Expand stroke trouble

[Michelle W]

Hi. I’m still learning Affinity Designer and I found the “expand stroke” in the upper left ... menu on the iPad but it doesn’t seem to be expanding the line. I even tried convert to curves, closing and reopening the document, scaling, joining to another line and it still isn’t working so I’m wondering if there is another step or something I am missing. Thank you for your help. 

[toltec]

9 hours ago, Michelle W said:

Hi. I’m still learning Affinity Designer and I found the “expand stroke” in the upper left ... menu on the iPad but it doesn’t seem to be expanding the line. I even tried convert to curves, closing and reopening the document, scaling, joining to another line and it still isn’t working so I’m wondering if there is another step or something I am missing. Thank you for your help. 

Hi Michelle W

The stroke has to be thick enough for it to work effectively.

EDIT or appear to (as Alfred mentions).

Here is a single, fat line.

I did 'Expand Stroke' and then selected it with the Node Tool

Expand Stroke has turned the line into a shape with nodes all around.

[Alfred]

7 minutes ago, toltec said:

The stroke has to be thick enough for it to work effectively.

You should find that you just need to keep zooming in until it looks thick.

[Michelle W]

Thank you for the response. I tried several times at various zoom levels until it was off the screen and couldn’t get it to work so I ended up tracing the lines. I’m hoping it works better in the future.

[MEB]

Hi Michelle W,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
If your stroke/line is based on a brush that uses a raster texture it can't be converted/expanded to a shape - which is probably what you were trying to do. Only the brushes from the Basic category and some from the Assorted category (the ones that don't use raster textures/are pure vector based) can be expanded to a shapes.

[Michelle W]

Ah... that makes sense. I’m in the vector persona and picked a brush with a tapered stroke thinking they were all vector but I believe I imported this one from online. Thank you very much for explaining.