lvl99 Posted September 25, 2016 Share Posted September 25, 2016 Would love automation/scripting/actions and ability to create all these (perhaps as "plugins") in a common scripting language like JavaScript (even allowing a "simple" mode similar to recording actions in Photoshop). For workflows which are repetitive it would be great to automate common actions as well as support third-party plugins which allows sharing common workflows, extend basic functionality, etc. Programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch and even something like Unity3D support this, and a cottage industry of helpful third-party plugins exist to extend the features and usability of apps beyond the capabilities of the core dev team. I think for Sketch it is a huge draw-card for users to automatically do things like create interactive mockups, export multiple files/sizes at a click of a button, and I would imagine that it would open up some great community-driven potential for Affinity's range of products (especially for Affinity Publisher, which I'm really looking forward to playing with, being a long-time sufferer of InDesign since Adobe shelved Freehand). Clara Montseny, matisso, glyph and 1 other 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lvl99 Posted September 29, 2016 Author Share Posted September 29, 2016 Examples of automation/scripts/plugins: * Convert layers to artboards and arrange in grid with X/Y spacing * Define interactions between artboards/layers/groups/objects to show/hide and export as HTML * Replace colours/palette throughout document * Define string variables and insert as special characters in text objects. Can change value of text variable which is replaced throughout variable instances within document By supporting a scripting language could even open up to procedural generation artwork techniques, incorporating randomness, automating repetitive tasks, etc. Clara Montseny 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff MEB Posted September 29, 2016 Staff Share Posted September 29, 2016 Hi lvl99, Welcome to Affinity Forums and thanks for your feedback :) There was already several threads/discussions about scripting, however as far as i know this is not something we plan to implement that soon. There's still work to do/other features planned coming first some of them may cover part of the examples you gave (prototyping, selecting/changing object's by their attributes etc). For more information on this please check Affinity Designer's roadmap. Quote A Guide to Learning Affinity Software | Affinity Quick Reference Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lvl99 Posted September 29, 2016 Author Share Posted September 29, 2016 Thanks MEB. I've looked at the roadmap and also did some searches before I posted my thread, but didn't find anything at the time which addressed my main concerns/request. I've been using Affinity Designer for a while now and find that when preparing multiple icons for creating icon fonts (via IcoMoon) that there's a lot of repetitive actions I'm doing which could be fulfilled by some automation system. For example, I have 50 layers with varying widths and heights, currently to export all as SVG at the same width/height I need to insert an empty rectangle into each layer which is the same size as the document dimensions. Painfully tedious. There must be a better way! With a plugin/scripting system, I could potentially create icon font files within Affinity Designer itself just from the layers... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chrisWhite Posted October 6, 2016 Share Posted October 6, 2016 I hope an SDK becomes more or priority in the future, if you look at what's happening with Sketch you can see the massive potential and I think it's one of the reasons the Sketch community has rocketed upwards over the last year or so. I'd love to see the same thing happen with Designer! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lvl99 Posted May 19, 2017 Author Share Posted May 19, 2017 Invision has Craft which is a suite of plugins for Photoshop and Sketch. To have some kind of API to build plugins for AD would be amazing and would allow it to interop better with a wide variety of applications & services. Sketch's benefit is that it is highly pluggable, and I think AD needs it to be competitive (I'm getting annoyed having to restart AD everytime I enable a font via my font management software). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff MEB Posted May 19, 2017 Staff Share Posted May 19, 2017 Hi lvl99, You don't have to restart Affinity for the font to appear in the font list. Go to Affinity Designer/Photo Preferences ▸ Miscellaneous and click the Reset Fonts button. Quote A Guide to Learning Affinity Software | Affinity Quick Reference Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeW Posted May 19, 2017 Share Posted May 19, 2017 Hi lvl99, You don't have to restart Affinity for the font to appear in the font list. Go to Affinity Designer/Photo Preferences ▸ Miscellaneous and click the Reset Fonts button. It would be nice if AD would operate like everything else I use and truly see the change automatically and enumerate the newly activated fonts without doing that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff MEB Posted May 19, 2017 Staff Share Posted May 19, 2017 Hi MikeW, This should only be used as a last resource. On the Mac (MAS) newly activated fonts does appear on the font list automatically. I will check on Windows but i believe it's working the same way. Quote A Guide to Learning Affinity Software | Affinity Quick Reference Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeW Posted May 19, 2017 Share Posted May 19, 2017 Hi MikeW, This should only be used as a last resource. On the Mac (MAS) newly activated fonts does appear on the font list automatically. I will check on Windows but i believe it's working the same way. Thanks, MEB. It does work once in a while and I see no rhyme nor reason as to the "why" of it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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