3 tools I miss - a suggestion

[SonjaThompson]

There are 3 tools I miss from DrawPlus and CraftArtist, which I used often.  I display them below.  From reading some of the past posts about them, I think your users, myself included, would really love to have them back in some form.  It's way faster and easier to do than even Ctrl-J for large grids and transformations, as shown in the Workbooks, and it's always nice to have more than one way to do things -- in this case, these tasks were simpler in DrawPlus than the newer Affinity.  If our calculations were off for the end result we wanted, we knew right away and could Ctrl-Z, change the parameters, and try again.

The Replicate Tool:

The Transform Tool:

And finally the Blend Tool, which can transform one object to another in terms of shapes and figures, images, colors, transparency, etc.  This one is a simple transparency transform for 100% to 20% with 3 steps between:

Thanks in advance for your careful consideration of my suggestion.

Sonja Thompson

[Andreas Scherer]

I'd also like a more versatile "Tiling Tool" as in Illustrator (diamond, pentagon, hexagon).

[John Rostron]

I would particularly like to see the 'Replicate' tool. This would help a lot when producing many copies of illustrations for children's craft work.

John

[Grazer5]

The Replicate function is exactly what’s called Step and Repeat in InDesign and I really wish Serif would build this into Publisher. For anyone doing layout work for cutting and especially die-cutting it’s an absolute necessity to be number accurate

[SonjaThompson]

On 4/2/2023 at 6:25 PM, Grazer5 said:

The Replicate function is exactly what’s called Step and Repeat in InDesign and I really wish Serif would build this into Publisher. For anyone doing layout work for cutting and especially die-cutting it’s an absolute necessity to be number accurate

Well, not exactly.  The Replicate Tool is much more powerful.  If I want a 30 x 60 grid of objects equally and precisely spaced in both directions, that's a lot of counting and duplicating and measuring.  The Replicate Tool is setting it up and seeing what comes out - minimal time and effort.

The Replicate Tool could use one improvement, as far as I can tell.  It measures distance between objects from the object boundaries, which is nice sometimes.  Other times, I'd like to measure distance from the object center.

The Step and Repeat process IS available in Publisher, I think -- the shortcut is Ctrl-J.

[Pšenda]

10 hours ago, SonjaThompson said:

The Step and Repeat process IS available in Publisher, I think -- the shortcut is Ctrl-J.

"Power Duplicate". 

https://affinity.help/designer2/English.lproj/pages/ObjectControl/duplicate.html

[v_kyr]

Makes sense, especially for creating some more exact aligned objects grid and objects flow transformations. - Also from these having a powerful Blend Tool with defining an amount of intermediate steps and distances to create, is probably the most needed one.