Affinity Designer: Transform and Copy, also Where is Scale Panel and Scale Outline when Scaling an Object?

[robJS]

Unlike Adobe Illustrator Affinity Designer does not appear to have a simple way of transforming and copying objects. In Illustrator  one can choose to transform (scale, rotate, etc.) and make a copy in the same operation. In Designer it appears that the only way of achieving this is to duplicate first (CMD J) and then transform the copy.

 

With regard to scaling an object I have not been able to find a Scale panel which allows one to input a scale percent for x, y or both. Also How does one scale the stroke of an object when resizing it?

 

Am I missing something?

[Alfred]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, robJS. :)

 

With regard to scaling an object I have not been able to find a Scale panel which allows one to input a scale percent for x, y or both. Also How does one scale the stroke of an object when resizing it?

 

You can enter percentages in the W and H controls in the Transform tab; if you want to maintain the aspect ratio, click on the 'Lock Aspect Ratio' chain link before changing either of the values. To scale strokes when resizing, go to the Stroke panel and put a tick in the 'Scale with object' checkbox.

[robJS]

Hi Alfred,

 

OK, that is good to know. Thanks.

 

I have been unable to find a guide to Designer’s tools, panels and menus. I am surprised that a program with Designers capabilities is so ‘undocumented’. If you know of a comprehensive online guide, listing all tools, etc., with a brief description and options that is not in video format I would like to know about it.

[MEB]

Hi robJS,

Take a look at the help file: it covers all features/tools/panels of the program.

We also have an official guide (hardcover book) available here.

[R C-R]

Hi robJS,

Take a look at the help file: it covers all features/tools/panels of the program.

In particular, I suggest checking out the "Workspace" section of the built-in help. It includes subsections for each of the panels & each of the tools.

[robJS]

Take a look at the help file: it covers all features/tools/panels of the program.

We also have an official guide (hardcover book) available here.

 

 

MEB and RCR, Thanks

 

Unfortunately the Affinity Designer Help, in the OS X Help on my iMac running OS X Yosemite does not have the option to open in the Safari browser, unlike most other applications. This makes reading the Designer guide somewhat inconvenient for me. I have Low Vision, ‘Officially Blind’.  Also I am unable to read the printed ‘official guide (hardcover book”.

 

I suggest that Affinity make their help guides available on their web site. 

 

 

Affinity Designer is completely incompatible with VoiceOver which also makes learning the basic features extremely difficult. I know it is too much to ask for full VoiceOver compatibility but if the developers could, at least, make the Tool Tips and control panels VO compatible it would be a great benefit for any low vision person who would want to give it a go. This is also something to consider if Affinity Designer is ever made available on the iPad.

[R C-R]

rob, you might try this: copy the following Into Safari's URL panel & press Return.

 

file:///Applications/Affinity%20Designer.app/Contents/Resources/AffinityDesigner.help/Contents/Resources/en-US.lproj/index.html

 

That is the local index file for Affinity Designer help. Unfortunately, there is no search function if you open it this way, but at least you can click on the three line 'hamburger' menu icon in the top left corner to expose the Table of Contents, which you can then browse zoomed to a larger size.

[robJS]

Thanks RCR,

 

That is very useful. Now to figure out a wayto open this file on the iPad :-)

 

The printed Designer Guide seems very 20th century, any chance that it will be published in digital format?

[R C-R]

Rob, just in case it is not obvious, I am just another user so I can't speak for what the company might do in the future, but as I understand it there are no plans to publish the Designer Workbook in digital form. This has to do with copyright arrangements with the authors of some of the chapters, concerns about piracy, etc.

 

As a feature request, I among others have suggested that it would be nice to have the help files online in a browser-friendly format (much the same way Apple, Adobe, etc. do with some of their help files) but so far there does not seem to be any company interest in that, perhaps because the Affinity team is small & they do not have the manpower to devote to that.

 

It could be tricky to put Designer help on an iPad in a usable form. It is not a single file but what Apple calls a "help bundle" -- a group of folders that in Finder normally looks like a single item. If you want to check it out, the path to it is:

 

/Applications/Affinity Designer.app/Contents/Resources/AffinityDesigner.help

 

In Finder, you can use the Go menu item "Go to folder ..." item & paste the above in to navigate to it. There are different subfolders for each supported language (like English.lproj for British English) plus a "shared" folder for all the resources shared by the different language versions. Somewhat like with a web page, each help topic & any links in it are assembled from the contents of all these resources. Safari on a Mac supports the local "file///" URL but I do not think that will work on an iOS device because that OS restricts direct access to the file system for security reasons.

[robJS]

Hi RCR,

 

Thanks for the clarification and thanks for taking the time to respond in such detail. I agree with everything you say about the need for a digital/browser version of the Affinity Designer Help files. Hopefully the developers will find the time and  see the sence in providing this.

 

With regard to the subject of getting the Help files onto the iPad I have already tried what you have suggested. I copied the en-US.lproj folder and a Web Archive of the Help document via Dropbox and iCloud but to no avail, as you had anticipated.

 

Anyway I can at least access the file on my Mac using the file path you gave me.

 

Thanks again.

[robJS]

Hi RCR,

 

Todays update!

 

I have found that I can open the Pages folder in the en-US.lproj folder using iCloud Drive on my iPad and and then open each page as a PDF in iBooks. So I can select topics I want to find out more about and read those specific pages in comfort using my iPad.

[codehead]

Nice economy of design, but there doesn't seem to be a way to do this—please tell me if there is:

 

I have a lot of identical dots (circle tool) in a layer. Each is strategically located—I want to make each of them larger, but identically-sized and without changing their center location.

 

If I select the entire layer, the transform works on the whole selection area, making it larger (spreading the dots so they don't keep their intended positions).

 

I worked around it, marginally, by making a larger stroke (originally no stroke) of the same color as the center fill. There are limitations there without scaling the circle—see following comment—but I could at least improve the size a bit.

 

(BTW, I don't quite get why making the stroke larger, when the circle is much smaller, just makes the outer circle larger and the white area expands...and not circular. Image attached of a 6-pixel red-filled circle with 60-pixel blue stroke.)

[Alfred]

(BTW, I don't quite get why making the stroke larger, when the circle is much smaller, just makes the outer circle larger and the white area expands...and not circular. Image attached of a 6-pixel red-filled circle with 60-pixel blue stroke.)

 

It looks as though the width of the stroke is limited to the diameter of the circle, but I don't think it should be (and I don't know why the inside edge isn't circular).

[gdenby]

I haven't found any way to do a batch transform like what you want. I.E. Select 20 circles and make each have a radius 10% larger. Best I've been able to do is make 1 larger, and copy with snapping to where the others are, and delete the originals. 

 

However, if you want to go back to the start, remake the shape(s) and convert them to a symbol. Arrange copies as you like, and the scale any one, and all will update. Check out the help on symbols. Not quite intuitive, but very powerful for doing mass conversions.

[codehead]

It looks as though the width of the stroke is limited to the diameter of the circle, but I don't think it should be (and I don't know why the inside edge isn't circular).

I believe it's a bug—I should check for open bugs and report it if not. The issue is this: As you increase the stroke, it expands in both direction: outward and inward. Once the inward edge reaches the center, it starts growing the other way as clear (and the bigger it gets, the less circular).

[codehead]

I haven't found any way to do a batch transform like what you want. I.E. Select 20 circles and make each have a radius 10% larger. Best I've been able to do is make 1 larger, and copy with snapping to where the others are, and delete the originals. 

 

However, if you want to go back to the start, remake the shape(s) and convert them to a symbol. Arrange copies as you like, and the scale any one, and all will update. Check out the help on symbols. Not quite intuitive, but very powerful for doing mass conversions.

 

Thanks. I did consider that there was probably a capability to make a master/linked shape, after I decided I need them a little larger, but I didn't anticipate that need in the beginning. (In this particular use, the dots can be fine when the whole image is at a certain scale, but when shrinking the image, the dots are the only part that need to be relatively larger to compensate.)

 

Still, I think the app should default to scaling objects individually. It might make sense to spread the objects when scaling up if the objects are grouped, but as individual objects, it makes more sense to scale the objects without changing their origins. In other words, selecting a bunch of objects and scaling up should have the meaning, "make these objects bigger", only.

 

Another way to describe it is: If you have several 28 pt text objects and select all of them, then set font size to 14 pt, they all change their font size but they remain in their original positions. However, if you use the transform tab to scale 50% (*=.5), it shrinks the collection (altering locations)—the same as if you scaled by corner-dragging the selection rectangle.

 

I don't know, this is so obvious that it seems like I'm missing an alternate way of doing it—though I don't see any indication of that in the docs.

[gdenby]

 

Another way to describe it is: If you have several 28 pt text objects and select all of them, then set font size to 14 pt, they all change their font size but they remain in their original positions. However, if you use the transform tab to scale 50% (*=.5), it shrinks the collection (altering locations)—the same as if you scaled by corner-dragging the selection rectangle.

 

I don't know, this is so obvious that it seems like I'm missing an alternate way of doing it—though I don't see any indication of that in the docs.

 

I have only a sketchy knowledge of font creation, but the outline of a letter form is tied to a rectangle that includes other information, such as kerning space. The form itself is not being scaled, but being adjusted within the letter's bounds. And the string of letters is scaled by reference to all of the sub parts.

 

Ordinary vector objects scale directly based on the bounding box their outermost nodes define. When a group of objects is selected at once, the scaling occurs within the groups bounds, not only the individual objects. As I mentioned earlier, I haven't found a built in routine that records how a single object is scaled in regards to itself, and then transfer to other objects.

 

AD symbols seem to be a way to get about half of the same function, w/o defining a whole character set. I suppose if one was really handy at font creation, one could make a dingbat font on the fly, and scale that thru the text engine.