Customisable Booleans

[tcarisland]

I find that using the "Add" operation Affinity Designer creates one big "curve" instead of grouping together all disconnected curves and only removes the overlap of overlapping curves like Adobe Illustrator does. Personally I like both features, but a lot of the time I need the AI feature because I work a lot with type design and I need individual and/or disconnected shapes to remain as separate shapes.

 

There's a feature lacking in nearly every vector graphics program, and that is the ability to use the subtract operation on a group of curves with another group of disconnected curves. In quite a few instances I find I want to do this, and this is the situation where AD is superior to AI since I can use the boolean "add" to create two big compound curves and then run the subtract, but after this I might want to split this curve up into individual shapes.

 

So what I'm asking for is the ability to split up complex curves where there's disconnected shapes into individual curves.

 

Could you also create a snapping mode that only allows integral coordinates? And make snapping available for the bezier parameter nodes (the ones that modify the curvature of the shape)?

 

I'd also like a feature where I can iterate over curves or groups and name them one by one, just display shape - write name - hit enter - display shape - write name - etc...

 

I'm still missing a precise line or pen tool feature where I can click on a coordinate, then enter the length and angle or just vector coordinates, and a "move" feature where I can move by length and angle or by vector coordinates, the "transform" box almost does this job, but not entirely.

[MEB]

Hi tcarisland,

Press and hold ⌥ (option/alt) while clicking on a boolean operation icon to create a compound (non-destructive boolean operation) so you can still access and edit the original shapes (clicking the small arrow in the compound layer in the Layers panel).

 

To split a compound shape - that is a single object (not a compound object a mentioned above) composed by several shapes use the Divide operation.

 

Snapping will be available for node's control handles later.

Thanks for your feedback.

[tcarisland]

The "Divide" operation almost does the job, but not exactly. What I get is this:

 

 

As you can see, I end up with some shapes "filled in" that I don't want to have to remove, if not for the center shapes, I wouldn't have to use my old copy of Illustrator for this particular job.

[Guest]

Hi tcarisland,

After performing the "Divide" operation, select the center parts and delete them.

[tcarisland]

On 28/07/2017 at 6:58 PM, reglico said:

Hi tcarisland,

After performing the "Divide" operation, select the center parts and delete them.

 

That's monkey work, especially when working with tens to hundreds of shapes. 

 

This is just one of my many drafts for a font, and for this font alone I need to delete 32 shapes, probably multiple times since design works in iterations, meaning that for 4 iterations I'm easily up to 128 click and delete operations for just one font, now let's say click and delete takes 4 seconds on average, that's 512 seconds of nothing but clicking and deleting for one design that might not even get accepted, meaning I've wasted 8.5 minutes on each font for something that could be done instantaneously.

 

As I already mentioned, Adobe Illustrator has a boolean add that fixes this problem, AD doesn't, but switching between my Mac and PC is annoying since I only have AI for Windows and I prefer working on my Mac.

[Guest]

Yes, this is not suitable for a big job!