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Forgive me if this has already been asked (I did a search but didn't come up with anything), but will we see offset paths with Affinity Designer? DrawPlus had this ability and other major illustration packages like Illustrator, Corel Draw and Xara have it. I don't see it on the roadmap, but perhaps I've missed something.

 

If anyone knows a kludge to get this working, I'd be interested in hearing it.

 

Thanks!

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Hi Ed S.,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

Currently there's no offset path tool in Designer. Hopefully this will be added in a future version as it's a frequent request.

Meanwhile you can use the following workaround to offset a path/shape:

- select the object you want to offset

- duplicate it and apply a stroke (the bigger the stroke width the bigger will be the offset)

- convert the stroke to a path (select the duplicated object with the stoke and go to menu Layer ▹ Expand Stroke

- with the stroke/path still selected go to menu Layer ▹ Geometry ▹ Divide. This will separate the stroke outlines in two shapes. The bigger one is the offset you were looking for.

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Hi Ed S.,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

Currently there's no offset path tool in Designer. Hopefully this will be added in a future version as it's a frequent request.

Meanwhile you can use the following workaround to offset a path/shape:

- select the object you want to offset

- duplicate it and apply a stroke (the bigger the stroke width the bigger will be the offset)

- convert the stroke to a path (select the duplicated object with the stoke and go to menu Layer ▹ Expand Stroke

- with the stroke/path still selected go to menu Layer ▹ Geometry ▹ Divide. This will separate the stroke outlines in two shapes. The bigger one is the offset you were looking for.

 

Perfect! Grazie!

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  • 3 months later...

Having been a user of Illustrator since 1990, the above work around leaves MUCH to be desired. I would hope that the developers of Affinity would address this issue ASAP. Many of us who use the "outline path" feature in other programs to create a fast and clean outline for artwork will find the current answer in Affinity lacking in simplicity and the final result of the workaround places way to many extraneous nodes on the artwork. [requiring to much clean up to the final work area].

This is one of several issues that may prevent me [and others?] from making the leap onto the Affinity band wagon.
That being said, you all still have a wonderful program.

PS: Thanks for your reply's.

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I guess it all depends where you got your schooling. I arrived at a job where multiple strokes were sometimes used and it boggles my mind that people don't use this technique more often for this scenario. My boss is an old school illustrator user and he taught me that for every object that needs multiple strokes, make a copy of the object to be stroked and do a paste. AD places the copy on top so this is important- Look at the layer panel choose the original object that now sits below the copy. Stroke that one it to your size needed. Then copy paste this object and do the same again for every new stroke needed. Remember to increase stroke size to see what is happening and use different colors to see the added strokes. A Paste behind and Paste in Front would be a great feature to be added in AD/AP to help with this.

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  • 6 months later...
On 12/1/2016 at 5:13 PM, MEB said:

Hi Ed S.,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

Currently there's no offset path tool in Designer. Hopefully this will be added in a future version as it's a frequent request.

Meanwhile you can use the following workaround to offset a path/shape:

- select the object you want to offset

- duplicate it and apply a stroke (the bigger the stroke width the bigger will be the offset)

- convert the stroke to a path (select the duplicated object with the stoke and go to menu Layer ▹ Expand Stroke

- with the stroke/path still selected go to menu Layer ▹ Geometry ▹ Divide. This will separate the stroke outlines in two shapes. The bigger one is the offset you were looking for.

I was wondering if there is an ETA on this feature. I need it very often and the expand stroke approach is not usable for me because it bloats the path with points. Basically, not having this in AD makes me keep my Illustrator subscription and it's a lot of hustle moving pdf's back and forth.

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First I wanna say I would like an offset path feature too. And something akin to AI's appearance panel...

 

The multiple copy method that evtonic3 posted works fine. And, if the back copies have no fill, is a manual construction of how an AI file is represented in a PDF. So while it is a skosh more work, is the same.

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