Affinity Utility App?

[Laura Ess]

I've been following some of the discussions in the Designer section about tracing, and have a different solution for that issue. When I originally bought Designer I thought it needed a trace function, but mostly because such had been in my old copy of Adobe Illustrator CS6 (bought ages ago for my Masters of Fine Art). When I reflect on my using that function in Illustrator, it always seemed incredibly finicky and never gave me the results I wanted.  I find Designer fun to use, and far more so than than Illustrator. I suspect though that I don't want that function in Designer.

Rather, how about a new Affinity Utility app instead, one that would do traces, yes, but also do scans from your scanner/printer, OCR perhaps, maybe some light editing to the results, ne a Digital Assets Manager, and would  import and export from various raster / vector / publisher formats directly, and save the results as Photo / Designer / Publisher, as required.

For example, Clip Studio Paint, Paint Shop Pro, and Open Canvas or even old Fireworks documents (or CC equivalent) have a mixed pixel and vector content.  Direct import could retain some (or all?) elements of that, whereas exporting this from their native applications to Photoshop, and then opening that, often replaces these with pixel replacements.  Likewise a greater variety of publishing/document formats could be imported, like TeX or LateX, OpenDocument, DocX, Corel Ventura, MS Publisher, Scribus,  et cetera.  Perhaps text could be exported in some of these formats as well.

Having a general utility program like this would mean that such actions don't have to be in the three main apps. They could be developed or upgraded independently. A wide range of document formats to import from would be useful for anyone who no longer the software such documents were originally created in. Individual import /export filters could be developed as needed.

Like the main apps, you could have entries in the File menu to edit these in Photo / Designer / Publisher. You could sell this app to people who don't (yet) have any Affinity apps, but want to export to Affinity formats!

Just an idea.

 

[Archangel]

Interesting idea. The Windows version of Photo doesn't support scanning into memory. And Publisher would benefit from OCR import from scanned documents.

[wonderings]

Not sure why you would not want your tracing function to be in Designer. If you are tracing an image you are wanting to make a vector out of it, why not cut out the step of tracing in one app only then to bring into another. To me this is just extra steps, and while I think Illustrator still is not great with tracing, especially compared to Corel, I would not want to have a utility app with Adobe to trace my image, make it a vector and then require me to bring it into illustrator to finishing doing what I need to do with this traced image. 

[Guest]

I like the idea, and could easily imagine a separate tool to acquire (scan, trace, OCR, etc), convert (from obscure formats to Affinity and vice versa), batch/automate tasks, etc. All tasks that you could conceivably do in any and all Affinity applications (3x the libs for each app, along with Intel and Apple silicon versions for each binary), but as a single standalone application that would work along side the primary Affinity apps (removing the need to included it each app and further bloat the app file sizes). Ideally it would support 3rd party plug-ins and scripts that would enable the community to build out many of the specific tasks, formats, etc they require.

[dcr]

1 hour ago, wonderings said:

Not sure why you would not want your tracing function to be in Designer. If you are tracing an image you are wanting to make a vector out of it, why not cut out the step of tracing in one app only then to bring into another.

If the proposed Affinity Utility was integrated with StudioLink, wouldn't you be able to vector trace the image in Affinity Utility then click on the Designer persona to finish working on it?  Or, if you're in Designer, switch to the Affinity Utility persona to vector trace an image then switch back to Designer to finish?

[Laura Ess]

7 hours ago, dcr said:

If the proposed Affinity Utility was integrated with StudioLink, wouldn't you be able to vector trace the image in Affinity Utility then click on the Designer persona to finish working on it?  Or, if you're in Designer, switch to the Affinity Utility persona to vector trace an image then switch back to Designer to finish?

Yes, that was the general idea. It would mean that the developers of each app wouldn't need to work on such issues, because Utility would have already converted things into a common format.