Hope I’ve chosen the right place to post this. To all those who use a Mac; I recently bought an app called Affinity Designer, which is a vector drawing program, about $50 (I think) with no subscription. Some reviews touted it as being better than Illustrator…and if for nothing else, at least for the affordibility and not having a subscription fee. I have been spending a lot of time learning it and to me, it’s much more user friendly than Sketchup or Inkscape. It will export in SVG, PNG, and many of the other formats. If you’re interested, check it out in the app store…but make sure you don’t confuse it with Affinity Photo, which is another of their apps.
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just as a side note: If someone else is intressted, Affinity Designer is currently on sale (50% off).
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Thank you Xabess. As a fellow newbie i needed this.
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Thanks for the motivation.
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Thanks! Ive been thinking about finding a alternative to AI and Photoshop and this looks great! Got it!
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Yes, thank you. I missed it for that good price, but it’s still a very good deal. You’re in Switzerland, right?
Welcome to the forum!
My pleasure. Me too… I need all the help I can get! 
I spent a long time on it yesterday and came out at the end of the day feeling really great about the things I was finally able to learn on it. It really IS a beautiful app. I have never used a vector program at all, so it was a matter of learning any of them from the bottom up.
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thank you for welcomeing me 
and yes I’m in Switzerland 
I was just curious. We have family friends in Austria, in Bregenz and my father’s family came from Switzerland (long ago) from Wengen. What a gorgeous country.
Now everyone can have an Affinity, not just Mac OSX folk…
Spotted this article over on The Verge today. As of this post, Affinity Photo is now available as a free beta on Windows (Win7, 64-bit & beyond)
Signing up with an email brings you to a download page for Affinity Photo as well as a download link for their Affinity Designer beta! (apparently Designer Windows beta was released back in June)
Apologies if this has already been posted elsewhere
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Thanks for the heads up on Affinity/Windows. Signed up for the beta just now.
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For anyone sporting an iPad and has been on the fence, Serif is running a promo on Affinity Photo for iOS. $9.99 til Saturday, December 9, 2017.
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I have enjoyed having it on my iPad Pro, but it must be an iPad Pro.
I tried installing on a standard iPad (which it did do), but when opening it, the app tells you it only works on iPad Pros. 
I just wish they’d hurry up and get Affinity Designer running on iPad!
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I would be on that in a heartbeat.
The wait is over! Affinity Designer for iPad has landed. Early bird discount price in the App Store as of this post.
Only have had time to tinker with it a few minutes, but the way they implemented gesture controls are FIRST CLASS. Video tutorials have been posted and demonstrate tons of well thought-out features.
A complex illustration initially created on the OSX version imported flawlessly to the iPad Pro. Next step will be to test out an all-iPad workflow creating on Affinity Designer and passing it along to the Glowforge App – that is if you guys & gals don’t beat me to it.
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@CarterTG, have you got settings for the Affinity to SVG export that reliably preserve scale? I’ve got mine set to export at 96 DPI but have had a few sizing glitches that make me wonder if there’s more to it than that…or maybe Affinity did it right but my mouse slipped and I resized in the GFUI without realizing it… sigh
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The easiest thing is just to make your document size exactly 20”x12”. That should always work, as it’s special-cased by the Glowforge software.
Or try using PDF, as that always preserves real units. (Note that a few things don’t work reliably in PDF. As of the last time I checked—a few months ago, I think—the Glowforge software still had some problems with transparent images embedded in PDFs.)
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