Affinity designer for ipad

Affinity designer for iPad just came out. Seems like it’s a very good program so far. Sale priced.

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I use their Mac app. Find it rather useful. Has a little learning curve, but I’m learning!

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I’ve been waiting for it for iPad and finally it came out. I bought it but have not yet used it. But, I will.

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I used it for a quick drawing to engrave names onto a set of pencils (cutout in cardboard then engraving set of 40 pencils). Looks as powerful as the desktop version. This is awesome!
They have a pretty complete looking tutorial library that’s linked from the app back to their website (https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/tutorials/designer/ipad/#/). Going to start looking at that tonight. I have moved nearly my entire workflow to the iPad. This program will help put the nail in the coffin.

I like the combination of Affinity Designer on Mac and iPad. The two issues I run into are uploading designs to the glowforge from the iPad (not sure how to get that going), and for some reason I have a scaling problem with the SVGs that I generate from Affinity. I have to save them at 133% in order for sizing to work out.

I really like working on the iPad especially with the pencil. You might also want to check out Graphic. It is another great program that works well on both Mac and iPad.

Good luck!

AD doesn’t export SVGs with real units. (It always uses pixel dimension instead for SVG exports.)

Three workarounds:

  • Export to PDF instead. That gives real units. (Note that Glowforge supports slightly different features in PDF than in SVG but both have been improving.)
  • Make your document exactly 20”x12”. Glowforge special cases any file with 5x3 aspect ratio to import it as 20”x12”
  • Set your DPI settings in AD to match what Glowforge uses by default. (I think it’s 96dpi but I don’t remember for sure.)
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Thanks! I think getting the right DPI is probably the trick - which is mind boggling for something called scalable vector graphics, but fine. I accept that the world Iive in is less than perfect.
I will experiment with this.
Thank you

The problem is that SVG was designed for the web, so it defaults to pixel units. The format supports using real units (inches, mm, etc) but Affinity Designer doesn’t yet have an option to use them when exporting SVG. (I have no idea why they haven’t added this yet. It would be trivial to implement and it’s been requested a number of times over on Serif’s forum.)

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Thanks @markwkruse, I went ahead and bought it since it’s so reasonable.

I found the best way to upload designs from the iPad to Glowforge using the Glowforge app is to save the SVG to Dropbox. Then in Dropbox there is an export option (it’s under the “…”), just choose that then choose the “Open in…” option and scroll the choices on the top line and the Glowforge app should be one of the options. Note that this works for SVGs but not for PDFs (at least, I couldn’t get it to work).

With Vectornator and other iPad apps that generate SVGs I found that the design opens fine in the Glowforge app. With Affinity Designer, the design loads but never renders. You can, however, login to your Glowforge via the web app on a browser (I use Chrome on iPad) and the design will be there and it will properly render at that point.