UncleMonkey Posted February 20, 2015 Share Posted February 20, 2015 I'm trying to break down the character 道 （dao, as in Dao De Jing) into its component pieces to illustrate how characters are formed. I can convert it to curves, no problem: result is 5 closed paths. But I can't find any way to ungroup those paths. I've tried clicking with the Move and the Node tools plus every combination of Shift / Ctrl / Option / Cmd I can think of, and either all five paths are selected, or none. The Ungroup item in the Layers menu is grey, unavailable. At the moment, it looks as if I'm going to have to delete paths one node at a time—and there are well over 100 of them. Aiyaaah! Am I going to have to rasterize and erase pixels? Anybody who knows an easy way to do what I want—select the 首 only, for example—please help! Thanks! 道.afdesign Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff Leigh Posted February 20, 2015 Staff Share Posted February 20, 2015 With the character selected go to Layer > Geometry > Divide. You will also need to use the combine function to remove the 3 segments from the body of the main character. I have attached an updated version to this post. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
UncleMonkey Posted February 20, 2015 Author Share Posted February 20, 2015 Thanks, Leigh! Gottit! For this particular sort of conversion, it would be nice to have the counters (holes) left as gaps surrounded by paths, instead of background-colored shapes lying on top of an outline, but Layer>Geometry>Subtract does that pretty painlessly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff Leigh Posted February 20, 2015 Staff Share Posted February 20, 2015 Excellent :D Haluke 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Harris Posted February 20, 2015 Share Posted February 20, 2015 At the moment, it looks as if I'm going to have to delete paths one node at a time—and there are well over 100 of them. Aiyaaah! In addition to what others have said, you can use the Node tool to select many nodes at once, either by dragging a marquee or by using shift-click. You can then delete them all in a single operation, or move them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
UncleMonkey Posted February 23, 2015 Author Share Posted February 23, 2015 Thanks! In fact, I did that by happenstance shortly after I posted, now that you mention it. I guess it's inevitable that folks who've been using Photoshop / Illustrator / FreeHand for decades are going to take a while to discover the new and easier ways of doing things Affinity offers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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