How to 'Intersect' rectangle with group of curves?

[Outer Woods]

Hey all,

I'm new to Affinity Designer and am having a hard time using a boolean operation to get the result I'm looking for. Basically, I want to use the rectangle to show only what is inside the rectangle and cut out everything on the outside. The closest I've gotten to a solution is creating a mask, which does what I want visually, but instead of deleting everything outside of the rectangle, it just "hides" it. I assume using "intersect" is my best bet but it will not allow me to use that operation. Any help is much appreciated!

Edited March 14, 2023 by Outer Woods

[lepr]

The Boolean geometry commands do not operate on Group objects (although easily worked around in your case) and they are generally not useful with open curves.

Shape Builder Tool in delete mode will solve your problem in a few seconds:

1. select Rectangle and Group
2. activate Shape Builder Tool [S]
3. set Action to 'Delete selected areas from objects'
4. set Drag Method to 'Marquee'
5. marquee select each of the four unwanted zones at top, bottom, left and right of the canvas

Performance tip: if the app is laggy when there is a great quantity of lines/shapes, using the Merge Curves command to make them become one Curves object can make a significant improvement in app responsiveness. Merging isn't always appropriate because a Curves object has only one style for all the contained paths, but the contour lines in your example appear to be identically styled anyway and so there would be no harm to their appearance from merging.

 

[Old Bruce]

8 hours ago, ,,, said:

Merging isn't always appropriate because a Curves object has only one style for all the contained paths, but the contour lines in your example appear to be identically styled anyway and so there would be no harm to their appearance from merging.

There are Purple and Grey lines, plus I think there may be a difference in width as well.

[lepr]

45 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

There are Purple and Grey lines, plus I think there may be a difference in width as well.

I should have looked more carefully. OK, the grey lines could be merged into one object and the purple into another. Hopefully this side-discussion doesn't distract @Outer Woods from the main point: use Shape Builder Tool.

[Old Bruce]

2 minutes ago, ,,, said:

use Shape Builder Tool.

Which I failed to mention is a brilliant use of that new tool. [take a kudos emoticon]

[lepr]

1 minute ago, Old Bruce said:

Which I failed to mention is a brilliant use of that new tool. [take a kudos emoticon]

Thanks! Shape Builder Tool and everything else built with the rewritten Boolean operations justifies the price of upgrading AD1 to AD2, in my opinion.

[Outer Woods]

@,,, @Old Bruce

Thank you guys for the advice! I'm struggling a bit to get the shape builder to do what I need but I'll watch some videos and see if I can figure it out.