Transform panel: option to show object size including stroke

[roryobryan]

An option for the transform panel to show an objects size including its stroke.

--

I've just been creating some graphics in multiple widths; 60px, 120px, 200px wide.  The outermost element was a rectangle with a stroke.  in order to scale the graphics efficiently via the transform panel I found my self having to use mental arithmetic, and multiple attempts, to account for the stroke width as this is not included in the dimensions shown in the Transform panel.

 

This would be a useful addition as an option for those of us needing precise scaling of stroked objects.

 

Thanks 

[Ben]

That's not as straight forward as it sounds.  The stroke is subject to mitre limits, so we'd have to do an expensive calculation of the physical extents of the stroke geometry. Fine for a simple rectangle, but for complex paths that could be involved.  We do approximations of this for invalidating areas of the page, but it is mostly pessimistically oversized and not at all precise.

 

One option is to chose to have your strokes inside aligned.  That way the physical size is unaffected by the stroke width, so the size displayed in the transform panel will be exact.

[roryobryan]

Thanks for quick the reply.

 

My image was actually a little more complex, so the "inside aligned" option wouldn't have worked in this case.  

 

Whilst looking around for a solution I did notice that I could "Expand Stroke" to detach the stroke and get closer to what I was after.  But that limited my options for adjustments thereafter.

 

Affinity Designer's performance is very impressive, so I can understand why you wouldn't want to compromise a basic calculation like this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[roryobryan]

** Actually, tried with inside stroke and, YES it did work with my final image..  

 

Originally I had been working with an open path, where I couldn't set an inside stroke, but ultimately closed it and could have used inside stroke and made my life a bit easier!

 

Useful tip thanks. 

 

(Just tried starting over using an inside stroke from the start, and I am struggling to get nice rounded corners easily.  So I think that ultimately the center stroke is easier in this case to get the desired look, but difficult to scale precisely there after.   But a useful tip that is good to know.

 

Thanks for the assistance.

[Ben]

We can look at the option you suggested.  I can't promise anything yet though.  The difficulty comes when specifying a new size in the transform tab.  We would have to increase the size with stroke awareness.  More complicated than it sounds as a stroke can be set to not scale with the object, so the size correction would have to be added to the original geometry but with deeper analysis of how the existing geometry is expanded by the stroke direction.

 

Anyway - 

[roryobryan]

Thanks Ben.  

 

You're doing an incredible job with Affinity Designer, btw..  I've been using it for the last few days and it's very apparent that it's a cut above the rest.  The forums, and support also. 

[Russ Johnson]

First, let me ditto roryobryan's kudos: you guys really are doing a terrific job.  If you weren't, we wouldn't be giving you such a hard time.  :)

 

That having been said, maybe I can help out by proposing a method.

 

Since AD already includes the ability to expand a stroke, that analysis software already will have been written, if AD simply automatically expanded each stroke into RAM and discarded the old RAM expansion any time the geometry of a polygon changes.  Running the relevant code after scaling or other operations that already account for or have nothing to do with the do-or-don't-scale-stroke-with-shape setting, the notion of deeper analysis ought to be moot.

 

As for layer effects — which nobody yet has mentioned yet, but I can just hear the hecklers already — they come with their own mathematical (pardon the pun) problems and simply could be ignored entirely … along with inside strokes, for obvious reasons.

 

I know adding a feature like this really isn't something to do in just a few minutes, but it seems to me that the hard part will be debugging, and making sure the in-RAM copies don't get saved to disk or spat out a printer as spurious geometry.

 

Anyway, that's just my 2¢.

 

—Russ