Designer: Simple document with large units hangs often

[chellman]

Hi all,

I've been working on a document to design my backyard, and set the units to feet since that's the level of granularity I'm thinking in.   I figured since Designer is a vector application, it would be no different than using any other unit.  Am I not thinking about this correctly?  Editing works fine about half the time, but the document often freezes up and I see the macOS beachball spinner for several seconds.  I'm not doing any pixel persona editing here, just straight vectors.  The document is 49x47 feet, so if I were to render it out as pixels it would be huge.  Is the availability of pixel persona influencing what I can do?

This is Affinity Designer 2.6.2 on macOS 12 running on a MacBook Pro M1 Pro with 32 GB RAM. 

[Old Bruce]

14 minutes ago, chellman said:

The document is 49x47 feet,

Or 588 x 564 inches. multiply those numbers by the DPI of your document to get the dimensions in pixels. Then mutiply the two numbers together to get the total number of pixels in your document. It is going to be huge.

I would set the DPI (on a copy of the document) to some silly low value like like 4 and see what happens while working on that. At a DPI of four that will give you 48 pixels per foot as opposed to 864 (at 72 DPI) or 3,600 (at 300 DPI).

[chellman]

I wondered.  So would you say it really is better to think about this as a pixel-based system with vectors on top than the other way round?

I tried resetting the DPI, but it's actually not letting me adjust the document size.  When I change it to 4dpi, the size jumps up to 1764 x 1692ft.  Most of the Document Setup options are disabled, in fact.

The last time I worked on this document, I was playing around with some texture fills on a few of the objects.  Did that freeze the resizability?  I just tried reseting all those objects to flat colors and that didn't change it.

[PaulEC]

Obviously you're not going to be able to print anything at this size, so wouldn't it be better to use a scale drawing rather than making it the actual size of your backyard?

[Old Bruce]

1 hour ago, chellman said:

Hi all,

I've been working on a document to design my backyard, and set the units to feet since that's the level of granularity I'm thinking in.   I figured since Designer is a vector application, it would be no different than using any other unit.  Am I not thinking about this correctly?  Editing works fine about half the time, but the document often freezes up and I see the macOS beachball spinner for several seconds.  I'm not doing any pixel persona editing here, just straight vectors.  The document is 49x47 feet, so if I were to render it out as pixels it would be huge.  Is the availability of pixel persona influencing what I can do?

This is Affinity Designer 2.6.2 on macOS 12 running on a MacBook Pro M1 Pro with 32 GB RAM. 

What is the size of the file in the Finder in bytes? It should be in the dozens of kilobytes. The pinwheel (beachball) should not show up. Is it possible to upload the file here? I could keep asking questions for ever and not hit on the cause of the problem.

 

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, chellman said:

 I'm not doing any pixel persona editing here, just straight vectors.  The document is 49x47 feet, so if I were to render it out as pixels it would be huge.

FWIW, I created an AD document with those dimensions, added 10240 vector objects to it, & did not detect any signs of a hang or unusually slow UI responses. (When I selected ~7000 same fill color objects & moved them, there was a maybe ½ second redraw delay, but that was as laggy as it got.) None of my objects were filled with bitmaps, all had solid colors & strokes.

So how many objects does your file include, & are any using bitmap patterns?