Drawing Lines with Affinity Publisher

[GFDBILL]

This seems to be a more complex task than it was with Page Plus.  With Page Plus, there is a Straight Line Tool on the main toolbar.  Once you have drawn a line, you can set the style as a default, so next time you want to draw a straight line 2 points, with straight ends (a really simple line) you just click the tool and draw the line.  Also if you want a line at an angle, there are several set angles to use - not just 45 degrees.  Could we not have such ease-of-use in Affinity Publisher?

[Old Bruce]

3 minutes ago, GFDBILL said:

This seems to be a more complex task than it was with Page Plus.  With Page Plus, there is a Straight Line Tool on the main toolbar.  Once you have drawn a line, you can set the style as a default, so next time you want to draw a straight line 2 points, with straight ends (a really simple line) you just click the tool and draw the line.  Also if you want a line at an angle, there are several set angles to use - not just 45 degrees.  Could we not have such ease-of-use in Affinity Publisher?

And Designer too.

[fde101]

If you use advanced mode in Grid Manager you can change this under "Additional axis setup" (change the intermediate divisions) - oddly, even if I switch away from advanced mode after adjusting that the setting seems to stick; not sure it is supposed to do that?

[Mandu]

I think when Photo and Vector persona become available, other tools within those personas (such as the straight line tool) will become available. Publisher is not AD or AP so there is no point of replicating all tools available in other software.

[fde101]

9 hours ago, Mandu said:

the straight line tool

They don't have one either.  It is all done with the pen tool by constraining the angle.

[Typo998]

Hi,

With the pen tool , click on the   line mode

Hold the Shift key if you want to make an horizontal line for exemple (when holding the shift key you have 45 degrees rotation each time when moving the mouse.

Hope that will help.

[Gee]

A line tool like the one in Pages or Indesign or ... would be nice, even very wanted.

[JPSports]

I agree. I understand the process for developing the program. Can’t believe a simple task like the line tool should be so hard. There are some nice things here but seems like a huge step backwards from where page plus has gone. Some of us won’t be around in ten years when needed features are added. I don’t want to use pp because it is a. Dead program and will never be developed further. Maybe open source the code so others can tweak it

[JPSports]

Looking for help. I draw a straight line with the pen. Then I select the move tool to move it and it disappears. This is more work than it should be. 

[walt.farrell]

7 minutes ago, JPSports said:

Looking for help. I draw a straight line with the pen. Then I select the move tool to move it and it disappears. This is more work than it should be. 

Did you make sure it had a stroke value specified? I think it should, by default, but it's probably worth checking.

You should be able to find it in the Layer panel, select it there, and check the stroke setting.

[jwhitmill]

I can't even begin to find a way to draw a simple line with this. I use the Pen tool, but it doesn't present me with any options for size or style.

[walt.farrell]

2 minutes ago, jwhitmill said:

I can't even begin to find a way to draw a simple line with this. I use the Pen tool, but it doesn't present me with any options for size or style.

With the Pen Tool selected, the Context Toolbar provides choices for Fill and Stroke, with the Stroke providing a color-well you can click in to set the line's color, and the next field providing the option for size of the stroke/line.

[Fixx]

You can also use stroke panel.

Yes, there is no line tool and we have to make do with pen tool. Hopefully we can use automatic style "decorations" instead.

[Jowday]

Using the pen tool holding down shift applying styles from the style studio would be sufficient for me , but...

 

[ClarityDynamic]

I must say after struggling with creating a line to separate my title from the body, the 'PEN TOOL' is absolutely amazing, my new favorite tool

[ClarityDynamic]

On 10/26/2018 at 7:23 AM, Typo998 said:

Hi,

With the pen tool , click on the   line mode

Hold the Shift key if you want to make an horizontal line for exemple (when holding the shift key you have 45 degrees rotation each time when moving the mouse.

Hope that will help.

This is PURE gold - Thank you @Typo998 for this nugget and VERY sound advice this is EXACTLY the correct answer 

[Wosven]

14 hours ago, ClarityDynamic said:

I must say after struggling with creating a line to separate my title from the body, the 'PEN TOOL'

Don't forget it can be in the paragraph style decoration settings, and you won't have to move your lines each time you modify your text, and can in a bulk modify this line on all the titles when modifying the decoration of your paragraph style.

[Timo2021]

I've just recently stated to use Affinity Publisher after that some years been using the Page Plus.

In Page plus you can choose different styles for the straight line for example a split the line with a gap between lines. You can even change wide of the gap and thickness of the lines, a very easy and practical tool for me.
I can't find that kind of function in Publisher. Maybe I can fix that in Design, can I?
I don't want to draw two parallel lines that's too much work, because I've got them on every page....

[dominik]

1 hour ago, Timo2021 said:

I've just recently stated to use Affinity Publisher after that some years been using the Page Plus.

In Page plus you can choose different styles for the straight line for example a split the line with a gap between lines. You can even change wide of the gap and thickness of the lines, a very easy and practical tool for me.
I can't find that kind of function in Publisher. Maybe I can fix that in Design, can I?
I don't want to draw two parallel lines that's too much work, because I've got them on every page....

Hi @Timo2021 and welcome to the forum.

You could do this with the appearance of the line. Basically it would be one line that has two line widths applied to it. The top one is thin and has the colour of your background and the width of the gap between the two lines. The bottom one has the width of the added width of the two lines plus the gap and has the colour of the strokes you want.

This of course won't work if you have e.g. a gradient or a photo in the background.
The good thing is, it also works with curved lines 🙂

If you need true two parallel lines you could save them once as an asset and pull them in on every page. Or you could put them once on a master page and apply that to pages where needed.

d.

[fde101]

On 2/22/2021 at 4:59 AM, dominik said:

You could do this with the appearance of the line. Basically it would be one line that has two line widths applied to it. The top one is thin and has the colour of your background and the width of the gap between the two lines. The bottom one has the width of the added width of the two lines plus the gap and has the colour of the strokes you want.

Nice - that is an interesting approach and should be fine as long as the line is sitting on a solid background color.  It breaks down if there is a gradient, image, or other such thing behind the line.

If you do happen to be working with a solid background color though, you could extend this by piling additional lines on top, making each one thinner than the last, and alternating the colors to create triple, quadruple, etc. lines.

I don't think you can do one thin one thick this way though unless they are balanced.

[dominik]

9 hours ago, fde101 said:

Nice - that is an interesting approach and should be fine as long as the line is sitting on a solid background color.

...

I don't think you can do one thin one thick this way though unless they are balanced.

Correct, this is only a visual thing, not 'real' two lines. And assymetrical designs are also not possible. But it would be a great enhancement if we could set an offset to achieve this.

By expanding such a 'multi stroke' and afterwards subtracting the top from the bottom results in a two rectangle vector shapes that look like two parallel lines that work on gradients and images.

d.

[fde101]

On 2/24/2021 at 12:36 AM, dominik said:

But it would be a great enhancement if we could set an offset to achieve this.

With an offset we could have real parallel lines with transparency between them.

[dominik]

On 2/27/2021 at 12:13 AM, fde101 said:

With an offset we could have real parallel lines with transparency between them.

There is some logic to it

And it illustrates the big advantage of this feature.

d.

[Lil John]

must say, after using pageplus, seems to me Affinity has gone backwards. Struggling to do simple tasks that were very simple in pageplus.

might have to spring for AI, this is more frustrating than productive.

my opinion.

 

[fde101]

13 hours ago, Lil John said:

might have to spring for AI, this is more frustrating than productive.

Personally, I found Illustrator to be much worse.

Also, Illustrator would be more comparable to Designer, while this thread is here to discuss Publisher - the comparison would be with InDesign.