Dashed lines / stroke panel Improvements

[Ash]

Apps: All
Platforms: Windows, macOS and iPad

A few new features have been added to the stroke panel...

1. As has been commonly requested we have now added the ability to 'balance' dashed lines using a new toggle button on stroke panel. This means that the dash pattern is automatically rescaled between any cusps in a curve - making things such as corners of a rectangle or the start and end of a stroke look correct.

2. An additional dash and gap have now been added to build up more complex dashed line patterns (now giving you 3 dash and 3 gaps) making, among other things, two dot chain patterns possible. On desktop you can also click-drag the dash and gap indicator as shown to adjust the value. 

3. A new button has been added to clear any arrowheads on a stroke - just making it more convenient than having to open the drop downs to set both ends to "None".

 

 

 

[Patrick Connor]

Known Issues:

• AFD-6485 - Time Taken to Expand Dashed Strokes Gradually Increases as Second Dash Value Decreases Eventually Causing Designer To Hang
• AFD-6490 - Make "phase" label draggable to change too
• AFD-6491 - Dashed lines - make draggable values have 0.1 accuracy
• PD-500 - iPad - Buttons at bottom of stroke panel don't work
• AFD-6479 - Artifacts showing on dashed balanced lines at shape corners.
• AFB-7456 - Increased accuracy in Balanced Dashed Lines from IDML
• AFD-6503 - Balanced dotted lines don't expand correctly
• AFD-6507 - Balanced dash lines - accept zero in 2nd and 3rd dash?
• AFD-6489 - First Dash Pattern Gap no longer has a minimum value of 0.05 on Windows
• PD-432 - [macOS] Dash Gap overlap / Stroke Panel flyout needs widening
• PD-434 - [iOS] Stroke Panel is too short now extra dash settings have been added.
• AFD-6468 - Import DXF files with dashed lines set to unbalanced

[Hangman]

The improvement to the application of dashed strokes is beyond brilliant, it may only be a small change but it is hugely welcome, definitely looking forward to the addition of non-integer value adjustments in a future release but even the simple drag action for setting dash and gap intervals makes this feature so much more intuitive and dramatically improves the workflow for dashed lines and finally allows us to create professional layouts using dashed lines where before, well, you really just couldn't, thank you... 👏

[MikeTO]

Very nice implementation of balanced corners!

Thank you

[Hangman]

1 hour ago, anto said:

Publisher freezes when all setting are 0

Appears to be fine on macOS... you can't physically set the first gap to value to zero as it defaults to 0.05 (again on macOS)...

[Ash]

4 hours ago, Patrick Connor said:

Known issues post:

• AFD-6489 - First Dash Pattern Gap no longer has a minimum value of 0.05 on Windows

All relates to the known issue above - it's a bug on Windows...

[Frozen Death Knight]

Really glad that the drag controls were added for each value. Much more intuitive and comfortable than before. 

[Hangman]

@Ash now that Dashed lines / stroke panel Improvements is a beta category, should the Expand Stroke bug be added to the known issues post above... The bug has been reported previously and can e.g., be replicated using a 1pt dashed stroke with dash and gap settings of 0, 0.05, 0, 0, 0, 0...

With those settings, selecting Expand Stoke crashes Designer requiring a Force Quit...

[Ash]

Yes thanks have linked internally, will leave to Patrick if he wants to list on here.

[Hangman]

@Ash, minor niggle but as the dash and gap values are now draggable would it not make sense for the phase value to be draggable as well...

[Ash]

yes 😆

[StuartRc]

Fantastic! another small but efficient time-saving improvement. Feel the 'Balance' toggle could be a little more obvious (only because I couldn't see it.. without reading the notes!😀)

[A_B_C]

This is fantastic. 😀

[Reckonyx]

WOW, i asked for this and they added it!

Many thank!

[A_B_C]

Though for tables, it doesn’t seem to work yet, or does it? 🙂

[bjorg]

Thank you! I Upgraded to v2 as soon as I saw this feature was on it's way. It works really intuitively and things look so much better with balanced corners!

The corners seems to break when exporting (pdf, eps and svg) and when expanding stroke. I'm guessing it is not easy to keep editability in other formats but I would be great if the appearance in other vector formats was kept. Maybe explode to line segments and group them at export would work?

[Ash]

7 minutes ago, A_B_C said:

Though for tables, it doesn’t seem to work yet, or does it? 

No we're not considering tables in scope for 2.1 - it's more of a niche use case and in itself it's quite a large chunk of work to get working well. Applying a dash to the frame border should be ok, but borders around individual cells is a minefield when you can have different weight / styled stroked adjacent to each other and things like that... 

[Hangman]

12 minutes ago, A_B_C said:

Though for tables, it doesn’t seem to work yet, or does it? 🙂

It seems a bit hit and miss, you still can't change the Cap, Join and Align options using the Table panel and you can no longer change those settings using the stroke panel either which you can in 2.0.4...

[Ash]

9 minutes ago, bjorg said:

The corners seems to break when exporting (pdf, eps and svg) and when expanding stroke

Yes we are generally going to need to expand balanced strokes before export (with some exceptions). We're certainly interested in examples of expand stroke not giving a visually consistent result with what it was before.

[RNKLN]

Quite a nice new feature. In general works good, but I managed to produce this with little effort. Yes, it's balanced, but my opinion is that it could be more balanced.

[A_B_C]

20 minutes ago, Ash said:

No we're not considering tables in scope for 2.1 - it's more of a niche use case and in itself it's quite a large chunk of work to get working well. Applying a dash to the frame border should be ok, but borders around individual cells is a minefield when you can have different weight / styled stroked adjacent to each other and things like that... 

Never mind, I know it’s super difficult to do this correctly, or rather, in a visually pleasing way. You don’t even have to consider different cell border styles, it’s sufficient to consider the same border style everywhere and different row heights or column widths. So I understand that balanced strokes in tables won’t make it into version 2.1. Basically, I was just curious to see whether you already have a solution for tables. 🙂

[Hangman]

2 minutes ago, Ash said:

Yes we are generally going to need to expand balanced strokes before export (with some exceptions). We're certainly interested in examples of expand stroke not giving a visually consistent result with what it was before.

Wow, surely that's potentially going to make for one very destructive and confusing workflow... A 400 page document where part of the design style uses balanced dashed lines around varying elements throughout. Expand balanced strokes, export to pdf then the client decides they want to change the dash spacing or dash stroke weight!

How feasible would it be to add an option to the pdf export dialogue to expand strokes in the same vein as export text to curves for svg export...

Currently expanding a balanced dash stroke breaks the setting even prior to exporting to pdf...

[Ash]

6 minutes ago, Hangman said:

Wow, surely that's potentially going to make for one very destructive and confusing workflow...

Erm, well you need to get people you are collaborating with using Affinity and then deal with native Affinity files until export time There's all kinds of examples of things which could go wrong if you are exporting to PDF and then expecting other people to edit properties of things - there's hundreds of attributes, properties, and other features which Affinity supports and PDF does not natively.

And balanced dashed lines is one of them - PDF has no concept of it. The best you can do is split a rectangle into the 4 separate sides with each side having the dash / gap settings Affinity calculated as needing to make it balanced. But it's no longer a single shape, or easily editable as even if you select all 4 sides in a different PDF editor if you change the width or gap distance it will all become unbalanced again. 

11 minutes ago, Hangman said:

Currently expanding a balanced dash stroke breaks the setting even prior to exporting to pdf.

Thanks - that's a bug.

[Hangman]

19 hours ago, Ash said:

And balanced dashed lines is one of them - PDF has no concept of it.

Ah, okay, that I did not know... so does that strengthen the case for having an option in the pdf export dialogue to expand strokes on export or is that simply not viable from a programming perspective... if it were possible/practical it has the potential to maintain a non destructive workflow...

Edit: I totally misunderstood the application of expanding balanced strokes for some reason thinking this would need to be done manually in the document prior to exporting thereby making it a destructive process but now realise it's automatic so please ignore my earlier comment...

[Michail]

Long awaited: Balanced corners - Thank you!