Symbol attributes clarification, etc, etc, & possible small bug.

[gdenby]

Working now w. symbols. Happy to have seen the in-house vid, viewed several times, took notes. Figured out that some of my problems to date were not understanding how the symbol container and contents selection changed operations.

 

Question. Symbol contents have attributes. There are obvious ones such as fill, stroke, and layer blend. It appears that transformations are also an attribute. Any others?

 

It seems that if a symbol content object/layer, or one within a group of objects making up the symbol contents has a geometric transformation, it is un-synchronized. An example. I made a symbol of a group of 2 nested stars. Duplicated the symbol several times, and selected one internal star in one instance. I turned off synch, and squashed the star some. After that, while it would move and rotate within that instance. Size and rotations in other  instance objects no longer affected it. A similar thing happened when I reshaped a square into a rectangle, at which point I saw that transformations were unlinked.

 

Which leads to a question. Is there a way to re-link? Or, should another symbol be made out of the transformed shape. IE, detach, re-create so that particular form can be retained. Then place that inside and existing symbol. Anu advice, or comment appreciated.

 

Sorry to make this longer, but... here may be a bit of a bug.

 

I made several instances of a rectangle. Moved individual containers around, and rotated them some. Then started rotating and moving one of the content rectangles. The various instances would shift in place in relation to each other, and/rotate synchronously, as expected. After 5 - 8 positional shifts, I tried centering 2 of the rectangles on each other. and found they had slightly different sizes. If de-synched so I could try and duplicate the center positions, rotation and XY sizes, as above, they no longer synched. My suspicion is that in the course of the positional transforms, there was a very small rounding error on the defining node positions. By small, I mean 1 or 2 hundreds or thousands of an inch. Enough to be visible on a retina screen, though perhaps not enough for most printers.

[Leigh]

I'm pretty sure that any attribute that is available to a shape, text, curves etc... can be used within a Symbol :)

 

If you turn Sync off and make changes to an attribute within an individual instance it automatically becomes unlinked and it's not possible "relink" when Sync is turned back on. If you're wanting to use the modified symbol in the future then detaching and adding as a new symbol seems like the best thing to do.

 

I've not been able to replicate your last question. If you can provide more information, I can look into this further for you.

[gdenby]

I messed around a bit just now, and didn't get rectangles of slightly different sizes. But I don't recall exactly what I did previously, which was the result of various random rotations and translations.

[Leigh]

Thanks for the update gdenby. I will continue to try and replicate.

[Nikos]

I'm pretty sure that any attribute that is available to a shape, text, curves etc... can be used within a Symbol :)

 

If you turn Sync off and make changes to an attribute within an individual instance it automatically becomes unlinked and it's not possible "relink" when Sync is turned back on. If you're wanting to use the modified symbol in the future then detaching and adding as a new symbol seems like the best thing to do.

 

I've not been able to replicate your last question. If you can provide more information, I can look into this further for you.

 

Transformations applied to a symbol instance object, however, are not propagated. Am I right?

If I select an instance and rotate/resize it, only the selected instance is affected.

[gdenby]

Transformations applied to a symbol instance object, however, are not propagated. Am I right?

If I select an instance and rotate/resize it, only the selected instance is affected.

 

My understanding from the Affinity video is similar. One point of confusion I had was that I didn't realize that changes to a symbol content object's shape, rotation, and skewing were different from changes in size, rotation, etc with instances on the page.

[Nikos]

I just found out that neither changing the rotation point is reflected on the symbol instances.

 

[andrej7]

Hi Everybody.

 

I use current latest Affinity Designer BETA for Windows 1.5.0.26. 

I use symbols a lot and consider them as a very important KEY FEATURE.

Since I like to have this flexibility so I can change elements and all instances updates accordingly.

 

I often use symbols in symbols in symbols :) .. and it seems buggy.

 

Simply sometimes when I add a new symbol instance into another symbol instance while sync on, the symbol doesn't show on other instances. I found a hack to fix that by duplicating the symbol and detaching the old one and deleting it. The duplicated symbol show up on other instances, but if I would not detach the previous one deleting would delete the new one in other instances. 

Looks like some referencing problem.

 

I would really love to know if there is a possibility to submit a bug.

I am software developer & designer so I can make you nice steps to reproduce with as simple as possible example file that manifest the problem.

 

There is currently only very little features around symbols, improving this feature would give the entire app way more power and production efficiency.

 

I also found that you cannot transform original symbol.

The only way is to create new symbol and replace every instance manually which is pain.

At some level it makes complete sense but sometimes you want to change/fix/update the symbol which has already been placed on many places so you don't have to transform every new instance as much (for example bad size, but you just want to rotate instances).

 

So something like possibility to override/update the symbol with a new symbol would be awesome (while updating all instances).

 

Also it would be nice if you can have a different form of listing of symbols in the case you have many of them and ability to select all instances and alike features. 

 

Also discovered another bug.

 

When symbol in symbol is in the scene and you place the child symbol into scene and delete it .. it will disappear from the parent symbol and all it's instances.

 

In another words. You crate a symbol which have another symbol in it. Then you can place the symbol which is in that symbol into scene .. but when you delete it it will also disappear from all other symbols. This is pretty bad since it disallows using the same symbol inside of another symbol and also use it elsewhere. Once you delete one instance of it all connections are gone.

 

This makes symbols in symbols a bad idea until these problems will be solved.

 

If any of the developers are interested I can make a video from the very start of the app creating new project that will show the problems mentioned (I did the test).

[R C-R]

I would really love to know if there is a possibility to submit a bug.

Using the 'bread crumb' trail at the top of the web page, back out to the Affinity Forum site overview page. There you will see the three Affinity Beta Support forums. The Windows beta forum is the place to submit bug reports.

[andrej7]

Thank you, I will create new topic there.