Spiral

[lenogre]

No spiral tool.

Why ?

I still use my old Ai CS4 for that.

[Andreas Scherer]

2 hours ago, lenogre said:

No spiral tool.

You can fake it well enough.

[iconoclast]

I use Inkscape for that and import the Spiral into Designer or Publisher as SVG, if I need it. Inkscape's Spiral Tool is pretty nice and allows logarithmic spirals too. But it would of course be nice if Designer would have such a tool too.

[PaulEC]

2 hours ago, Andreas Scherer said:

You can fake it well enough.

Could you explain how you did this?

[2ddpainter]

1 hour ago, PaulEC said:

Could you explain how you did this?

you could use open half circles for this
(mirror it, scale it a bit and so on)

 

[Pšenda]

2 hours ago, PaulEC said:

Could you explain how you did this?

For example:

[PaulEC]

Thanks both, I know you can do spirals in other software (I’d use DrawPlus, myself if I needed to) but I was really wondering how you could “fake it” in Affinity.

[Andreas Scherer]

3 hours ago, PaulEC said:

Could you explain how you did this?

Later. It's all done in AD, promise. And it's live text on path.

Good night.

[Pšenda]

11 minutes ago, PaulEC said:

how you could “fake it” in Affinity.

For example, by downloading the attached *.afdesign file in my link and using one of the offered spirals. Alternatively, I will save it/them to Assets for repeated use.

[firstdefence]

I use a complement of apps to do what I want, I think, even if Affinity got a spiral tool I'd still use inkscape 1.2.2 for Mac out of habit, inkscape fills a lot of feature holes that affinity has, yes the UI is clumsy but the tools do what you want and the spiral tool is simple to use, although it could be made more... elegant, but you get exactly what you want, evenly spaced (Divergent: 1 - Last shape) concentric spirals, can't be bothered faffing around with workarounds. 

I think another year or two and Affinity will have ironed out a lot of the wrinkles and will start becoming the app suite it should be. Have you seen the bug list for 2.1.x it's epic and on top of that they are very slowly adding new features, such as cross reference in publisher for example.

[Andreas Scherer]

9 hours ago, Andreas Scherer said:

Later.

• I draw concentric circles with diminishing radii and add two perpendicular lines.
• With the Pen tool, I draw one curved line connecting the nodes marked with black dots and try to create a smooth spiral.
• With the Art Text tool, I add the text in a single line.
• With Font "Lobster Two Bold Cursive", I mark individual words/phrases and increase the font size from 28pt to 84pt.
• Done.

 

[Andreas Scherer]

15 hours ago, iconoclast said:

I use Inkscape for that and import the Spiral into Designer

Good idea. My design would have worked with "8 rotations, 0.4 deviation, 0.2 inner radius". Noted for next time. Thanks.

[Andreas Scherer]

1 hour ago, firstdefence said:

I use a complement of apps to do what I want

very slowly adding new features, such as cross reference in publisher

I use Rawtherapee for my photography needs (without DAM). And TeX simply is the non-plus-ultra for technical texts (including long-time archival format in plain text), although I would be hard pressed to suggest TeX for desktop (i.e., console) publishing. 🤓

[firstdefence]

22 hours ago, 2ddpainter said:

you could use open half circles for this
(mirror it, scale it a bit and so on)

 

Add a power duplicate or two, a join command and you have a spiral...

 

 

 

[2ddpainter]

14 hours ago, firstdefence said:

Add a power duplicate or two, a join command and you have a spiral...

cool !
Well done

[lenogre]

firstdefence : great tip but space between lines is not equal.

I notice that many of us want a spiral tool…

[2ddpainter]

2 hours ago, Red Sands said:

One of the many features I bought Vectorstyler to have in my vector toolbox.

own also a copy, is a kind of swiss army knive of vector graphics to me

[firstdefence]

On 4/17/2023 at 2:45 PM, lenogre said:

firstdefence : great tip but space between lines is not equal.

I notice that many of us want a spiral tool…

Yeah slight glitch in the process plus the many steps to even achieve a semblance of a spiral make it a moot point but wanted to show it can be done albeit clumsily.

[v_kyr]

Well there are thousend of ways & tools to draw spirals. - Here is one of the most trivial one by using just plain turtle graphics and 8 lines of py code ...

import turtle as t

t.tracer(10,1)

for i in range(360):
 t.circle(i,20)

t.update()

 

Of course we can instead also use 10 turtles simultaniously in order to do a slightly more interesting spiral ...

import turtle as t

t.tracer(10,1)

N = 10
angle = 30

turtles = []
for position in range(N):
  look_at = 360/N*position
  new = t.Turtle()
  new.setheading(look_at)
  turtles.append(new)

for radius in range(360):
  for my in turtles:
    my.circle(radius*radius, angle)

t.update()

With scripting and a few lines of code one can do much much more, like text and object spirals etc. etc. - All in all much more things like an embedded spiral tool would ever can offer here.

 

[Andreas Scherer]

For those who like curly braces: https://forum.processing.org/two/discussion/13125/for-loop-to-make-a-spiral.html

[earl_grey]

Spiral tool in Affinity Designer 0 Serif DrawPlus x8

spiral

[v_kyr]

It's also easy to do with Nodebox , which is a fun play around tool for generative drawing stuff and can also export as SVG/PDF vectors.

• https://www.nodebox.net/node/documentation/tutorial/exploring

[Markus van der Westhuizen]

To be quiet honest, I don't know why I should have to fake something like a Spiral or why I should have another piece of software on my computer (and that may not be available on the iPad) just because it is not available on AD.

I've used FreeHand and Illustrator since 1994 and both apps had spiral tools back then already. Surely it can't be rocket science to include a spiral tool? Why does Affinity not just take the opensource data from InkScape and build a tool from there?

I really don't want to leave the AD workspace to go to another app to make a spiral (which I use a lot), and then import or copy and paste it over into AD to continue work there... I'm sorry. If I need a spiral intensive job I go to Illustrator and I do the entire job there, no matter how much I love AD.

PS. The Spiral tool is the only reason I still have Adobe on my computer.

[ashf]

+1 for spiral shape