How to (re)order slices?

[NielsKM]

I can't seem to find a way to order my slices in Affinity Designer Export Persona - I mean in the right side Slices tab (next to layers). I would expect it to be possible to simply drag slices up/down as you do with layers in Draw Persona.

Thanks,

Niels KM

[Dan C]

Hi NielsKM,

Welcome to the forums

This is something that has been requested previously on our forums - see below - and is something we may add in a future update!

In the meatine, I'll move this thread to Feature Requests & Feedback

[NielsKM]

OK, thanks Dan.

[CommiePinko]

It's always a pleasure to go looking for a much needed feature and find it was promised years ago.

[walt.farrell]

9 hours ago, CommiePinko said:

It's always a pleasure to go looking for a much needed feature and find it was promised years ago.

Where do you see a promise? Dan said "we may add in a future update".

1. "May" is not a definite commitment.
2. It's still the future.

[Alfred]

32 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

It's still the future.

Without the benefit of time travel it’s always going to be in the future!

[Pšenda]

10 hours ago, CommiePinko said:

much needed feature

Under the term "much needed feature", I personally imagine functions without which something cannot be done in principle, or only very complicatedly. Reordering Slices, which do not make export impossible, I personally consider a "cosmetic" feature, for which I expect a very low priority (compared to other really critical ones).

[alexkoch]

Hi Affinity, hi forum

I've run into a buch of issues with the Export Persona which I would like to share and add some thoughts/proposals…

My workflow/setup was to set up a larger (~6K) canvas where I would paste one picture at a time and (re-)position predefined slices on it within the Export Persona. All slices have a fixed aspect ratio and several export sizes attached to them (1x1, 16x9, 3x2, 4x3… in 2500w, 1600w, 1200w etc.). As you may have guessed I'm exporting sets of images for responsive web html to be used in picture/srcset context.

 

Things I ran into:

It is hard to see which slice is active

header bars and all slices equally visible makes it hard to position slices

Slices can't be reordered in the panel

batch-renaming or more path-component options would be useful (filename, timestamps…)

path name components: user variables/tokens I can't get to work, they just vanish after typing them in

layer palette (EP) only allows for changes to visibility, no moving

fixed aspect ratio in slice palette transform tool seems not to do anything (chain symbol for width and height)

shift-scaling (which does provide fixed aspect ratio) introduces rounding errors after some back and forth, slightly missing aspect ratio again

Arrow and Slice-Pointer behave somewhat counterintuitive; arrow only activates layers, but won't switch to the layers tab; Add-Slice-Pointer moves slices also

 

Some proposals:

dim non-active slices in EP view, hide header bar

add group-align features (left, right, center, top, middle, bottom) for selected slices

make local path-components/tokens available in all slices ("myNewToken" instantly available in all path-composer instances… (per document))

allow for repositioning of layers in "Layers" tab in EP (idea: arrow pointer 😀)

fix fixed-aspect-ratio function ("Transform" tab) – once set, scaling of a slice stays constrained

please please add WebP format options in EP

come up with a super smart idea on how to handle the even pixels/aspect ratio dilemma

(I would prefer an "enforce even pixel over aspect ratio" and "enforce aspect ratio over single pixel scaling precision" toggle, which I would set to the latter an never touch again)

 

Sorry for the moaning, I literally just lost a day of work due to some aspect ratio glitches, which left me with 250+ exported images, which ever so slightly made my pages jump – because 16x9 ended up being 16x9.1754, and even 1x1 went sideways in some cases… 

 

In case anyone is wondering: I absolutely love all Affinity software and evangelize everywhere…

best
Alex

 

[All Media Lab]

 

Hi @alexkoch  Alex,

Your example with the construction building image shows that you don't understand how it works.😉!

The easiest way to accomplish what you want is making pre-sets for all art directions (in my example (header portrait for phone) (header wide for all other devices even phone landscape mode). In this case it's ment to be used for a header. When you look on top of the exports panel there is even a copy paste function, so you can create one size with the name and then change the size and/or the text. I agree the missing webp is a real pity!!!

What I do in the pre-sets with the naming is for example header-contact-4-3-1200px, header-contact-4-3-800px, header-contact-4-3-500px then I make a folder named contact-header that contains a folder webp and jpg. That way you can use the pre-sets for every header you make in the future without specific naming. And placing the link names in the website becomes more easy, for example in Sublime Text you can multi select the names that have to be changed and the rest of the link name stays the same.

You have to be sure to crop the exact pixel ratio before going to the export mode! There is no cropping necessary in the export mode!  Like said you only crop one image for every art direction before going to the export persona. In my example 2 images.

Regards,

David

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[alexkoch]

Hi

Thanks for your response, All Media Lab David

(I'll skip over the part where you suggest I didn't understand the Export Persona and Slices concept.)

You are suggesting having several Versions of the source file, being different documents in different aspect ratios. Which is fine, but not exactly better or less work, and since the results would be the same it comes down to personal preference. And by all means, do it that way, no problem. 

My point is that AP does work the way I used it (for years, actually) — support for more than one slice per document hints at that — and some UI functions are broken or difficult to work with.

E.g. proportional scaling not working (despite icon changing in the Transform palette) is a glitch, at best. And it made me loose quite some work. The main features/non-features (loosing the ar-constraints, not easily seeing which slice is active, no way to re-sort slice-layers) drove me to use Sketch for these multi export scenarios.

Works super reliable. Not as cute as the seal, though.
 

[Forteskun]

Hi, any news on this feature? It's still not possible to rearrange slices?

[alexkoch]

No, stayed the same.

I'm not sure how to attract attention to this topic, I would add the freezing exports when WebP is chosen as export format (already on this forum, different thread)

Unfortunately we are at Version 2.0 by now, but some (all?) of the UI-bugs mentioned in my post are still present; it looks like the Export Module got new file formats (WebP) but everything else remained untouched.

I always forget about the freezing issue, head over to the Export Persona (instead of using "my" workaround via Sketch) — sigh…

[D.VE]

Any update on this topic? 

There is much room for improvement at the Export Persona...

[Alfred]

On 3/16/2023 at 10:55 AM, alexkoch said:

No, stayed the same.

I'm not sure how to attract attention to this topic, I would add the freezing exports when WebP is chosen as export format (already on this forum, different thread)

Unfortunately we are at Version 2.0 by now, but some (all?) of the UI-bugs mentioned in my post are still present; it looks like the Export Module got new file formats (WebP) but everything else remained untouched.

I always forget about the freezing issue, head over to the Export Persona (instead of using "my" workaround via Sketch) — sigh…

 

9 minutes ago, D.VE said:

Any update on this topic? 

There is much room for improvement at the Export Persona...

This thread is in the ‘Feedback for the Affinity V1 Products [ARCHIVE]’ section of the forums. A new V2 thread is more likely to attract attention.

[Pšenda]

17 hours ago, Alfred said:

This thread is in the ‘Feedback for the Affinity V1 Products [ARCHIVE]’ section of the forums. A new V2 thread is more likely to attract attention.

Serif has already announced that there is no need to duplicate threads from V1 and create more in V2. If necessary, the topic will be moved to V2.

[Dan C]

Thanks for raising this, I've moved the thread to the V2 section as required