Reasons for being unimpressed - Why no DPP Import

[murray]

So incase it were not clear, I'm somewhat unimpressed by the fact that.. without warning Serif have decided to deprecate the DrawPlus series and instead put all focus on a Windows version of Affinity Designer.

That alone speaks worlds to how poorly the customers such as myself have been treated.. we were enticed into buying a software line believing that things would continue to evolve and grow.. and now I find we are taken back to working with primitive tools offered by the Affinity line...

Discontinue a product line.. that's cool.. your products.. your choice

Don't make this public till sales have started to slow down on the final release.. little shady but again not the end of the world.

State that there are no plans to allow customers of the product to import their work into the new product line that's replacing it!!! ARE YOU SERIOUS?

Why is there no update that states clearly .. DrawPlus file imports will be included with the first release of the Windows Affinity Designer product line?

[DWright]

Hi murray,

 

Affinity Designer for Windows uses a different code base for the file save format than the DrawPlus range and at the moment there is no direct compatibility between the afdesign and dpp file formats.

 

Closer the the beta release date we will have further information on this.

[MattP]

Closer to the beta release date we will have further information on this.

 

To be clear though, there will be no announcement at that time on any DPP import feature - as mentioned in the first paragraph the two products are from completely different code bases with different concepts and methods, so DrawPlus objects cannot be imported, nor would it know what to do with them...

 

DrawPlus will continue to work, nobody is taking it away: It is still the software that you purchased and works as it always did. DrawPlus files can be exported as SVG or PDF and imported into Affinity if required.

 

The world changes, technology particularly so... The old products were not profitable enough to remain in business, so we either did something different, or we closed the doors - luckily we had the foresight to do something different many years ahead of time because we could see it coming - not all companies have been so fortunate. This wasn't a decision taken lightly or a change made on a whim, it was for the sake of being able to produce modern software that has value in the modern world to creative professionals.

 

Thanks again,

Matt

[Jax_Cavalera]

Would it make more sense as a courtesy to drawplus users .. to provide an Affinity Designer export option so they have a way of converting the old vector work into AD compatible shapes whilst maintaining the Layers and groups info?

 

The world does change and move forwards .. that said, when a new Video Codec comes out, conversions are commonplace. When Adobe updated their file compatibility support between products, they ensured old tech users would not have work orphaned by providing a lossless conversion format.

 

Perhaps it isn't reasonable to compare Adobe's customer care with Serif as they aren't the same company and have very different levels of scale

[R C-R]

Would it make more sense as a courtesy to drawplus users .. to provide an Affinity Designer export option so they have a way of converting the old vector work into AD compatible shapes whilst maintaining the Layers and groups info?

Maybe I am misunderstanding something, but how would an Affinity export option enable these users to import their DrawPlus format files into an Affinity app?

[MEB]

Hi Jax_Cavalera,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

I believe that adding an affinity export option to DrawPlus will not add much value and eventually will not worth the time because there's no feature parity between the two programs (see MattP post above). This means that there's no way to translate certain features from DrawPlus to Affinity without simplifying/convert them to simple paths/objects, loosing their edibility along the way. For example there's no contours/offset or equivalent tool in Affinity Designer, so there's no way to keep those features editable in Affinity other than import the flattened/backed shape. And this you can also get if you export the file as a PDF from DrawPlus. Same for gradient meshes and several other features which currently doesn't exist in Affinity Designer and will eventually be implemented/approached in a totally different way (with respect to code).

Since the products are quite different (different codebases) and also are in "opposite" development stages it's difficult to take advantage of such exporter.

 

Hi R C-R

I think @Jax_Cavalera meant to add an Affinity file export option to DrawPlus.

[Jax_Cavalera]

Hey MEB,

That's a bit of a shame really that we are taking so many steps backwards.  The tools missing from Affinity Designer that aren't being included simply for the argument that their implementation wouldn't be perfect is particularly confusing.

That sends a message to me that the developers of Affinity advocate they prefer customers to have Nothing to deal with these toolset gaps instead of something that gets the job done as an interim step whilst the flaws are being ironed out.

In other posts I've read on the subject of these missing features, it seems that the code exists but is not yet included due to it not working perfectly yet.

I'd be more than happy with an export situation where my exported DrawPlus files had the following :

- keep grouped curves as groups

- keep the contents of each layer on that layer

- convert any non-curve vector content to plain curves

- give the option to include text as text OR as curves

 

The problems with PDF / EPS / SVG export are they do not honour Groups or Layers which means you would need to export each Layer as a separate Page and merge grouped curves .. a MONSTER TASK to manually undertake.

Automating the conversion of non-curve vectors into plain curves would significantly reduce the pain.  Respecting layers and groups would also significantly reduce the pain.

The value added is that you won't have to deal with Lots of customers hassling about the lack of features in Affinity since there would be a swift way to migrate their work.

Not adding that basic ability will put more load on customer support as you deal with disgruntled customers such as myself who are being left for dead with no-way of migrating our work to an actively maintained design software suite.  A problem that we were not warned about prior to purchasing DrawPlus X8  .. no-one told us that it would be discontinued and that our work in it wouldn't be exportable with some level of basic Pagination, Layer Preservation and Group Preservation!!!

 

[murray]

Hmm it seems that we are almost 1 year along the journey and looking at the toolset, we still don't appear to have any of the functionality that makes drawplus a great piece of software available in Affinity Designer.

It's a shame really that in all this time the following don't appear available :

- Vector eraser tool
- Slider for adjusting curve smoothing (node reduction as an adjustable / pre-viewable slider)
- Vector pressure sensitive tool that doesn't use outline strokes but creates and performs those boolean operations at run-time the way the Vector Brush tool works in drawplus

If there were another format that could enable better cross-application compatibility between Affinity Designer and Adobe CC applications that would be an ideal outcome.

The main problem I have with using Outline Strokes vs Runtime Booleans for a "vector brush / eraser" tool(s) is that outline strokes continue to get very CPU / GPU / RAM intensive as the user continues to draw a single "blob".  To try this for yourself, start drawing with the existing "Art Vector Brush Tool" in AD and see how long you can go around in a circle before your computer either crashes or becomes terribly unresponsive.

Do the same test in good old drawplus x8 and see how long you can go before it crashes... the answer.. as long as you want in drawplus!

AND not only is it more efficient on system resources, the result doesn't require additional steps to get it back to a vector curve shape.. outline strokes have to then be processed further to convert those strokes into a vector shape, which is rarely an accurate conversion in comparison.

Maybe my expectations are a little bit wild, to think that the company responsible for producing these great tools, would still have the ability to implement them into their new software that was touted to replace drawplus, idk.. most people seem content with what you've released so that's a positive :)