Grid Manager improvements

[ronnyb]

Grids in affinity are super. A few ideas to polish it off:

 

1. How about beefing up the Grid Manager and adding an interactive Grid TOOL that displays handles and guides on the art boards, allowing the user to interactively drag and adjust, similar to the way Smart Shapes are always live and adjustable? This would be in addition to the current numerical panel of course, and in fact the tool could be enabled via the current Grid panel...

 

2. We need a border/edge padding setting for grids, or a Grid offset setting, which allows precise x and y placement of the grid on the art board, and not necessarily from the upper left corner (or whatever the current behavior is).

[JET_Affinity]

When you guys get around to providing the ability to move the ruler origin, please bear in mind how it integrates with the axonometric grids feature.

 

When you configure a dimetric or trimetric grid and use the keyboard shortcut to toggle between the planes, the intersections of the three planes do not coincide. So, for example:

 

1. You toggle to the top plane, draw a rectangle, skew and scale it by its transform handles, snapping to the grid to make a 1 x 1 unit square.

 

2. You toggle to the side plane, and similarly draw a 1 x 1 unit side square. But because the intersections of the side plane grid do not coincide with those of the top grid, you have to draw the side square out of position.

 

It seems that presently, the Artboard origin serves as the origin of all three grids. When the ability to reposition the origin is added, a user preference should be provided: "Moving Ruler Origin Moves Grid Origin." Also, moving the origin should be made possible without having to mouse all the way to the upper left corner of the window and dragging it to where you are working (as is standard-fare in most programs). When drawing axonometrically, that would be a frequent task and would quickly become irritatingly tedious. Perhaps provide a rightClick menu selection "Set Origin Here", or a dedicated single-key keyboard shortcut to tap when the mouse is down.

 

Better though, whenever an axonometric option is selected in Grid and Axis manager, simply make the Up axis position and spacing automatically subordinate to the settings of the First and Second axes unless a "custom" option is active.

 

Frankly, the whole Grid and Axis manager is cumbersome and unintuitive. I would much prefer to see Affinity's Grid and Axis Manager re-vamped to mirror the functionality of DrawPlus. Affinity is supposed to be the "professional" set of applications. DrawPlus's treatment of axonometric drawing grids is more powerful, more intuitive, geometrically correct, and well...just more "professional."

 

The dimetric preset, by the way, is still in error. Its vertical axis length (spacing) is disproportionately short.

 

JET

[ronnyb]

Would be great to be able to select wether to Print the document Grid as well as turn it into a stand-alone layer in the layers panel for further manipulation