Does Affinity Designer v2 solve this SVG export problem?

[YannZeRookie]

Hello,

I've been very happy with Affinity Designer 1.10.5, except for one very annoying thing in the SVG export: when exporting an SVG file, AD will "simplify" polygons where it can by removing vertices on flat segments.

You could argue: "well, it's a good idea to remove unneeded vertices that bring nothing interesting but a waste of bytes, isn't it?"

I'm sorry but no. You see, I use AD to build vector shapes that are connected by their vertices, in order to build a well-formed mesh that will be used in a video game. When polygons touch one another, they must share vertices. Removing this vertex (see attached demo) screws me up.

• Is there a way to disable this "feature" in v1?
• Does v2 address this?

Thanks,

Yann

Missing Vertex.afdesign Missing Vertex.svg

[v_kyr]

Welcome!

I'm not sure the SVG generation for export has been reworked at all here for V2 releases (I don't think so). - However what one could do even on V1 apps to overcome with the generation of simplyfied/optimized nodes (...for shape rects & polygones) is, to convert shapes first to curves and then add/apply some additional node (with the Node tool) to them here (so the whole has >= 4 nodes). - When exporting afterwards as SVG, no node optimization should usually take place as initially with just having 4 node shapes.

[YannZeRookie]

Hello, thanks for your reply!

Unfortunately, the number of nodes does not matter. I made a polygon with 12 nodes, 6 of them being on straight segments. All 6 of them were removed, and the exported SVG polygon contains only 6 nodes. I double checked that the polygon was a Curve in AD.

[v_kyr]

7 hours ago, YannZeRookie said:

Unfortunately, the number of nodes does not matter. I made a polygon with 12 nodes, 6 of them being on straight segments. All 6 of them were removed, and the exported SVG polygon contains only 6 nodes. I double checked that the polygon was a Curve in AD.

Sorry, forgotten to tell that you have to move the nodes you inserted slightly - 1 pixel would be enough here via the cursor keys - so the straight intersecting polygone lines between the default nodes would get minimalistic bent then. - If you then save as SVG (you can use the flatten SVG option, see the more button on export) the nodes you've inserted and repositioned should be preserved in the exported SVG file.

Above screenshot shows the two blue selected nodes I've additionally inserted into that hexagone and then repositioned either one of them for 1 pixel (one to the left and the other one to the right). - When I save that as SVG the added nodes should be preserved.

[v_kyr]

 

 

[YannZeRookie]

Hi, thanks for the trick. I really appreciate the time you took to put a video together!

I had discovered this trick on my side a few months ago. The problem is that I have a cadastral dataset with over 20,000 inter-connected polygons, so the manual tweak is not a workable solution.

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, YannZeRookie said:

The problem is that I have a cadastral dataset with over 20,000 inter-connected polygons, so the manual tweak is not a workable solution.

Then you better take some other, more capable SVG tool here. - There are a bunch of SVG tools available, see for example ...

• 32 great free & paid SVG editors for UX designers

[YannZeRookie]

The thing is that the original file was created in Affinity Designer by a cartographer. From that I export an ultra-high resolution PNG file to build a multi-resolution interactive map AND I also export the (vector) cadastral information as SVG. So in this project, Affinity Designer is our authoring tool, and we're stuck with it.

I am a software developer, so I can read the exported SVG code, find missing vertices and put them back in. This is what I had to code, but it's a pain and it takes processing time. I wish I could get rid of this correction code 🙂

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, YannZeRookie said:

The thing is that the original file was created in Affinity Designer by a cartographer. From that I export an ultra-high resolution PNG file to build a multi-resolution interactive map AND I also export the (vector) cadastral information as SVG. So in this project, Affinity Designer is our authoring tool, and we're stuck with it.

Export the whole file as PDF so you can better try to exchange that with some other graphics app (... one which offers good PDF import parser and also a good SVG output generator). Then export from that other app the related parts as PNG & SVG in order to see if it may ease the overall handling then.

2 hours ago, YannZeRookie said:

This is what I had to code, but it's a pain and it takes processing time. I wish I could get rid of this correction code

I can sing a song about such things too, thus I personally always look after more flexible tools & programming solutions here.

[ToryRutter]

Affinity Designer version 2 includes updates and improvements to its SVG export capabilities, but it is difficult to say whether it solves a specific problem without more information about the problem you are experiencing. That being said, Affinity Designer's SVG export functionality is generally considered to be very good, and the updates in version 2 should make it even better.

One of the improvements in Affinity Designer version 2 is the ability to export more advanced SVG features, such as SVG filters and blend modes. Additionally, Affinity Designer version 2 includes improved handling of text on a path in SVG export.

If you are experiencing a specific issue with SVG export in Affinity Designer, I would recommend checking the release notes and documentation for version 2 to see if the issue has been addressed. You can also reach out to Affinity's support team for assistance.

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[YannZeRookie]

OK thank you very much for the information and the answers. Great community here!