copying is in, it pastes it to the artboard. And it doesn't matter whether I lock the artboard and/or hide the artboard - the outcome is the same. This means every time I make a new element I have to drag it to the right layer in order to work with it.

Is there a solution to this problem? It seems to me a lot of people are saying they rely on the same behavior from Illustrator that I do and I haven't really read a workable solution. To me, it seems like fixing this behavior would be a very close approximation of what a lot of people are looking for. My naive expectation going in is that if I have an objected selected and then I start making a new object (e.g. with the pen tool), then that new object should be created in the same layer as the object I had most reccently selected is located in, not the random artboard 5 layers down. What am I missing here? 

Thanks for any guidance

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On 5/7/2021 at 5:37 PM, loukash said:

Something like this, perhaps?

ade_multiartboards.png.379fd97ac1da04c382e63a95f4260b28.png

 

^ Every artboard will contain its respective part of the purple curve on export, "All Artboards" will contain everything.

The red and green artboard outlines are just added to illustrate the structure. (Blue is the bleed.)

To create the "All Artboards" artboard, duplicate all artboards first, convert each to object (only possible individually one by one, not by selecting them all, which can be a p.i.t.a[rm].), boolean add to make them one object, then convert back to artboard.

Caveat: New objects may want to "snap" into the next best artboard as a child. So perhaps you may want to lay out everything in the "All Artboards" artboard first as a nested layer, then when finished, move the "actual content" layer outside on top of the artboard layers stack.

More possibilities and options are available via Export persona and Slices.

Very flexible model.

There are a few bugs, as almost everywhere (not to speak of the apps from the company that rhymes with schmadobe), but…
Nah.
The concept is okay.
You just need to make use of the features it offers.

Here's the issue, and if you carefully re-read what you've just wrote and even what I wrote you'll understand, because it's pretty much self-evident:

These are workarounds. All of them. And really convoluted, inelegant, not that flexible ones at that. Also, what you've just suggested, I had already figured out on my own (and some variation of it is probably described by myself somewhere on this thread, albeit without illustrations), mind you.

It's the whole going back-and-forth between being outside and inside of artboards that's the problem, because… trying to stay outside of them is “contrary” to Serif's philosophy, you are basically fighting against the application at every corner. And while these workarounds may work for projects with very simple artwork, like the squiggly line demo you've just shown, they immediately fall apart with multi-universal-layer documents. I know this for a fact because I did do a lot of such projects, and I tried to recreate them on AD to the best of my ability. It doesn't work (or not without you wanting to just defenestrate your computer, that is).

They fall apart because then you have to repeat them with every. single. layer. And perform extraneous mouse movements and clicks, and do constant object-dragging in the Layers palette, for every. single. object. Now multiply layers by the dozens and objects by the thousands, and do the math.

Let's not beat around the bush here: the real problem is there's not a one-stop-shop, set-it-once-and-fuggedaboutit toggle box where you can just change the interaction model altogether – kind of like the one that allows you to switch between Ai's and Corel's selection tool paradigm – and be done with it. And to add insult to injury, there aren't even shortcuts such as the ones I've suggested to make those highly repetitive workarounds easier and more tenable.

As for “making use of the features it offers” (emphasis yours): no $***, Sherlock. Yeah, that's obviously an option for some, or even the majority of their current, digital illustration-heavy user base, but if I could do just that, and if that was good enough by my standards or even sustainable in a professional environment, do you think I – or anyone else for that matter – would be here on the forums… *checks notes* making these feature requests in the first place? 😂

Come on, man, you're welcome to make interesting observations and offer suggestions of your own, but asking us, loyal, paying customers, to just suck it up and try to make do with subpar tools (which are subpar for no good reason other than some veeeery debatable – but reversible, or at least not necessarily exclusive – philosophical choices made early on, and not really due to any inherent technical limitation) and let Serif devs live in their cool little echo chamber, instead of putting the user forum – specifically designed to accommodate feature suggestions and requests – to good use, just won't fly…

As for the time I still spend here in the forums fighting against windmills, even with a freaking PhD project to do and a thesis to write, well… I'm just taking one for the team (the “team” being my students and my colleagues), because if we do get our way, I know this will end up saving hundreds or even thousands of person-hours in the long run. No, really; in the real world of graphic design, complex jobs which warrant these features are more than common enough to justify their implementation, this isn't just some capricious tug-of-war I'm having here with Serif just for the heck of it.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Are all of us being heard? I to came looking for how to do this and found this thread. So many of us saying how vital this feature is to our work flow and yet it has not been addressed! This thread started in 2018 I believe! 

I too want our of the clutches of Adobe and Illustrator especially. I like Affinity but yet.....I don't! 

I needed to put my two cents in but I really really need this feature (just like everyone else......I guess for now creating a giant artboard and puting a box the sise of my document on that giant artboard is going to be the solution. Not ideal but I might be able to work around it for now.....

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20 hours ago, schwabbyfw said:

So many of us saying how vital this feature is to our work flow and yet it has not been addressed!

What feature is that?

Visibility of objects outside of the document area in a Designer document which does not contain artboards is controlled by the View -> View Mode -> Clip To Canvas option.

If the document does contain artboards, objects which are partially outside of an artboard are clipped to the artboard, but those completely outside are still visible.

If something is outside of the artboards in Illustrator it is not included in the PDF stream so it does not exist when importing into Affinity Designer and thus cannot be included.    That is a limitation of PDF (or perhaps of Illustrator) and not something that Serif can fix.  If you are running into this import issue, you will need to open the file in Illustrator and move them temporarily onto an artboard before importing the file into Designer.

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  • 1 month later...

Eureka! I'm a 71-year-old retired educator, self-taught now "retired" Adobe Illustrator user learning Affinity. After struggling to understand a lot of what I was reading above, I finally discovered that there's a little checkbox in the new document window to make something an art board, and since I've never even noticed that option, my documents apparently aren't artboards (I didn't know there was anything but an artboard). But now, if I go to View: View Mode: Clip to Canvas and UNcheck that, I can store things outside the page boundary. Excellent! So glad to fix that issue.

Edited by Digraph
clarity
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  • 2 weeks later...

image.png.e7d1b04632c88cee6ce3ffb1b31c8b16.png

So, from what I'm gathering in this thread, there's no way for me to disable this choice in a document with artboards, and that choice is, as someone put it, "by design"?

Well, then, that design choice is wrong and should be changed. I've run into a lot of situations where this would be extremely useful. An example, among many: I want to see what my bleed area looks like. In order to see that, I have to export the artboard and look at the exported file. As I understand it, there's no other way. That's just absurd.

This request seems to be over six years old. Please, just let me flip this simple boolean!

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  • Staff

Hi @smlsvnssn,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
Thanks for your feedback. You can place and see objects outside artboards (in artboard based documents) - just try it. Only objects that cross the boundary of the artboard are actually clipped (and as such only visible inside the artboard area). Regarding the bleed issue specifically that's a bug (or rather an improvement) that's already logged with development.

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Yes, @MEB, I knew that already, since that fact has been mentioned extensively in this thread. That's not what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about, and what a lot of other people have been talking about for a few years, is that I want to be able to choose whether objects crossing artboard boundaries get clipped or not.

Can I do that? If not, I want to be able to make that choice, instead of the software forcing me to accept its choice.

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@MEB

Part of what is so frustrating about this issue is the tone of the response users receive from the Moderators. Responses from the moderators seem to purposefully ignore what we are saying then treat us like we're just ignorant, with phrases like "just try it". Many, many contributors to this forum have taken the time to be very specific about why this issue is so important. Many users go out of their way to explicitly explain that they understand the current functionality to ward off the snide comments, but either get them anyway or are completely ignored. My last post received no response whatsoever from Affinity - and I was very polite. 

Your users are telling you that some of us want to see the objects that cross the boundary of the clipboard without it being clipped. There's nothing to argue about - we know we want it and we're asking for it. We don't care about objects that don't cross the boundary. It's completely irrelevant. Allowing your users to control the view functionality of the clipboard with a simple toggle feels like the teeniest, tiniest ask of all time. If you cannot provide a satisfying reason for why this small change can't be made you will continue to frustrate and lose users. 

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  • 2 months later...

It's really a frustrating user experience. I need to be able to see what's crossing the artboard boundary as well as what's fully outside the boundary. That ability allows us to fine tune the artboard boundary itself, if we need to. It allows several actions to take place.

A simple toggle would solve this. Toggle on and you hide boundary crossing objects, toggle off and you see all objects no matter what positio they have to boundary.

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  • 1 year later...

There is another option... use the Layers Palette to locate and select, then drag "it" on to your canvas (you could even increase the Thumbnail size for a more trustworthy viewing) So panic not, ye fluffy peeplees, your imported thing-a-me has (most likely) not disappeared, its just taking a rest from you staring at it all the time! : ) WD

Edited by Wonky Dom
Grammar
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  • 7 months later...

I think devs should rethink this topic, these workarounds is not good solution because other tools still works in that area, like guide lines you still do not see outside. This is vector software, why artists should work in print zone only? And every time you need to resize it. You added CAD file format for import, like DXF, but it's hard to work with. The other pain the reduction of anchor points.
Maybe better to make a poll of most wanted feature? Because i saw many old topics here and why many people cannot forget about corel draw, illustrator etc, but after 5+ years Affinity still lack of this features.

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1 hour ago, sprayer said:

these workarounds

These are not "workarounds" because:

1 hour ago, sprayer said:

This is vector software

^ There you go.

An artboard is a vector object, not a borderless rectangular page. (Test it yourself: any vector shape can be converted to an artboard, not just rectangles.) 
Other objects "on an artboard" are in fact artboard's children.
By definitition, child objects are being clipped by parent vector objects.
That's why you need to move an object outside the artboard within the z-hierarchy to see it on the canvas. This is the expected workflow, not a "workaround".

If there's no artboards in Designer, then the document itself is a simple single page.
Disable View → View Mode → Clip To Canvas to see all objects outside the page.

1 hour ago, sprayer said:

guide lines you still do not see outside

Guides are children of an artboard/page as well. If they weren't, they would clash with guides in other artboards. What a mess that were…

MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2

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3 hours ago, loukash said:

These are not "workarounds" because:

^ There you go.

An artboard is a vector object, not a borderless rectangular page. (Test it yourself: any vector shape can be converted to an artboard, not just rectangles.) 
Other objects "on an artboard" are in fact artboard's children.
By definitition, child objects are being clipped by parent vector objects.
That's why you need to move an object outside the artboard within the z-hierarchy to see it on the canvas. This is the expected workflow, not a "workaround".

If there's no artboards in Designer, then the document itself is a simple single page.
Disable View → View Mode → Clip To Canvas to see all objects outside the page.

Guides are children of an artboard/page as well. If they weren't, they would clash with guides in other artboards. What a mess that were…

Do you know what vector is? It is free from dimensions it is mathematical images, you can draw infinite space and work with. For example you can make a dozen variations of fonts letters to choose from, align them to guides etc, why i should draw them all in artboard? You can import from CAD very big shape and work with it, if you want laser cut you do not need artboard or something, this is vector not pixel software what have restriction to hardware 8k texture max in viewport. And yes i know what arboard is and i do not use it, Corel Draw also have such function it is called PowerClip, when i what to clip i will clip it, why we should use it by default? By the way by default there are no arboards and you will not see any object outside of zone at all. 

I don't know what argument you will listen, there are not too many big vector software such as Illustrator, corel draw, Inkscape and they work the same in that way.

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1 hour ago, sprayer said:

It is free from dimensions it is mathematical images, you can draw infinite space and work with.

But when you make a rectangle, it has a defined size. Same with an Artboard. It is also a vector object, with a size. And it can contain things, which are then limited to what fits in that Artboard.

You don't have to use Artboards, if you don't like their behavior.

-- Walt
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