Guest Posted December 21, 2016 Share Posted December 21, 2016 I'm finding that when I expand strokes within Affinity Designer I'm often left with dozens of nodes that can often lead to performance issues on mobile devices in complex compositions. In Adobe Illustrator these convert to stroke to path operations are much more efficient and can be further optimised by using the 'simplify' command to further reduce the number of nodes in the resulting shape. Often going from hundreds of points to a few dozens without any significant change in the overall shape. This has a significant impact when using SVGs exported from Affinity Designer in apps/websites as the files themselves tend to be quite bloated and the additional nodes can lead (in excessive cases) to redraw performance issues (aka: 'jank') when scrolling. For a very simple example the variable width line in the attached file has two nodes as a line, and over 60 nodes as a shape (it's also very jagged with many of the curves being translated to straight lines). The result is the exported SVG files is over 6Kb (for a line) and even when run through SVGOMG https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/it's over 1.5Kb. In Illustrator this shape would likely be in the range of 12 nodes and less than 1Kb when exported and run through SVGOMG. excessive nodes.afdesign Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff MEB Posted December 21, 2016 Staff Share Posted December 21, 2016 Hi bryanrieger, Welcome to Affinity Forums :) We are aware of this. There's plans to improve it in a future version/update. Thanks for reporting it. Quote A Guide to Learning Affinity Software | Affinity Quick Reference Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted December 22, 2016 Share Posted December 22, 2016 Brilliant. Glad to hear. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pcote Posted November 26, 2020 Share Posted November 26, 2020 It’s been almost 4 years now for what I would consider a basic but essential feature. Any update on this topic? darrin and Dazmondo77 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DutchDude Posted June 9, 2021 Share Posted June 9, 2021 On 12/21/2016 at 7:05 PM, MEB said: Hi bryanrieger, Welcome to Affinity Forums We are aware of this. There's plans to improve it in a future version/update. Thanks for reporting it. So... How is this coming along? I have a drawing made in AD that combines and subtracts a couple of ellipses and has some outlines. It's been expanded twice. The result is thousands of nodes in the outside outline. Totally un-editable. Manual reduce is inefficient and often inaccurate. I wonder how hard it is to add a reduce nodes feature. CorelDraw 3, about 25 years ago, did this quite well enough and had a slider to choose the reduction/accuracy ratio. It's been requested 6 years ago. Is it really that hard? I can't fathom how anyone using lines can do without it... Dazmondo77 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DutchDude Posted July 26, 2021 Share Posted July 26, 2021 I guess I'll have to make do with Inkscape. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tom d Posted July 27, 2021 Share Posted July 27, 2021 12 hours ago, DutchDude said: I guess I'll have to make do with Inkscape. I just tried to expand the stroke and it only had ten 10 nodes. This qualifies as a fix. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alex de Kyburg Posted September 5, 2022 Share Posted September 5, 2022 On 7/27/2021 at 3:45 AM, tom d said: I just tried to expand the stroke and it only had ten 10 nodes. This qualifies as a fix. Nice... And, is it done in Designer? If yes: how*? *Hint of used tool and where to click to have it popped up... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff MEB Posted September 5, 2022 Staff Share Posted September 5, 2022 Hi @Alex de Kyburg, Welcome to Affinity Forums To expand a stroke go to menu Layer > Expand Stroke. Quote A Guide to Learning Affinity Software | Affinity Quick Reference Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alex de Kyburg Posted September 5, 2022 Share Posted September 5, 2022 Great MEB! Found it. Yet not to be used for the purpose directly... but for lot's of other tasks, yes. Turning back to the main question: any global notes simplifier on the track? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff MEB Posted September 5, 2022 Staff Share Posted September 5, 2022 Hi @Alex de Kyburg, No, the closest thing you have is the Smooth button in the context toolbar for the Node Tool. The first passage/click removes coincident or collinear nodes if there's any, then further clicks will refit the line adding or removing nodes as necessary, so not exactly simplifying (reducing nodes/complexity). transitdiagrams 1 Quote A Guide to Learning Affinity Software | Affinity Quick Reference Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alex de Kyburg Posted September 5, 2022 Share Posted September 5, 2022 Noticed that, yes. Too bad there ain't some shape analysis allowing to keep the designed curves as is, by acting on the nodes characteristics... But, of course, I guess this is just an idealistic dream. 😇 transitdiagrams 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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