Scaling a drawing

[erikberg61]

I just purchased Affinity Designer yesterday and opened a few of my files that were created in Illustrator CS6 - two were PDFs and the others ai files.  I noticed that when I selected the entire drawing (all objects in the drawing) and held down the shift key (thinking it would maintain proportion as it does in Illustrator) and pulled on a corner to expand the size, the extents would expand, but the contents quickly began to disappear from the right edge and bottom.  In other words, the drawing didn't get larger as expected.

 

What am I doing wrong?  Is there another way to increase the scale of a drawing?  This is the main reason I used illustrator to create vector logos so I could rescale without losing quality.  I generally like the interface of Designer, but I can see there is going to be a learning curve.

 

Thanks,

 

Erik

[Bri-Toon]

When drawings are transferred from Illustrator to Designer, the layers will at times have cropping masks applied to them. It sounds like the drawings are vanishing because they are leaving the cropping region. I noticed that this is the case for Illustrator files which were done with the Live Paint Bucket Tool. You can click on each mask (mask thumbnail; not layer thumbnail) and delete them individually, but this may ruin some designs. Otherwise, you can move and resize the cropping region to where it was on the image before it was resized.

 

Edit:

There is a Crop Tool in Designer, but it crops objects or layers; not the overall drawing. You can identify which layers have been cropped with the cropped thumbnail along side of them.

[Alfred]

two were PDFs and the others ai files

 

Just as a point of information, the Affinity apps don't (know how to) read the proprietary *.ai file format. What you're seeing in Affinity Designer is the contents of the PDF stream that the AI file contains when saved with the appropriate option selected.

[erikberg61]

Ok thanks.  I see the same thing happens with an SVG version of the file, however I don't see any cropping masks, just 6 layers that contain the individuals shapes of the logo.

[MEB]

Hi erikberg61,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

There a few things that may be going on here so it's difficult to pin point the exact cause of your issue without seeing the file.

Have you tried to go to File ▸ Document Setup... and insert the dimensions you want? Make sure that the Object will: section a little below is set to Rescale.

Note that you can also use expressions in the input fields, so adding *200% after the current value and closing the padlock icon (between the input fields) will double the dimensions of the document.

For more info about expressions please go to menu Help ▸ Affinity Designer ▸ Workspace ▸ More ▸ Expressions for field input.

[erikberg61]

Ok, that's helpful.  I went to document setup and changed the Objects will: to rescale from Anchor to Page.  Then I changed the DPI to 2000 x 2000 from 1024 x 1024 and it enlarged as expected.  When I then selected the entire drawing and used the lower right handle with the Shift key depressed, and began pulling down and away, the same cropping effect happened.  Interesting.