Issue with working on "Tiled Artboards"

[SpongeBob]

Hi folks,

I'm using Affinity Designer to draft sewing patterns as well. I used to draft these on Illustrator, now on AD I'm exploring the basic tools and functions that are necessary to start a draft and then finally print them in A4 pdf patterns. So this post is particularly for the Printing/Artboard layout side of it.

So far, I have drafted some simple shapes and and I'm looking to make this into a pdf doc so I can print it on my A4 printer.

For this to work, (as I did on Illustrator), I need tiled artboards lined up, side to side(Both horzontally and vertically) and I will then place my pattern shapes on these A4 sized artboards and make my continuity marks and page numbers so I can line it up correctly after they are printed.

The issue is this: I line up the artboards as I want but then when I paste the shape on the artboards, it is pasted on only the "active" A4 artboard and not pasted or overflowing to the other A4 boards.I tried several things. For example, I selected all the tiled artboards and drew shapes cutting across artboards, which worked fine. But even when all artboards are selected, and then I paste my vector shapes, it only gets pasted on to the 'one active artboard and the 'overflowing parts' are not seen. Also, selecting all artboards is not a good viable option because I will have 50-100 boards based on the pattern and I can't select all of them all the time to draw on these artboards.

Could anyone please let me know how to go about this? Please see attached image for what I'm trying to achieve.

PS: I have several issues with Artboards, I'll write them in another post..

Regards,

Pree

[firstdefence]

It might be an option to create one large artboard to encompass the garment pattern and then slice the document up on export. You can use guides to create a grid based on A4 dimensions and also to enable snapping in export persona so you get A4 slices.

just a quick example using A2, you can obviously export to pdf not png but I just wanted to show the slicing option, the export format I'm sure you can work out 

[SpongeBob]

Hi, Thank you!

I couldn't directly layout and print off on A4 sheets without margins(I have a basic printer with limited options)..So I had to create rectangle boxes and use these along with guide marks to match them up after printing them out. Each slice should be of the dimension rectangle. While I was able to get more or less close to it; there was some difficulty in getting the lines of the rectangle not being missed out in the slices. So did a bunch of pixel calculations and used the Transform window to adjust the values; now it seems to be fine!

While this needs more effort and calcualtions than just creating artboards for the required size and its ease of use, until they give me the ability to do this, the slicing method should be fine;

Thank you so much!

Also, the snapping on the slicing action doesn't seem to be working on the leftmost columns for me; do you experience that as well? Sometimes, snapping with a vertical guide doesn't work and in some cases with the horizontal guide..