Getting Artwork to FontLab

[Alfred]

10 minutes ago, nicolasbulb said:

I don't want to export and import

Why not? Copying and pasting means you’re not only reliant on the sending application to put the required formats on the clipboard but you’re also reliant on the receiving application to handle the the clipboard contents correctly. Exporting also means that you can reuse the items at a later date.

[nicolasbulb]

Ok but in this case, copy and pasting is way more faster to work with. I can have a big artboard with a lot of different sketches and quickly going back and fourth the 2 softwares. Exporting require to add extra steps. It works in Illustrator and FontLab VI so why not with Affinity Designer?

[Leigh]

On 5/15/2019 at 12:18 PM, nicolasbulb said:

 It works in Illustrator and FontLab VI so why not with Affinity Designer?

No idea why it's not working but it's logged with our developers to be looked at. Hope that helps!

[nicolasbulb]

Thanks. Let's see what the developers can do.

 

@touchara

I'm concerned about copy and paste, no import export here. Thanks

[firstdefence]

On 5/15/2019 at 10:17 AM, nicolasbulb said:

Hi, I'm currently testing FontLab 6.1.4 and Affinity Designer beta 1.7.0.11. I still can't copy and paste from Affinity Designer to FontLab in order to get it directly to vectors. It works with Adobe Illustrator CS6 though. Any news about this? I don't want to export and import and definitely don't want to use the Autotrace because it makes no sense to trace artworks that are already in vectors. Many thanks. 

After pasting artwork (a vector in Affinity) but pasted as a pixel image from Affinity into Fontlab and then using Separate and Trace, the interpretation isn't always accurate, nodes will not be in the same place and in order to correct for symmetry etc you then have to post edit the nodes. On a scaled up document the trace is pretty good but it seems odd that Affinity cannot copy as vector to other apps. To show this isn't just a Fontlab issue you can try pasting to Inkscape and Inkscape will paste a pixel image and a slightly blurry one at that.

Copy/Paste from Sketch results in having to trace the shape, same from Inkscape.

[R C-R]

24 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

... but it seems odd that Affinity cannot copy as vector to other apps.

I have not tried this but does setting Affinity Designer General Preferences to enable "Copy items as SVG" make any difference?

[firstdefence]

5 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I have not tried this but does setting Affinity Designer General Preferences to enable "Copy items as SVG" make any difference?

Unfortunately not, but was a good call, might do a bit more testing with that enabled.

[nicolasbulb]

Quote

After pasting artwork (a vector in Affinity) but pasted as a pixel image from Affinity into Fontlab and then using Separate and Trace, the interpretation isn't always accurate, 

This is actually the problem. A vector graphic should be copy and pasted as a vector graphic and not a pixel image. It makes no sense to do that and use the Trace interpretation of a software. The tracing tool of FontLab should be only used when designing font based on scans available on vector format.

As I said, it works with Illustrator so Affinity should be on paar. It's on the developers side now. I hope they will fix it soon. 

[Alfred]

53 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

it seems odd that Affinity cannot copy as vector to other apps

It’s clear that the Affinity apps make vector data available via the clipboard, since you can paste to any app in the suite and the resultant object is still vector, but if you don’t get the expected result even when you ‘Copy as SVG’ there’s obviously something else going on. Do you have some means of inspecting the clipboard contents?

[firstdefence]

If you Copy/Paste to Illustrator from Affinity Designer it will paste as vector and then copy/paste to fontlab it will paste as a vector.

I'm not a programmer or anything like that so my interpretation of this info may be way off but from some info I gleaned with regard to Mac clipboard and a Clipboard viewer that shows the content as Hex Code, I think the reason Adobe Illustrator pastes as vector into Fontlab is because the copy is primarily SVG/SVGM/PDF/PICT

Affinity Designer is PDF/PNG/TIFF

 

[Alfred]

50 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

Affinity Designer is PDF/PNG/TIFF

And if you ‘Copy as SVG’? 

[firstdefence]

7 minutes ago, Alfred said:

And if you ‘Copy as SVG’? 

lol! Same, no reference to SVG, maybe that's for Affinity only. This is the same whether in Affinity Designer or Affinity Designer βeta 1.7.0. 

Also the same for Affinity Photo and Affinity Photo βeta 1.7.0.x 

[Alfred]

16 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

lol! Same, no reference to SVG, maybe that's for Affinity only.

The way I’d expect it to work is that the sending application puts a number of formats on the clipboard and then the receiving application picks up whatever it can use. So if you choose the ’Copy as SVG’ option it should be added to the mix and therefore available for pasting into anything that understands plain SVG or an Inkscape/Sodipodi variant.

P.S. Was the ‘lol’ a reaction to my ears? 

[firstdefence]

42 minutes ago, Alfred said:

The way I’d expect it to work is that the sending application puts a number of formats on the clipboard and then the receiving application picks up whatever it can use. So if you choose the ’Copy as SVG’ option it should be added to the mix and therefore available for pasting into anything that understands plain SVG or an Inkscape/Sodipodi variant.

P.S. Was the ‘lol’ a reaction to my ears? 

What lol!

[firstdefence]

and yes it was, made me chuckle lol!

[v_kyr]

4 hours ago, firstdefence said:

lol! Same, no reference to SVG, maybe that's for Affinity only. This is the same whether in Affinity Designer or Affinity Designer βeta 1.7.0. 

Also the same for Affinity Photo and Affinity Photo βeta 1.7.0.x 

Not sure what you are talking about (?) ...

... all those left side PB types do reference a created "Clipboard.svg" file and guess what's inside then.

[Mark Oehlschlager]

Out of curiosity, do the font designers out there have any trouble pasting vector art from Affinity Designer into the font creation software, Glyphs? 

https://glyphsapp.com

Below is the only relevant page from the Glyphs manual:

 

[firstdefence]

7 hours ago, v_kyr said:

Not sure what you are talking about (?) ...

... all those left side PB types do reference a created "Clipboard.svg" file and guess what's inside then.

Me neither, but it's obvious that even if the clipboard copy has svg, Fontlab is not acknowledging it's existence, or it's the format of the clipboard.svg and how Fontlab see's it, because its just ignoring it and using an image as the Artwork paste into Fontlab.

[firstdefence]

@Mark Oehlschlager Copy/Paste into Glyphs works, the copy is pasted as vector. 

[firstdefence]

From this in Affinity

To this in Glyphs

[firstdefence]

Just tried registering at the fontlab forum, but gave up after the fourth time, I wish these forum signup pages would show what is banned (hotmail email incl outlook emails) and what the format of a password must include.

[nicolasbulb]

@firstdefence

I've tried to register to Fontal forum as well with no luck. I've sent a support ticket about it as well as the issue we're having with copy/paste. I'll keep you posted.

Nicolas

[firstdefence]

2 minutes ago, nicolasbulb said:

@firstdefence

I've tried to register to Fontal forum as well with no luck. I've sent a support ticket about it as well as the issue we're having with copy/paste. I'll keep you posted.

Nicolas

Good to know, at least we are starting to get somewhere, albeit in a clumsy way 

[firstdefence]

@nicolasbulb Any news on on the support note?

[zehfred]

Same problem is happening with Figma:

So this might be a problem with Designer? What's bizarre is that it works with some apps and not with others. For example, Inkscape and Powerpoint receive a vector. It's so weird!