Percentages in place of pixel values

[RobotCoffin]

Hello, a piece of software I'm using for work has me recreate layouts designed in Affinity in an online dashboard that uses canvas percentage instead of the pixel values you'd find in the "Transform" panel. Is there some way to instead show these values as a percentage of the document?

 

 

[thomaso]

Hi @RobotCoffin,
Welcome to the Affinity forums!

Percentage is not available as a permanent display option or unit. Maybe a workaround can help.

First of all: You can enter % in the fields of the Transform panel (and others in the entire UI) to get a certain value auto-calculated by the app. For instance in your example the width "1566 px/2" or "1566 px*0.5" or "1566 px*50%" result in a new width of 783 px (50%). For such calculations the currently set unit doesn't matter of course, it works regardless of px, inch or mm for instance.

Furthermore you can use available variables in the Transform panel and other fields, for instance 'sw' for 'spread width' (= canvas width = artboard width). Thus a typed "sw*15%" results in 15% of the canvas width and for a canvas of 3500 px width this results in an object value of 525 px.

In Designer V2 you can work with a scale factor. It gets comfortable if you choose the scale factor and the artboard size accordingly to achieve a certain number of pixels.

In APub/APh V2 and in all V1 apps the scale factor feature doesn't exist. As an additional workaround you could choose a canvas size combined with a unit that allows you to 'think' the document as 100% while the document DPI influences the resulting size in Pixels, too. Consider that a certain typed value creates a different number of pixels depending on the document unit. At a page width of 1000 a typed object width of 10% results in an object width of 100 = 10% of 1000, accordingly a typed value of 25% results in 250. Depending on the unit a same numerical value represents different pixel dimensions. For instance a typed value of 2.54 in the unit inch causes a different number of pixels than in mm, pt, pica, feet etc.