Repeat action on many objects

[Daniele Avitabile]

Dear All,

I am new to Affinity Designer (just migrated from Intaglio). I often find myself in need of:

* Applying a certain action on an object, say, rescaling a rectangle around its top-left corner, and fixing its width to 10cm

* Repeating exactly the same action for each of 10 rectangles that are also on the page.

Note that making the first rectangle and then cloning it is not an option.

Along the same lines, I would like sometimes to rescale all circles that match a certain property: I know how to select by stroke, say, but I don't know how to rescale all circles in the selection at the same time. 

How do I accomplish that quickly and efficiently in Affinity Designer 2? 

Best

Daniele

[firstdefence]

You can make the first shape a symbol and any duplicates will reflect changes. 

https://affinity.help/designer2/English.lproj/pages/SymbolsAssets/symbols.html

 

[Alfred]

4 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

You can make the first shape a symbol and any duplicates will reflect changes.

This is true, but:

19 minutes ago, Daniele Avitabile said:

Note that making the first rectangle and then cloning it is not an option.

 

[firstdefence]

So each rectangle is a unique size?

Maybe the OP needs to post a more accurate description of what they are laying out and what they want. 

[Alfred]

3 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

So each rectangle is a unique size?

Maybe the OP needs to post a more accurate description of what they are laying out and what they want. 

Indeed. As things stand, we don’t even know whether or not resizing a rectangle from 20 cm wide to 10 cm should also result in its height being halved.

[Daniele Avitabile]

Thank @firstdefence and @Alfred for your responses. I typically import images, or other data, from pdf files, and after importing them I have to make them all of the same size. Another use case is that I import an eps with 500 dots in there, and I want to resize all the dots by a certain amount. In this cases I am not creating the objects from scratch, but I rather must act on pre-existing objects. I hope this clarifies things

[thomaso]

3 hours ago, Daniele Avitabile said:

how to rescale all circles in the selection at the same time. 

If you want to change objects of different sizes to one common size: This has been requested in the forum for V1 quite a few times. I don't know if it is available in V2 yet.

2 hours ago, Daniele Avitabile said:

I want to resize all the dots by a certain amount.

This works: To change different sized objects relatively…

• Activate the "Transform Objects Separately".
• Select all wanted objects.
• Set the anchor in the Transform panel to the wanted position.
• Type the wanted final value for the current main object in the Transform panel … or type expressions.

[Daniele Avitabile]

Thank you @thomaso! This is exactly what I was looking for. 

Daniele

[Dan C]

16 hours ago, thomaso said:

If you want to change objects of different sizes to one common size: This has been requested in the forum for V1 quite a few times. I don't know if it is available in V2 yet.

I can confirm this has been added in the 2.4 update - currently in beta but soon to be released