Boolean operations with letters do not work in Affinity Designer 2.0.3!

[Designer1]

Boolean operations with letters do not work in Affinity Designer 2.03! The cutting of the Letters with knive does not work either!
How can you market such unfinished and non-functioning software!? Awful.

[RM f/g]

Both work fine here (on Mac).

Just have to re-apply colour after a boolean operation.

[MikeTO]

It's working fine for me, too. As RM stated, a letter has no stroke by default so if it's un-stroked before you do an add or subtract just remember to stroke it after you perform the operation.

[Designer1]

In Designer 1.06 it works perfectly. Not in Affinity Designer 2.03. I have Windows 11.

[GarryP]

Seems to be working for me on Windows 10 – see attached video.
If you can supply a file which exhibits the problem then we can see if we get the same problem on our machines.
Also, if you can give a more detailed description than “do not work” then that would be helpful for diagnostic purposes.

[Designer1]

Nothing works for me!

[MikeTO]

It's hard to tell which boolean operations you're doing because the screen recording didn't capture the mouse pointer - we can't see which buttons are being clicked.

It appears that at ~15 seconds you tried a boolean (which one?) and the two selected objects disappeared which would be bad if this is what happened.

At ~22 seconds you chose undo? and at 24 seconds chose another boolean (I'm guessing xor based on the result) and this time it worked. The object had no stroke or fill but that's okay, you can set those.

So what happened at 15 seconds? And which font is this?

[Designer1]

1 hour ago, MikeTO said:

It's hard to tell which boolean operations you're doing because the screen recording didn't capture the mouse pointer - we can't see which buttons are being clicked.

It appears that at ~15 seconds you tried a boolean (which one?) and the two selected objects disappeared which would be bad if this is what happened.

At ~22 seconds you chose undo? and at 24 seconds chose another boolean (I'm guessing xor based on the result) and this time it worked. The object had no stroke or fill but that's okay, you can set those.

So what happened at 15 seconds? And which font is this?

Open Sans font. I have tried subtracting and adding. It does not work! Cutting with the knife doesn't work either.

[MikeTO]

I can't duplicate this with Open Sans. Here's a recording of applying each of the booleans in succession.

It might be helpful if you could upload a new screen recording with the History panel visible in addition to Layers, and with the mouse pointer captured so that we can see what options you're clicking on when. 

Thanks

 

 

[Designer1]

16 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

I can't duplicate this with Open Sans. Here's a recording of applying each of the booleans in succession.

It might be helpful if you could upload a new screen recording with the History panel visible in addition to Layers, and with the mouse pointer captured so that we can see what options you're clicking on when. 

Thanks

 

 

 

I have Affinity Designer in the German version. Do you speak German?

[MikeTO]

7 minutes ago, Designer1 said:

I have Affinity Designer in the German version. Do you speak German?

Sorry, no. But German screenshots and screen recordings are fine, we'll figure it out.

[Designer1]

Open Sans font. Boolean operations with letters do not work in Affinity Designer 2.03!
I am not able to work with this software. Bad!

[MikeTO]

Thanks for the updated screen recording. This definitely looks wrong, the two objects are disappearing for you. It's working perfectly for me on macOS so could somebody else with Windows please test this and see if it works for them?

Thanks

[Designer1]

8 hours ago, MikeTO said:

Thanks for the updated screen recording. This definitely looks wrong, the two objects are disappearing for you. It's working perfectly for me on macOS so could somebody else with Windows please test this and see if it works for them?

Thanks

Interestingly, Boolean operations work perfectly in Designer 1.06. Why has 2.03 been programmed so badly? As a professional designer, I can't work with it for clients. Actually, one should urgently expect an update from Serif!

[Designer1]

10 hours ago, MikeTO said:

Thanks for the updated screen recording. This definitely looks wrong, the two objects are disappearing for you. It's working perfectly for me on macOS so could somebody else with Windows please test this and see if it works for them?

Thanks

Try the same with letter S !

[GarryP]

There is a known issue with Geometry functions on certain types of fonts after conversion to curves: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/179179-fonts-conversted-to-curves-unable-to-mergeadd/

Maybe that issue is related to this one since the software will probably need to convert the glyphs to curves before performing the geometry function?

Note: Trying to use a Geometry function on Open Sans text also gives me strange results on Windows 10 with Designer 2.0.3.

[Designer1]

15 minutes ago, N.P.M. said:

**WorkAround** 

1. Convert to curves.
2. Ungroup the newly formed group.
3. Merge the (former glyphs)curves together.
4. Give those curves a contour of 0.1px.
5. Now slice with (shift)knifetool or use a shape to boolean subtract.
6. Set the contour to -0.1px(to make it have the original size).

Et voila

Also, I don't work with pixels, but with mm. You can't do that in your daily work! Very cumbersome. The Serif should simply fix these bug !

[MikeTO]

2 hours ago, GarryP said:

There is a known issue with Geometry functions on certain types of fonts after conversion to curves: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/179179-fonts-conversted-to-curves-unable-to-mergeadd/

Maybe that issue is related to this one since the software will probably need to convert the glyphs to curves before performing the geometry function?

Note: Trying to use a Geometry function on Open Sans text also gives me strange results on Windows 10 with Designer 2.0.3.

It could be the same issue, I'm unsure. I'm also unsure why using booleans on the letter S in Open Sans would give different results on Mac versus Windows - this code should be platform independent. I think we'll need to wait for somebody from Serif to look at this one.

In the meantime, the workaround suggested by N.P.M. is worth trying but if it's the bug you linked to then it may not work either with this character on Windows.

Cheers

[Designer1]

57 minutes ago, N.P.M. said:

The glass is always half empty with you, isn't it?
I stated it is a workaround and a solution you can apply right now until it get's resolved by Serif @MattP
Also you can put in px in the contourfield although it says mm(0.1px = 0.085 mm)
But you are right if you're going to slice/cut a 1000 glyphs a day 🤨
Maybe you should use another tool for this until it get's fixed, probably coreldraw?

I have tried this cumbersome solution. It does not work! One cannot expect customers who use software to constantly inquire in the forum because the simplest functions does not work. What about customers who are not registered in this forum and cannot work with Affinity Designer 2.03! Such bugs should be an absolute exception and should be fixed within 24 hours. Waiting weeks or months for an update is a bad service.

[Designer1]

10 minutes ago, N.P.M. said:

 

 

 

I tried it with S exactly like your video. It worked. However, there is a problem with the S shape. After setting the contour to -0.085 mm, S has a small hole at the top in the enlargement.

[Designer1]

15 minutes ago, N.P.M. said:

Tried it jus now again and don't see it here.
You could try the kind(round/mitre/bevel) of contourtool to have it act differently.
 

 

 

.

Thank you for this information.
What video - software did you use to make this video?

[SrPx]

If you set in preferences/general to allow to "copy as svg". After that, all you need to do is first convert to curves (as usual) your text , letter, glyph or etc, then you can do a geometry/melt -if needed- , copy the curves with ctrl + c or right click->copy, (but the actual curves not a "group"), then menu Edit/Special Paste, and choose Paste as  Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) (it generates a group, get rid of it (ctrl+shift+g or right click->ungroup) or pull the curves out of it).
 

I have set in preferences/shortcuts a key shortcut to use it instead of regular ctrl+v (only when needing to "curate" a curves object), for the sake of speed. Which is the only real difference to a normal workflow.

You can leave the "copy as SVG" preference permanent, some people do it as they are frequently fast copy & pasting among apps like Inkscape and Designer).

So, the difference with a normal workflow is that you are making a copy of your converted-to-curves text, place it over the old one (using snapping on as it places it exactly in place, then get rid of the old, of course). It's all done in 5 seconds. From then on, no need to make it to the object anymore, can do then any boolean, knife or shapebuilder operation to it. The object is permanently "curated".

It's a workaround I found till they fix it. But it works for now with this issue, workaround that works to be able to use without this and other issues : booleans, shapebuilder and knife. But in other threads I can see that a few people don't realize yet that it is related to the same bug.

Note that setting in preferences ' copy as svg', it takes it on or off without needing to restart the app. You can change it on and off as you wish during your process. 

 

 

[Ben]

@Designer1 Can you upload your actual file.  It is likely that there is a maths precision issue affecting that specific character glyph.  I can only know for sure by debugging it.
Can you also convert your text to curves before uploading.

Thanks.

 

[Designer1]

22 hours ago, Ben said:

@Designer1 Can you upload your actual file.  It is likely that there is a maths precision issue affecting that specific character glyph.  I can only know for sure by debugging it.
Can you also convert your text to curves before uploading.

Thanks.

 

@Ben Here is the file with S. I converted S (Open Sans) to curves.

s.afdesign

[Ben]

Thanks for the file.

The issue is exactly what I suspected.  We are seeing some precision issues with very specific types of curves.  Unfortunately, fonts seem to exhibit these forms of curves more than anything else - curves that are almost symmetrical, but less than a complete 1/4 circle arc.

In a nutshell - there is a calculation we do that uses some complicated maths for polynomial root finding - these curves produce numbers that get very large in the calculation and exceed the limits of what a 64-bit computer can handle without loosing vital precision.  Creating these test cases was difficult - they just happen by an unfortunate combination of input geometry, and hard to predict.  But, the method we are using produces much more overall accurate results than other software might do (we give you a zoom to over 1,000,000%, and we try to ensure that anything you do looks precise even past that zoom level).

 

I am working on a solution to this issue that balances the needs of precision and speed.