Non-integer zoom level display (Designer)

[jjsanderson]

Designer is very popular in the sewing community: sewing patterns are often distributed as layered PDFs, and Affinity seems the most popular tool in the community to edit and adjust patterns, select specific layers, combine elements to make best use of available fabric, and so on. Sewers often then project patterns onto fabric on a large cutting table: no need for pinning or chalking, you just cut on the projected line. It's amazing to watch – so fast!

Anyway, everyone seems to export to PDF, bring the file into Acrobat, and project from that. Why? Because Acrobat seems to be the only widely-used PDF app which displays non-integer zoom level, and of course it's critical to get the scale factor precisely right so the projection onto the fabric is 1:1. There are myriad YouTube tutorials showing this workflow.

It would smooth the workflow to be able to scale the view in Designer to a precise value. As best I can tell, this does actually work, however the Zoom tool's Context Toolbar only displays integers. There's room to show at least one more significant figure, but the displayed number is rounded.

Would it be possible to display 1 decimal place, if that's what's typed into the box? I think that would give sewers the confidence to stay in Designer and shave a few more seconds off their workflows. I think more than 1 decimal place would be overkill for this use case – a few millimetres here or there is within error for both the line width and the cutting process.

Thanks for considering.

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, jjsanderson said:

It would smooth the workflow to be able to scale the view in Designer to a precise value. As best I can tell, this does actually work, however the Zoom tool's Context Toolbar only displays integers. There's room to show at least one more significant figure, but the displayed number is rounded.

I can't speak to whether or not Serif will do it, but it does use non-integer values, it just doesn't show them. Entering 100.0 will give you a different zoom level than 100.4 but both will be shown as 100.

[loukash]

2 hours ago, jjsanderson said:

Would it be possible to display 1 decimal place

In addition to @MikeTO's post, you can see the decimal zoom value in the "Status" toolbar item. If the document title is too long, the decimal value will still be visible in the tooltip if you hover over the Status box.