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Sneak peeks for 1.7


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Not entirely - they are not a CAD program either.

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How hard is it...?  Anything evaluating cubics is very costly on a computer, so we tend to do a lot of it using curve subdivision which then has precision and performance issues.

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6 hours ago, Ben said:

 

Sorry, not sure exactly what you are asking for..?

 

well, suppose you want a rectangle with an area of exactly 12 square inches — this is easy to achieve, because the area of the rectangle = width × length. but more complex shapes are difficult to make a certain area. some Illustrator plug-ins (like hotdoor.com) allow to change area of the shape numerically. so you can make uneven shapes the same size not by changing their width or length, but by changing their area

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1 hour ago, Max Basok said:

well, suppose you want a rectangle with an area of exactly 12 square inches — this is easy to achieve, because the area of the rectangle = width × length. but more complex shapes are difficult to make a certain area. some Illustrator plug-ins (like hotdoor.com) allow to change area of the shape numerically. so you can make uneven shapes the same size not by changing their width or length, but by changing their area

 

Thanks for confirming my suspicions!

 

6 hours ago, Alfred said:

think @Max Basok is asking for something that depends on an area measurement feature which we don’t yet have (but this is pure guesswork on my part, of course).

 

As I hinted in that post, what you are asking for will not be possible until the Affinity apps are able to measure areas.

 

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Re: Area:

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…it would be very handy for optical compensation of uneven shapes…


Of course, visual appearance of "same size" is not just a simple matter of area (as any type designer knows), but it's at least a starting point for that, and useful for many other common things.


Personally, I've long maintained that every serious drawing program should provide path length and area as visible attributes (as, for example, ACD Canvas has for as long as I remember). If they were given, one could devise whatever calculation needed for use-specific purposes (especially given Affinity's more capable value fields).


The object model for Illustrator's JavaScript implementation includes area as a path property. So it's fairly trivial to write a JavaScript that will do whatever calculation you want that includes area as a factor. (I've used it in a few of my own AI Javascripts.) There are a couple of caveats; for example, the value shown is a simple sum of subpaths in a compound paths, regardless of winding order.


AI used to only provide path length (among other object values) in its hidden programmer's dialog which was accessed by an "Easter egg" keyboard shortcut. After  a period of user demand, path length was eventually exposed in its Document Info palette (a frankly rather half-baked grab-bag feature), when the Objects and Selection Only palette options are on.

JET

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33 minutes ago, JET_Affinity said:

a frankly rather half-baked grab-bag feature

 

Nothing new there, then! ;)

 

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Ben, I believe all these new implementations are quite exciting and I really look forward to see them working. But my main concern is with all the functionality in Designer that does not work as it should. I'm referring especially to the many bugs with constraints, symbols, artboards, exports and others, as well as some really bad performance bottlenecks. I wonder if these pending issues will still be present in version 1.7, or you guys do intend to fix them in the near future.

 

Will you or anyone else from Serif be able to answer this?

 

Thanks in advance, and sorry for being a pain :S

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I'm concerned at the possibility of Serif hiding a few tricks up their sleeve. If they do, it's fine. If they do, there should be a discrepancy between their development time (November 2017 - November 2018) and the feature that they show in this thread here. 

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11 hours ago, rubs said:

Ben, I believe all these new implementations are quite exciting and I really look forward to see them working. But my main concern is with all the functionality in Designer that does not work as it should. I'm referring especially to the many bugs with constraints, symbols, artboards, exports and others, as well as some really bad performance bottlenecks. I wonder if these pending issues will still be present in version 1.7, or you guys do intend to fix them in the near future.

 

Will you or anyone else from Serif be able to answer this?

 

Thanks in advance, and sorry for being a pain :S

 

I can't talk for constraints, symbols or artboards - I've not had much to do with them.

 

Export is a lot to do with me.  What areas are you talking about?  We already acknowledged that we need to do some sort of live previews for raster exports (though it is complicated by the fact that a slice can have multiple output configurations).

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15 hours ago, Max Basok said:

well, suppose you want a rectangle with an area of exactly 12 square inches — this is easy to achieve, because the area of the rectangle = width × length. but more complex shapes are difficult to make a certain area. some Illustrator plug-ins (like hotdoor.com) allow to change area of the shape numerically. so you can make uneven shapes the same size not by changing their width or length, but by changing their area

 

Presumably, you can only do a uniform scale to increase/decrease the area?  Or do the tools allow you to change area with non-uniform scale?

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5acc9c83e32c2_TransformImprovements.thumb.png.140e7cc3b3c84c8fd25122550e262d7a.png

 

I think this is an improvement to the current transformation tool. If you want to implement this i advice you to keep the current transform dock and use this as the advanced version of it.
I think it's pretty straightforward. A is Area. I don't expect AD to be able to show area for every vector shape (integrating function is pretty hard). I do think that we should be able of object that is available in the shape builder tool or if can't at least it should be able to show polygon area. D is for dilatation. It's scaling, basically. The dilatation point is currently known in AD as "rotation centre". But, you can't specify the location of the rotation centre currently.
Why you should implement this? To distant yourself from Ai even more.

Transform Improvements.afdesign

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3 hours ago, Ben said:

Export is a lot to do with me.  What areas are you talking about?  We already acknowledged that we need to do some sort of live previews for raster exports (though it is complicated by the fact that a slice can have multiple output configurations).

 

Okay, here are some of my problems with export and slices (some may be Windows-related only):

Thanks again for being so responsive, Ben!

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Yeah - seems like most of your issues are Windows related.  I'll have to pass it to the Windows team to look at.

 

The artboard and PDF issues are common, so I'll look at those when I get chance.

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5 hours ago, Ben said:

 

Presumably, you can only do a uniform scale to increase/decrease the area?  Or do the tools allow you to change area with non-uniform scale?

definetly, uniform. at least, for me it's hard to imagine non-uniform scale when it takes complex shapes

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2 hours ago, Fatih19 said:

That's what I'm talking about in my transform improvements. 

Uses for knowing the area (or length) of a path would be very user-specific. Max may want to perform scaling based on area or path length, either of which, as Ben mentioned, is a simple matter of uniform scaling which can already be keyed as an expression into the dimension fields. I, on the other hand, may want to know the area or path length in order to convert the value to another unit of measure (e.g., acres or miles) in order to paste it into a dimension callout on a land plot drawing. Or any number of other things.

So there's no need for any elaborate re-work of the Transform palette for this. Object attributes like area and length just need to be visible in any sensibly unobtrusive location of the interface so the user can use them as values in whatever specific calculation needed.

Sure, the Transform palette is one logical place to display dimensional object attributes, but it's not the only place to do it. Consider: There are other kinds of object-level attributes also very useful to know (count of nodes, open or closed, etc.) which are not dimensional, and would not be used as transformations.

Such specific uses are not things every user would do every day in the same way. The user just needs to know the values in order to use them as fits the needs. They could appear in an attributes pane, or in a contextual cursor menu, for example. Let's trust the developers to know how to best integrate such things into the established interface schema so as to preserve the overall elegance.

JET

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59 minutes ago, JET_Affinity said:

Uses for knowing the area (or length) of a path would be very user-specific. Max may want to perform scaling based on area or path length, either of which, as Ben mentioned, is a simple matter of uniform scaling which can already be keyed as an expression into the dimension fields.

 

From the image he posted here, it would seem that Max wants to be able to adjust a number of different shapes so that they all have the same area.

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6 hours ago, rubs said:

This happens in the Mac OS version too... 

 

9 hours ago, Ben said:

I can't talk for constraints, symbols or artboards - I've not had much to do with them.

@Ben Any chances the other developers that worked in these are looking at this thread? Symbols + constraints are some of the most useful features for screen designers. I was using it a lot, until some bugs started to appear and I ended up losing some hard work...

 

Anyway, for exporting persona, I'd like to see a way that I could add different slices for the same artboard, but for one slice, I'd like that certain layers would be visible, while for the other slices I'd like that other layers were visible.

 

So, fo example, If I designed an UI and wanted to export some screens, instead of duplicating the same artboard and showing / hiding layers in each one of those artboards to display certain panels over the screen, I could have only one screen, with different slices with those layers visibility attached to them.

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Quote

From the image he posted here, it would seem that Max wants to be able to adjust a number of different shapes so that they all have the same area.

Right. So just seeing the area value for each lets you determine the needed scale factor.

If I have four objects with areas of 225, 275, 300, and 265, and want the first three to be scaled to have the same area as the last, I can simply key "*265/225" in either of the first's size fields to scale it by 118%, enter "*265/275" to scale the second by 96%, and "*265/300" to scale the third by 88%.

JET

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12 hours ago, JET_Affinity said:

Sure, the Transform palette is one logical place to display dimensional object attributes, but it's not the only place to do it. 

 

APh has its Info panel that displays color information. I think this could be enhanced and brought over to AD to do exactly what you describe.

I just do not know if this can be done easily, even though it seems so to a non programming user :)

 

d.

 

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4 hours ago, JET_Affinity said:

Right. So just seeing the area value for each lets you determine the needed scale factor.

If I have four objects with areas of 225, 275, 300, and 265, and want the first three to be scaled to have the same area as the last, I can simply key "*265/225" in either of the first's size fields to scale it by 118%, enter "*265/275" to sale the second by 96%, and "*265/300" to scale the third by 88%.

JET

Shouldn't you put root 265/225 on both W and H to retain it's shape?

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