Incorrect sizing of objects inserted into a symbol which is present on multiple artboards of different aspect ratios/orientations

[ilmiont]

Hello,

This is frustrating and a bit hard to describe. It is probably clearest if you watch the video I've made:

The setup is that I have multiple artboards of different aspect ratios and sizes. Then I've made a symbol (the blue background rectangle) and added an instance of it to every artboard, sized to fill the artboard.

I then proceed to select an instance of the symbol, with sync enabled, and insert an object into the symbol --- first an image, and then a rectangle.

As expected, the object is populated into all the symbol instances (yay!), but the aspect ratios/orientations of each instance seem to be ignored - so it looks skewed on the portrait artboards.

I'm struggling to properly articulate the behaviour here, but hopefully the video makes it clearer. I do understand why this is happening I think - it seems only the orientation of the symbol instance I originally insert into is considered. But I'm sure you can agree the results are NOT the expect behaviour here!

As you can probably see from my artboard setup I'm trying to make a set of artboards for producing social media images – the idea being, I have a symbol with an instance for every social media image size. Then I can just drag my content in and, voilá, Sync works its wonders and I have an image ready for each platform. As the video shows, this is kind of a big stumbling point for that use case...

Latest Affinity public on Windows.

ilmiont

[Aammppaa]

I would say that the behaviour is exactly what I'd expect and not a bug.

Each symbol has been stretched and distorted, so anything that you put inside the symbol will also be distorted.

What is the exact behaviour you are trying to achieve?

Imagine I make a logo that is square, and I now insert this into an artboard (or any container) that is very tall and thin.

How should the logo appear?

• Stretched to be tall and thin? <- This is what you are doing at present and is not what you want.
• Proportionally scaled to the height and therefore hugely cropped at the sides? Unlikely.
• Scaled to the width with a large gap top and bottom? Might be the best option.

More importantly, how can the software know which of these options you want? How can it make an intelligent decision?

It can't, so you need to make that decision when scaling the symbol on your artboards.

Don't stretch it, just scale it to appropriately fill the area.

You might want to take a look at the Affinity Publisher Beta, since this has Picture Frames, that deal with this scenario at least semi-automatically.

[ilmiont]

I see, thank you for the explanation. I hadn't thought of scaling the symbol; I'll give that a try and see how it works out.

 

The exact behaviour I'm trying to achieve -> the inserted objects should retain their own aspect ratio across all instances of the symbol. So at present that's fine on the landscape instances, but as you see, the portrait instances the symbol loses its correct aspect ratio.

 

I guess I'm working outside the intended use case of symbols, so perhaps I'll be better off trying another approach.

[Gabe]

Hi @ilmiont

On 9/20/2018 at 6:46 PM, ilmiont said:

Then I've made a symbol (the blue background rectangle) and added an instance of it to every artboard, sized to fill the artboard.

As @Aammppaa suggested, once you resize( distort ) a symbol, anything going inside that symbol will be distorted. Not a bug, but how the symbols work. 

Thanks,

Gabe. 

moved to questions.