How to - split Ellipse

[Dr. Dave]

See my screen cap - in Illustrator I would select both elements, click on the Intersect function, resulting in two editable shapes. In Affinity Design tho, I get an empty canvas and layer "(Curve)."

I just want to divide the ellipse shape into two editable elements.

What am I doing wrong?

[Old Bruce]

Some sort of bug with the line not being real enough to cut the oval (or any other shape), workaround is make two ovals and two rectangles and separate one and then the other oval using one rectangle for each.

[firstdefence]

A slightly less involved way is just make a rectangle as the cutter and select Divide. This produces two sections of the ellipse, an arc and the rectangle see image below. 

Parts moved to show what you end up with. 

[walt.farrell]

51 minutes ago, Dr. Dave said:

click on the Intersect function,

In Affinity, "Intersect" is defined as (from the Designer Help, with my emphasis),

Quote

Intersect—creates a new object from the overlapping areas of selected objects.

When you have a line and a shape, the overlapping area would be the thickness of the line, so I think it's doing exactly what I would have expected an Intersect to do.

[PixelPest]

When it´s just a straight cut you can use your line as a blueprint and establish 2 new node at the rim of the circular shape - select the 2 new points and go: Break Curve from the Action tab:

Cheers

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, PixelPest said:

When it´s just a straight cut you can use your line as a blueprint and establish 2 new node at the rim of the circular shape - select the 2 new points and go: Break Curve from the Action tab...

I think this is probably the best workaround for now, but we really need a proper knife tool to avoid all the extra steps it involves. At least a knife tool is still on the Designer Roadmap, so eventually we will get one.

[PixelPest]

If you don´t mind the gap you can take a tiny width for a path - expand stroke - select both and Boolean subtract - then split. You won´t notice when you add strokes to the shapes:

[R C-R]

1 minute ago, PixelPest said:

If you don´t mind the gap you can take a tiny width for a path - expand stroke - select both and Boolean subtract - then split.

The gap would not usually bother me ... but the tendency for 'expand stroke' to add a zillion extra nodes definitely would. 

[Dr. Dave]

@PixelPest More steps than I was expecting, but I also have to be mindful this is v1.7.

Thx for the contribution tho.

[PixelPest]

Seems we need an explicit "Boolean Division" option as AI or Inkscape has: