Turn off antialiasing

[marty_s]

I agree, it would be really great to have alias/anti-alias pre-sets. I'm not a professional designer but I do work on the web and I just want to be able to create buttons and images with clear fonts. I don't want to have to take a couple of hours to learn what gamma blends even are and then how to use them, and then fiddle with those settings all the time. Thanks.

[712Jefferson]

Adding my support as well.  Anti-aliasing is a real issue for apparel printing and I'm discovering first-hand how unfortunate it is that Designer doesn't have an easy way to deal with this.  With so many users requesting this over the course of five years now, you'd think it would have already been addressed.  Disappointing...

[Jowday]

A per-object option like this should also be considered by Serif - I like it:

http://rwillustrator.blogspot.com/2007/03/to-anti-alias-or-not-to-anti-alias-that.html

[Medical Officer Bones]

On 8/8/2020 at 8:12 PM, Jowday said:

A per-object option like this should also be considered by Serif - I like it:

http://rwillustrator.blogspot.com/2007/03/to-anti-alias-or-not-to-anti-alias-that.html

A more controllable and simpler method:

 

This is combined with a document-wide anti-aliasing control for flexibility, which means it is simple to control this property easily for document-wide and object-specific anti-aliasing.

[Indefensible]

+1

I would have thought turning antialiasing off would have been there since day one. I learnt to use Designer from CorelDraw, and it works well for most use cases, but lacking this function in  export really hinders its usefulness.

[matt]

This is the reason I logged in today. Sigh.

Yet another thing VectorStyler already has: https://www.vectorstyler.com/documentation/overview/viewing/

I'm currently working in 1-bit (aka monochrome; two colours) and in VectorStyler I can do this:

1. View > Display > Pixel Preview
2. View > Subpixel > None

 

[MattP]

On 11/18/2020 at 4:55 PM, matt said:

This is the reason I logged in today. Sigh.

Yet another thing VectorStyler already has: https://www.vectorstyler.com/documentation/overview/viewing/

I'm currently working in 1-bit (aka monochrome; two colours) and in VectorStyler I can do this:

1. View > Display > Pixel Preview
2. View > Subpixel > None

 

This is just a view option though - what about output?

I've added this to the next Beta, hopefully building it for you tomorrow. It's fully hierarchical, you can inherit, force on or off at each stage.

It's the most flexible approach and is supported in all our raster output.

[Edited to say - WOW, that's awful compression on Twitter - sorry!]

 

[Kal]

9 minutes ago, MattP said:

I've added this to the next Beta, hopefully building it for you tomorrow. It's fully hierarchical, you can inherit, force on or off at each stage.

It's the most flexible approach and is supported in all our raster output.

Matt, this is good news—thank you! Many of us are requesting an even simpler implementation, where we can just set the antialiasing for the whole document at export time. I've wanted to do this many times, whereas I've rarely (if ever) needed to apply it selectively to individual objects. Not saying others won't value the highly flexible feature that you're adding… I'd just love to see this as a simple off/on feature at export. Any chance we can have this too?

[MattP]

1 minute ago, Kal said:

Matt, this is good news—thank you! Many of us are requesting an even simpler implementation, where we can just set the antialiasing for the whole document at export time. I've wanted to do this many times, whereas I've rarely (if ever) needed to apply it selectively to individual objects. Not saying others won't value the highly flexible feature that you're adding… I'd just love to see this as a simple off/on feature at export. Any chance we can have this too?

I don't see why not, but don't forget you could just set the top level layer itself to 'Force off' and see on document exactly what you'll be getting at Export time? I don't know why you wouldn't want to see what you're outputting while designing?

[Kal]

 

12 minutes ago, MattP said:

I don't see why not, but don't forget you could just set the top level layer itself to 'Force off' and see on document exactly what you'll be getting at Export time? I don't know why you wouldn't want to see what you're outputting while designing?

If I were creating pixelated icons for a retro UI, yes, I'd want to see the effect while I work. But as I explained earlier in the thread, my typical use case is very different…

On 10/28/2019 at 9:36 AM, Kal said:

My most common use case is to export raster print versions of a logo. For logos (and similar hard-edged graphics) antialiasing just makes them print with a fuzzy edge, so I always export high-res raster logos with no antialiasing.

In this instance, it's about tailoring the artwork to different output media. That should be an export function, not something I have to hard-code into the design file.

[matt]

1 hour ago, MattP said:

This is just a view option though - what about output?

I've added this to the next Beta, hopefully building it for you tomorrow. It's fully hierarchical, you can inherit, force on or off at each stage.

It's the most flexible approach and is supported in all our raster output.

Thanks for this! Very much appreciated. I'll have to download the latest Beta.

As for output, for this workflow I actually don't generate any! I just rapidly iterate screen layouts and then when I'm happy I recreate them in code with my existing assets.

[MattP]

1 minute ago, matt said:

Thanks for this! Very much appreciated. I'll have to download the latest Beta.

As for output, for this workflow I actually don't generate any! I just rapidly iterate screen layouts and then when I'm happy I recreate them in code with my existing assets.

Ha! Okay, fair enough! Yes, I'll build the Beta (1.9.0.10) tomorrow when I've done adding it to the iPad version too (don't want to commit it until it's finished in all products).

[matt]

That's fine Matt, I work at the computer Mon/Wed/Fri so I'm in thinking mode today. No rush, I've waited long enough!

We (my wife really) got an iPad Pro with Pencil recently so I'm interested to try Designer on that - my wife has been using it for wrapping paper patterns.

[Kiori]

If this is coming than we will finally be able to do proper pixel art with affinity. Unbelievable.

[Kiori]

Hey @MattP if you're looking for things to work on after this feature, try looking here and here, I'm sure there are others that complement workflow of actual content creation.

There are other suggestions  here and here, that would actually make affinity a competitor to serious art software like clip studio paint, but maybe affinity considers these things outside of their scope. Thanks for caring and adding this feature, I thought this would never happen. 😉👍

[Aammppaa]

Hi @MattP per object anti-aliasing looks like good progress.

Are we any closer to improved aliasing options for text? See this post from 2015 that you participated in.

Thanks.