Print/Export 2-up, 3-up, 4-up etc.

[Dittobox]

First off I want to say: thank you!

I've been an graphic designer, photographer, and video producer for about 10 years as both in-house and freelance. I've never had this much hope that Adobe's expensive monopoly on the tools of our trade might be seriously challenged. I've been using Designer for just a few days now and it's clear to me already that Serif is serious about making professional tools. Truly excellent work so far! I anticipate using both Designer and Photo (and Publisher!) quite heavily. It's hard to explain how excited I am about this.  :)

 

Feature Request:

Create or export n-up documents, e.g. place two copies of a 5.5" x 8.5" documents on an 8.5" x 11" page, or four copies of 4.25" x 5.5" page for export to PDF or direct printing.

 

Current workflow (Adobe):

With Illustrator, InDesign, et al. I can create original sized document (5.5" x 8.5"), then start a new document double that size (8.5" x 11"), link/place the original file, then either print directly or export to PDF for a client to print in-house.

 

Current Affinity Design behavior:

I tried this method with Designer, by placing a 5.5" x 8.5" *.afdesign file in an 8.5" x 11" document, however it appears to rasterize any placed documents on PDF export. This means files are larger and do not scale up if necessary. I tend to think this is a bug because on the Designer canvas, placed *.afdesign documents appear to remain vector. The workaround is to copy and paste the content from the original file into the new one and then duplicate that content across the document.

 

I see that linked files (not just embedded) are on the roadmap, which is great. I assume this would be a big part of Affinity Publisher as well, once that's released. Even embedded files are fine, as long as the export doesn't get rasterized. That said an export option (or a part of the Export persona) with the ability to select how many you want on a page of a given size would be a killer feature.

 

Thanks!

[crabtrem]

Forgive me for asking a stupid question. I am trying to get my head around your issue. And I am coming up short, no surprise there. 

 

Question:  When you talk about the rasterize any placed documents, and they are larger and do not scale up if necessary. I am stuck on the dimensions you give. You place a 5.5"x8.5" file in an 8.5"x11" file. Is this also the orientation of the file, because you didn't mention any changes to that? Am I reading too much in the terminology? Are you actually placing an 8.5"x5.5" file in an 8.5"x11" document? And placing two copies one on top of each other in the new document. Because the way I am reading your description there would be an overlap across the document with the two copies. 

 

Sorry again in advance for asking a stupid question. 

[jmac]

I believe he's is placing one 8.5 in w x 5.5 in h document in the top half of and 8.5 in w x 11 in h document and a second 8.5 in x 5.5 in document in the bottom half. The part about what gets rasterized I can't speak to.

[Dittobox]

Here's a little demonstration of what I mean by 2-up. Does this help?

 

 

Also attached are sample *.afdesign files, and a resulting rasterized PDF file from the two 5.5x6.5.afdesign documents that were placed in the 11x8.5.afdesign file.

5.5x8.5.afdesign

11x8.5 Rasterized PDF.pdf

11x8.5.afdesign

[crabtrem]

First. Thank you for the clarification. My perspective needed that.

 

So, if you will take into consideration that this is only my opinion. I offer the following observations for consideration.

 

It looks like the PASTE IMAGE command literally does that, from what I can observe.  So my take on it, is when you use the PASTE IMAGE command, a pixel image is inserted with a link to the embedded file. So you are using a rasterized view.

To test that. I took and copied just the elements (layers) from your document and pasted them onto the 11"x8.5" document, exported the PDF and you can see the results.

 

No rasterization. Because I didn't use the PASTE IMAGE command, but actually copied and pasted the layers.

 

I was thinking it might be easier to use artboards. So I created an artboard document from your original file, added the second artboard. I ended up copying the original and placing those over the larger page. Then deleting each of those artboards, but choosing the option to save all the elements. And you see the results here.

 

 

So in summary, I believe your rasterization is from using the PASTE IMAGE command. And I believe that it is the way the command is designed to work. It was one of those V8 moments for me. 

 

I again emphasize my disclaimer. Everything here is my opinion only. Provided only in the hope that it might help you. I will always defer to the experts at Affinity. These are just my observations.

Good luck.

 

[MikekPhoto]

First off I want to say: thank you!

I've been an graphic designer, photographer, and video producer for about 10 years as both in-house and freelance. I've never had this much hope that Adobe's expensive monopoly on the tools of our trade might be seriously challenged. I've been using Designer for just a few days now and it's clear to me already that Serif is serious about making professional tools. Truly excellent work so far! I anticipate using both Designer and Photo (and Publisher!) quite heavily. It's hard to explain how excited I am about this.  :)

 

Feature Request:

Create or export n-up documents, e.g. place two copies of a 5.5" x 8.5" documents on an 8.5" x 11" page, or four copies of 4.25" x 5.5" page for export to PDF or direct printing.

 

Current workflow (Adobe):

With Illustrator, InDesign, et al. I can create original sized document (5.5" x 8.5"), then start a new document double that size (8.5" x 11"), link/place the original file, then either print directly or export to PDF for a client to print in-house.

 

Current Affinity Design behavior:

I tried this method with Designer, by placing a 5.5" x 8.5" *.afdesign file in an 8.5" x 11" document, however it appears to rasterize any placed documents on PDF export. This means files are larger and do not scale up if necessary. I tend to think this is a bug because on the Designer canvas, placed *.afdesign documents appear to remain vector. The workaround is to copy and paste the content from the original file into the new one and then duplicate that content across the document.

 

I see that linked files (not just embedded) are on the roadmap, which is great. I assume this would be a big part of Affinity Publisher as well, once that's released. Even embedded files are fine, as long as the export doesn't get rasterized. That said an export option (or a part of the Export persona) with the ability to select how many you want on a page of a given size would be a killer feature.

 

Thanks!

This would be a great addition to AP as well.  It's easy to do in Photoshop and there are a number of scripts available.  My favorite, and free is Tych Panel, the other tool I use, unfortunately Windows only is Qimage Ultimate - where you select the images and it will automatically resize them to the paper size selected, to you can specify the image size, like 5"x7" and it will place two images per 8.5x11 page. If you select more images it simply creates more pages.

 

Adding a feature like this to AP and AD would be a great time saver and help folks wean away fro Adobe :)