CONTOUR Tool Upgrade Request

[David in Mississippi]

Before converting over to Affinity Software (I use 8 of the 9 apps, I don't use Publisher on the iPad (yet)), I was a proponent of Xara Designer Pro. In that software, their contour tool had three features I desperately WISH Affinity would make available as well:

First, the created contours are DYNAMICALLY LINKED to the object from which the contour is created. This means that once you create the contour based on an object (including text), you can change the source object (such as edit the text), and the contour automatically and dynamically changes with those edits.

Second, the created contour is automatically "added" to all elements of that contour. This is especially evident when adding contours to text. Currently in Affinity, if you create a contour on a text object, each letter has its own independent contour, and as you expand the contour, it looks horrible. To fix this, you have to select all the contour elements and use geometry > add to add each letter to make a single contour element. This should happen automatically. To be even better, you might want to also add a setting that gives us a checkbox: "Automatically add contour elements?"  Here is an example of what I mean:

Third, it would be great to be able to designate the NUMBER OF CONTOUR LAYERS in a single contour.  Xara allows you to have a single contour with up to 10 layers, each of which can have a different color. Here is an example:

Thanks for considering this - I believe it would boost the usability of the contour tool immensely in the Affinity Suite.

 

[Aisthetikos]

Yes, I agree, there are a number of features missing in the contour tool. 🙂 It's not quite finished yet.

[Pšenda]

On 6/3/2023 at 5:27 PM, David in Mississippi said:

First, the created contours are DYNAMICALLY LINKED to the object from which the contour is created. This means that once you create the contour based on an object (including text), you can change the source object (such as edit the text), and the contour automatically and dynamically changes with those edits.

Maybe I don't understand the request, but this is exactly how the Contour Tool works - the contour adapts to the object even after editing it.

[dre.]

14 hours ago, Aisthetikos said:

Yes, I agree, there are a number of features missing in the contour tool. 🙂 It's not quite finished yet.

100%

[Aammppaa]

I asked for the same some time ago... 

 

 

[Mark Daniel]

For what it's worth, by combining Compound Groups and Symbols you can have editable text with multiple outer contours.

You can also do a similar thing using the appearance panel, again still retaining the edibility of the text.

I appreciate that we could make this easier in the long run but hopefully these ideas might be useful in the meantime.

Mark

 

 

[chessboard]

@Mark Daniel Thanks, that's cool! Would you mind to explain, how you did this? How did you get the three instances of the symbol to have different fill colours, and what do these dotted orange lines in the layers panel mean?

For now I thougt all instances of a symbol are absolutely binded to the same appearance and that you can change the appearance only for all of them at once. But it seems that you can change the fill colour for example and keep the rest of the instance in sync with the symbol definition.

Or am I wrong here?

[Circulus]

4 minutes ago, chessboard said:

what do these dotted orange lines in the layers panel mean?

From the help:

[chessboard]

@ReturnThanks! I never understood this "Sync"-Button. Some things are so uncommon in Affinty, at least when comming from Adobe Illustrator. I alway thought of symbols as exact clones.

[Ted H]

On 6/13/2023 at 4:56 PM, Pšenda said:

Maybe I don't understand the request, but this is exactly how the Contour Tool works - the contour adapts to the object even after editing it.

I'm not the OP, but I *think* what he might mean is that instead of actually CHANGING the object to a contour, the contour tool could leave the object untouched and ADD a contour to it, and then if you changed the object, the contour would then update to fit the edited object. (Apologies to OP if that's not what they meant.) I think this sort of behaviour would make the Contour tool SO much more useful. Perhaps such behaviour could be implemented as an option you could turn on with a checkbox, so that the Contour tool could retain its current behaviour, but have the "Keep Original" as an option.