slice tool snap to grid?

[parusdesign]

6 years later, and the slice tool is still pretty much useless. No snapping to grid or guides. No ability to create slices from rectangles without background and border for them to keep the slice's content, it just exports the hollow shape itself.

[Elin]

Designer 2 is now released and the only freaking thing I need in my daily work is proper slice snapping. WTF serif

[Quacklin]

And Designer 2 is released and still no improvement on the export persona slices.

[tcdaly]

I'd like to add my request for snapping to grid using the slice tool.

[Binarytales]

February 2024 can saddened to find this thread after a little bit of googling. 😢

The slice tool feel next to useless for me in it's current state in Affinity Designer 2. 😞

I'm trying to export an icon set for my Stream Deck so need 15 square slices to line up exactly with the artwork.

The free hand slice tool is not snapping to anything.

I have tried creating non-visible boxes in the right positions and creating slices from those but then all I can export is the empty box, I can't seem to get it to export all the layers for a clice created that way.

The "Edit All Layers—allows selection of objects across all layers (rather than the current layer)." option doesn't seem to do anything. I may be missunderstanding it's purpose but my intuition was that it would indeed say what the docs say and select all layers when creating a slice.

The "Export Setup Options" as described here- - says "The following options are available in the export setup for each slice entry: ..."  IMO this suggests that you can change between these options but I can't see a way to do that, it seems these options are just different icons to show how the slice was initially made.

Part of the challange for me in this particular situation is that I have background artwork that spans across the whole grid of icons to be exported making it much much harder to create each icon as a self contained group or layer - at least, as far as I can tell, without loosing the abillity to easily edit the background layer in isolation.

Very very frustrating that there isn't a better way to do this even after all this time.

I guess my only option now is to manually place every slice and adjust the exact size and position using the Transform pallette. I'm glad I only have 15 of these to do!

[Hangman]

Hi @Binarytales, and welcome to the forums,

If you create your icons, ensuring they are perfectly pixel-aligned, in the Designer Persona then auto-create your slices directly from the Slices Panel in the Export Persona that 'should' give you what you need.

Without seeing your icon designs it's difficult to know how they look but as a very simple example, you could set your icons up at 72 px x 72 px which gives you the option to export them either as SVG files or as PNG files @1x, @2x or @4x depending on whether you want the icons to be 72 px x 72 px, 144 px x 144 px or 288 px x 288 px.

Name the Layers appropriately, this example names them Button_01, Button_02 etc., just for demonstration purposes.

If you want to upload a screengrab of a typical icon design along with any specific issues or questions, plenty of people on the forum will be able to help...

Note: The ability to specify a specific file path on export is a new feature in v2.4.0 which is currently in Beta.