To quickly select all your outlines, or background element in 1 color.
I include a screen capture of all the options available in the Find & Replace and Select dialog from FreeHand.
rui_mac that's an insane amount of find and replace features in freehand. Crickey!
Can be a great timesaver when you open documents from someone else or from CAD applications. Change any attribute a thousand times at once with only a few clicks.
So, if it found any line width between 1pt and 5pt, it would change the width to the triple of the width it had.
The Find/Replace was one of Freehands hidden gems - great for handling colours.
Speaking of which the 'remove unused colours' was another life saver.
Helped clean up the palette and identify colours that somehow slipped through the net.
Almost made a new topic for this one.
Thought of this again because the export to eps wasn't working and I thought it was the stroke width variations, so I was going to convert them all to shapes / expand.
Found out that I had to click them all, one by one, was looking for a major time saver like: Select all: Stroke / color / etc.
I'm making a design with confetti and need to be able to select and change a lot of colors at once, but can't.
No news. I wouldn't expect it for several months. We have so much other stuff to do.
Well, this is sort of important feature. Would be nice to see it implemented soon.
Just to get it right: there is no way right now to select fills and contour lines by color or stroke?? Either with search like in Freehand or by select as? It's a must have feature wich I really depend on! And I guess there is a reason why most apps have something like that..
No, it's not possible yet. This is planned but there's already many features in development, it may still take a while.
Bear with us while we get there.
Any News on that feature request?
No, not yet. The latest Beta introduced several new features that were already planned too (some still being worked/developed for the next Beta) and there wasn't yet time to start working on this one. The development team is relatively small so those things take time, but we will get there.
It’s just a bit silly not having at least some advanced selection options.
This is one critical feature from Illustrator that I use all of the time. Most of my usage is polishing PDF graphs made in Matlab or such for publication. It's sometimes hard to select the entirety of lines without this feature. Hopefully it will come soon. Until then, I still need Illustrator.
I really hope that this gets implemented soon!
The smart selection options in Illustrator are easily the biggest time saving features that I depend on in my regular architecture workflow. Not even just time saving, but totally enabling. Without better selection tools, many of my documents will have to be handled by Illustrator because it is effectively impossible to handle dense and varied vector information efficiently in Designer.
I want to love Affinity Designer, but simply can't until the selection options are far more robust. Once this happens, I will covert all my designer friends.
Imagine, instead of just selecting the same fill or stroke, you had a slider where you could "fuzzy select" similar objects. So you move the slider up a bit, and now you get those other objects where you used a slightly different shade of blue, or the ones that have a 1.85 point stroke instead of just the 1.5 point stroke on your selected object.
Ah, that Freehand example at the beginning of this thread! It reminds me of how much I lost when Adobe killed FreeHand.
Affinity has done a marvelous job at creating their apps from scratch, not as a mere clone of Adobe's offerings. The new workflow paradigms are one of the best features of Designer and Photo. But as is apparent in this thread, there are certain functions that need to be brought in to the programs in order to be fully competitive.
I came to Affinity (and am loving it) after abandoning Adobe over the whole "rental" model. But my favorite illustration program was always Freehand, not Illustrator. All these years after acquiring and killing Freehand, Adobe still has not added many of the features to Illustrator that Freehand had. There are still things that are impossible, or at least incredibly difficult to do in Illustrator that were a cinch in Freehand.
Please, development team, do not merely look to Illustrator for inspiration; take a good look at Freehand. You will discover many tools and techniques that, if brought in and given your unique polish, would give Designer a clear advantage over Illustrator.