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[Affinity Designer] A Shearing/Skewing objects and font tool is a MUST HAVE for professionals wishing to make the jump from Adobe.


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Firstly, I wanted to take a moment to thank Serif and their programmers for making such a wonderful piece of software. I'm looking forward to one day eventually making the jump from Adobe but I thank you for giving me hope. I already purchased and strapped in for the ride as I know that you lot are going to accomplish amazing things.

This is all just constructive criticism and feedback from someone who wants to be able to use your product in a regular and professional way.

A feature you really need to put towards the top of the update pile is the Shear/Skew tool for text and objects.

 

Shearing and Skewing fonts and objects are things I do a lot of when I'm working with Adobe Illustrator. It's not a matter of "if" I use it because I always end up using it to some degree at one point or another when I'm working on different projects.

 

For those who might not know the tool by name but know it in function.
 

 

This is a type of feature I would need to have included in the Affinity package if I were to ever make the jump from Adobe. The tool is simply too valuable for me as a  designer. This being said, Affinity DOES include a transform menu (props where earned) within their software which gives you slight adjustment to what objects and font you're working with. The problem is it simply does not work in a way which is smooth and freeform like it exists in Illustrator. I cannot use transform in the same way I can use Shear or Warp.

 

I've included the above links to give the programmers and the other members of the community the level of functionality I am looking for with regards to a Shear/Skew tool for the Affinity Designer. I would hope this is something which is actively being pursued as it's certainly something that would be essential.

 

Thank you in advance for reading my thoughts and concerns and I wish you all success.

All The Best,

 

-Copernicus
 

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Hi CopernicusComplex,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

To shear/skew an object (or text object) freely approach the mid bounding box handles coming from outside of the bounding box until the cursor changes to two opposite arrows then click and drag to shear/skew the object or text (works with both middle horizontal and vertical bounding box handles). Look to the bottom of the screen for key modifiers. You can also use the Transform panel's Skew and Rotation fields to enter specific values.

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You can also use the Transform panel's Skew and Rotation fields to enter specific values.

 

It should be noted that the Shear/Skew control in the Transform panel only applies horizontal skew. In order to translate this to vertical skew, you need to subtract the same value from the Rotation value. For example, if you have an object which is rotated by 12 degrees, setting the S value to 15 will skew it horizontally by 15 degrees; if you want the skew to be vertical, you need to set the R value to -3 degrees (i.e. 12 - 15 degrees).

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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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Yes, but ... exactly how they are related isn't immediately obvious to everyone. I've always thought it would be better if there were separate controls for horizontal skew and vertical skew, leaving the program to convert internally from one to the other if necessary; after all, that's the way it works when you do it visually on the canvas.

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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In order to translate this to vertical skew, you need to subtract the same value from the Rotation value.

 

 

...Which is absurdly cumbersome and tedious. From a UI perspective it's conceptually tantamount to providing only a height field and requiring the user to enter 90 or -90 in the rotate field in order to set width.

 

I'm all for feature elegance and avoidance of clutter, but the interface for numeric skew needs to provide horizontal and vertical, even if it's just a radio button or keyboard modifier.

 

It would also be worth considering putting the Reset Bounding Box icon in the Transform palette in the blank space under the 9-point proxy, rather than having to go back and forth across the screen for reiterated transformations.

 

JET

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I'm all for feature elegance and avoidance of clutter

 

Me too, but this is absurdly inelegant! It was/is the same in Serif DrawPlus. :(

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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Hi CopernicusComplex,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

To shear/skew an object (or text object) freely approach the mid bounding box handles coming from outside of the bounding box until the cursor changes to two opposite arrows then click and drag to shear/skew the object or text (works with both middle horizontal and vertical bounding box handles). Look to the bottom of the screen for key modifiers. You can also use the Transform panel's Skew and Rotation fields to enter specific values.

I completely didn't realize this was a possibility. I feel like an idiot.

 

In my defense, that is a really weird way to infuse such a feature into the program. If you're expecting people to be transitioning from Adobe Illustrator, the idea that such a feature is built it would never be intuitive.

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MUST HAVE for professionals wishing to make the jump from Adobe...

 

 

If you're expecting people to be transitioning from Adobe Illustrator, the idea that such a feature is built it would never be intuitive.

 

 

The treatment of the bounding box skew handles is not weird or undiscoverable. Other drawing programs do it quite similarly (CorelDraw, Canvas, Inkscape, Xara Designer Pro among them). But yes, it's different from Illustrator.

 

No offense, and you're entitled to your opinion about what constitutes "professional" quality software.  But I don't equate the term with Illustrator's worst-in-class user interface, and I've been making my living with this stuff since it first appeared in the mid-80s.

 

If this skew thing is a deal-breaker, I can offer you at least one consolation that comes to mind:

 

Consider that Illustrator's interface has long displayed rotated bounding boxes which let you manually scale in the directions of its rotated axes by dragging side handles...but not by numerical input, and only as long as Illustrator "remembers" the object's rotation. And nowhere in the interface does Illustrator provide you access to the angle at which its on-again-off-again rotated bounding boxes are rotated, so that you could, for example, numerically return it to orthogonal orientation, or rotate other objects to the same angle.

 

Affinity's rotated bounds, on the other hand, persist pretty much no matter what you do to the object, and are far more useful. The angle at which the object is rotated from its as-created orientation is displayed right there in the Transform palette whenever the bounding box is visible. And you can perform all of the on-object transformations (including skew) relative to the rotated bounds, not just horizontal and vertical scaling.

 

So no, it's not like Illustrator (thanks, Serif). In this regard, it's more like ACD Canvas, one of the venerable "big four" drawing programs (FreeHand, Illustrator, Canvas, Draw) that date back to the early days. And Canvas blows Illustrator's doors off for CAD-like accuracy and no-nonsense technical drawing in an environment that's as capable as any of the others for general commercial illustration.

 

Which treatment of object rotation do you consider more "professional"?

 

(There are plenty of other consolations, too, by the way.)

 

;-)

 

JET

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The treatment of the bounding box skew handles is not weird or undiscoverable. Other drawing programs do it quite similarly (CorelDraw, Canvas, Inkscape, Xara Designer Pro among them). But yes, it's different from Illustrator.

 

No offense, and you're entitled to your opinion about what constitutes "professional" quality software.  But I don't equate the term with Illustrator's worst-in-class user interface, and I've been making my living with this stuff since it first appeared in the mid-80s.

 

If this skew thing is a deal-breaker, I can offer you at least one consolation that comes to mind:

 

Consider that Illustrator's interface has long displayed rotated bounding boxes which let you manually scale in the directions of its rotated axes by dragging side handles...but not by numerical input, and only as long as Illustrator "remembers" the object's rotation. And nowhere in the interface does Illustrator provide you access to the angle at which its on-again-off-again rotated bounding boxes are rotated, so that you could, for example, numerically return it to orthogonal orientation, or rotate other objects to the same angle.

 

Affinity's rotated bounds, on the other hand, persist pretty much no matter what you do to the object, and are far more useful. The angle at which the object is rotated from its as-created orientation is displayed right there in the Transform palette whenever the bounding box is visible. And you can perform all of the on-object transformations (including skew) relative to the rotated bounds, not just horizontal and vertical scaling.

 

So no, it's not like Illustrator (thanks, Serif). In this regard, it's more like ACD Canvas, one of the venerable "big four" drawing programs (FreeHand, Illustrator, Canvas, Draw) that date back to the early days. And Canvas blows Illustrator's doors off for CAD-like accuracy and no-nonsense technical drawing in an environment that's as capable as any of the others for general commercial illustration.

 

Which treatment of object rotation do you consider more "professional"?

 

(There are plenty of other consolations, too, by the way.)

 

;-)

 

JET

I apologize for bruising your ego. Wasn't intended.

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