Rotate Guides

[earl_grey]

Hi,

I think it's a good idea to add a "Rotate Guide" to affinity designer

 

 

[Pšenda]

 

 

[Aammppaa]

Hi @LOGerin1 and welcome to the forum.

As @Pšenda indicates, Rotated guides are not yet a feature of Affinity.

I've not used rotated guides, and I wonder what their purpose is? Perhaps someone could explain?

Since Affinity can use any object as a snapping guide, could you not just draw a line at the angle you require and use that as a guide? It can be locked in place if required, like a guide.

The only difference that I can see is that guides will not be exported / printed. Is this the only difference?

Also don't forget that Affinity can create angles grids. Will they not perform the same function as a guide?

Sorry if I'm missing something obvious, but I see this request quite often, and don't really understand what problem rotated guides solve.

[Pšenda]

6 hours ago, Aammppaa said:

Affinity can use any object as a snapping guide

 

 

[Aammppaa]

@Pšenda thanks for pointing me to @JET_Affinity's reply - not sure how I missed it before.

The point about manipulation being by bounding box only is not correct, or at least is no longer true... 

The new Point Transform Tool will easily snap any node to any other piece of geometry. The transform centre can also be snapped to anything. Rotating an object onto a guide object is now straight forward. 

I also think that the example posted (the conical flask with liquid) doesn't require guides at all, but would be best to draw with a rotated / angled grid. 

I do take the point that true guides are hairline width which makes them more appealing to look at, but of all the rough edges in Affinity at this early stage of its life, angled guides seem to me to be one of the least problematic to work around. 

I suspect there is an element of users not fully understanding the power of the tools they do have available, and defaulting to workflows from other apps. 

[kim-berly]

For me it isn't about snapping. It's about placing my pen tool where I need it for my Mandala (or any design I create using Illustrator). No I can't use the method for drawing a Mandala I've seen in videos. If you go to my thread asking for help with guides and look at the 3 examples of Mandalas I drew in Illustrator you might understand why that method won't work. It's fun for about a minute and then I want to trace one of my Mandala png files.

I draw 5-9 slice Mandalas and have set up a template with all the guide rotations on different layers and I just delete the ones I don't need and my color books are there, too. Can''t import a template file. Oh well, can't have everything. I don't like Corel Draw much. They have a place to input rotation, even for dynamic guides. And I downloaded Gravit (don't like the way they do layers at all) but you can create a guide, put it on a layer, select the guide, input where you want it and with the rotation you want. And InkScape is more then I want to fool with.

Using a path as a guide (even if it's on a locked layer) will light up as the pen rolls over it. Very intrusive. Not a work around. Hopefully my example will show what I mean. My Mandalas are all tileable. Most of my designs are tilable. It's just what makes me happy.

[iconoclast]

I miss rotable guidelines too. It would be helpful in many cases. Especially for perspective drawing with 3 vanishing points. But also for many other things. In for example Inkscape you have the opportunity to rotate guidelines freely. It makes many things much easier. Of course you can use pathes as a sort of guidelines, but that causes more work and makes your layerstack much more confusing.

[Pyrrho]

Agreed. Just encountered an issue today where not only would rotatable guides be easier, they make a lot more sense in my head. I'd rather Affinity provide us with UX elements that work the same way in which we've learned to do things in many other products we've used for years (sometimes decades) instead of asking us to use workarounds.

[Dangerous]

I often need to position elements of a drawing around a circle (or several concentric circles) and although I usually power duplicate a group of them (as a group or a symbol) I often need position guides to work out the best size or rotation angle to suit the design.

For me radial guides would be great and if possible rather than radiating from the document centre if they could radiate from a movable 'centre' spot, that would be even better.

 

[CardGuy]

On 5/15/2019 at 5:58 PM, Aammppaa said:

Hi @LOGerin1 and welcome to the forum.

As @Pšenda indicates, Rotated guides are not yet a feature of Affinity.

I've not used rotated guides, and I wonder what their purpose is? Perhaps someone could explain?

Since Affinity can use any object as a snapping guide, could you not just draw a line at the angle you require and use that as a guide? It can be locked in place if required, like a guide.

The only difference that I can see is that guides will not be exported / printed. Is this the only difference?

Also don't forget that Affinity can create angles grids. Will they not perform the same function as a guide?

Sorry if I'm missing something obvious, but I see this request quite often, and don't really understand what problem rotated guides solve.

I'm coming from illustrator where I use rotated guides all the time. The work-around of making an object, rotating it, and then snapping to it, or any other solution is an inefficient limitation on how I work. The simple solution is to simply make guides rotatable. That you don't use them is fine. That there may be other solutions is fine. None of them are as simple and obvious and simply allowing guides to rotate.

[CardGuy]

Do we have rotatable guides yet? And if not, why not? And please don't reply that there are clunky work-arounds like creating objects, rotating them, etc. Just allow guides to rotate. Simple, intuitive, expected and efficient.