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Printing a detail of a drawing – why I need it, and 3 suggestions


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EDIT: This is for Affinity Designer, sorry I forgot to mention in the subject!

 

When I create posters to be printed in larger formats (like DIN A1 or something), I sometimes want to print a preview on my A4 office laser printer, to get a better impression of some details (like font sizes, for instance). An A4 sheet that I can stick to the wall allows to see some things better than on the screen at my desk.

 

In this case, I dont want to print a "tiled"version of the whole drawing wasting time and 8 sheets of paper, only to find my desired detail printed prarted on two sheets that I need to tape together – I rather want the critical detail in 1:1 sale on one single page. So I am missing some option to print only a detail of the whole drawing, i.e. crop the drawing for printing (sorry for my English, is this the right term?).

 

I can imagine three locations where I would look for such functionality:

  1. In the print dialog, where the preview is, I would like to drag a frame where I want the output to be cropped (very intuitive but probably more work to implement)
  2. In the "Scaling and artboards" section of the print dialog, it would be nice to be able to select slices (from the export persona) as well as the ArtBoards and the whole document.
  3. In the export persona, next to PNG, PDF, SVG, JPEG, etc., have an export type "Print" that I can add to a slice.

 

In my opinion, 2 and 3 would be nice and consistent with the overall concept. I could just create a slice covering the detail view I want to print, and the view would be stored in the drawing (so I can create consistent printouts of exactly the same view when modifying my poster).

Option 1 is very intuitive but has the disadvantage that the cropped area is probably not stored, but gone after each time.

 

PS. As a workaround, adding a temporary artboard (with transparent background) on the desired detail just for printing does not work, the resulting page is empty probably because the objects are not part of the actual artboard but in the artboard lying below. Of course, I can export a slice as pdf and then print the pdf, but that is not as efficient as I would think Affinity can be :-) .

 

Thanks!

BTW, great work, I really love to see how Affinity Designer gets even better with each update!

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Unless I've misunderstood what you're trying to achieve, you can do this:

 

1. Draw an A4 rectangle on top of the drawing

2. Clip the drawing to the rectangle

3. Select the clipping rectangle

4. Choose 'File > Print...'

5. Set the Range to 'Selection'

6. Press 'OK'

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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Thank you Alfred,

this sounds promising, but I cannot find what I need to do in step 2.

I cannot find any menu item like "clip" or "crop" (searched in "Help" after switching the UI language to english).

 

Having selected a rectangle, and after choosing Print, in the print dialog I cant find anything like "range" or "current selection". In which section of the print dialog should it appear?

 

EDIT: Ah, I am using Affinity Designer, not Affinity Photo! Sorry I did not mention that earlier!

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Thank you Alfred,

this sounds promising, but I cannot find what I need to do in step 2.

I cannot find any menu item like "clip" or "crop" (searched in "Help" after switching the UI language to english).

 

In the Layers panel, click on the image thumbnail and drag it up towards the rectangle layer. A thick blue line will appear, extending to the right from the thumbnail, and the image in the workspace will be clipped.

 

Having selected a rectangle, and after choosing Print, in the print dialog I cant find anything like "range" or "current selection". In which section of the print dialog should it appear?

 

I've attached a screenshot showing the relevant part of the Print dialog.

 

 EDIT: Ah, I am using Affinity Designer, not Affinity Photo! Sorry I did not mention that earlier!

 

Well, you didn't mention it in the topic tags or the title, but you did mention it in your postscript! ;)

post-8358-0-12714500-1478461868_thumb.png

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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