On Guides...

[ronnyb]

HERE's an interesting take on Guides and Snapping, from the Skala folks, who have an upcoming design app up their sleeves...

 

"Skala is a precise user interface and icon design tool with phenomenal rendering quality and a unique blend of vector, bitmap and 3D abilities."

[Ben]

Interesting thought, but I think it opens up a can of worms.

 

In Affinity, we quantise our selection boxes to screen pixel positions. This is affected by the zoom level and panning position of your spread in screen space.  That way our boxes always look crisp.  The same for our snapping indicators.  Our guides are also quantised to a screen pixel for rendering.  This only affects the screen representation of our guides and margins.  If you zoom in to say 800%, our document pixel takes up 8 screen pixels (if you turn on Pixel view mode).  A guide might be placed at the boundary between two document pixels.  It is precise when it comes to snapping/aligning.  If we rendered it at 2 pixels thick, it doesn't enhance precision of the actual snapping - it just makes it look thicker.  What it would mean is that we'd have to render our selection boxes at 2 pixels thick, else it would appear that the snapped edge of a selection box is not exactly on a guide.

 

If I zoom out in the document, then the precision of the guide placement is lost in terms of screen space - it is at a finer resolution than what can be displayed, and so the position of a guide is rounded to the nearest whole pixel for the purpose of rendering to screen.  Rendering at two pixels thick doesn't help since the actual position is lost in the screen pixel used to render it - but that doesn't prevent me snapping to it perfectly.  In fact a two pixel line would detract from the precision of the guide's actual position.

 

So, while it sounds like they've hit upon a unique idea - it doesn't really make sense for anything other than exact 100% zoom levels, and doesn't improve actual precision at all.

 

I think we'll stick with what we've got.   ;)

[ronnyb]

Cool beans... I just ran across it and it sounded interesting and wanted to shsre with you guys... Keep up the amazing work!!

[ronnyb]

Also, it might be cool to offer other grids not based on the square, like 2 or 3 point perspective grids, polar grids, isometric grids, etc. If you guys haven't heard of Hexels, its a neat niche art app, which offers alternative grids. Worth checking out the free download...