A built-in add-on under Object › Plug-ins › Smart Pen:
- The Smart Pen Tool draws and edits Bézier paths without switching
tools: a click adds the next segment straight or curved (a panel
toggle; Tab flips the segment being placed or the last one), a drag
makes a smooth point (Alt breaks the handle, Shift snaps to 45°, Space
moves the point), a curve after a straight segment joins it tangent.
- On existing paths it selects and moves points, removes a point keeping
the shape (Alt-click), toggles smooth/corner (double-click), drags
handles, reshapes a segment by dragging it and inserts a point on it
(Alt-click); it closes, continues and joins open paths.
- The Smart Pen panel: next segment straight or curved, remove points
keeping shape, make smooth, make corner, retract handles, close or
join.
The tool stays out of both toolbars as shipped; the All Tools drawer
lists it under the add-on's heading. Commands are addon.pen.*; the
existing Pen tool, commands and menus are unchanged.
A built-in add-on under Object › Plug-ins › Path Precision Tools:
- Anchor Eraser Brush: painting over selected paths removes the anchors
under the brush that the outline can do without within a tolerance,
refitting the handles beside them (Alt ignores the tolerance, Cmd/Ctrl
deletes without refitting, pen pressure can scale the brush); one undo
step per stroke.
- Extend Path tool: dragging an end of an open path carries it on
straight, by stretching its last curve or along the circle it curves
on, or shortens it back along itself.
- Measure & Inspect tool: drag to measure distance and angle; hover a
path to read segment and path length, area, curvature, tangent and
anchor angles and handles, in the document's units.
- Anchor Inspector panel: the selected anchor's position and handles as
numbers, with Make Smooth (auto-smooth rule), Make Corner, Equalize
Handles, Remove Points Keep Shape, Add Points and three ways to close.
- Add Points at Crossings and Split at Crossings.
The tools stay out of both toolbars as shipped; the All Tools drawer
lists them under the add-on's heading. Commands are addon.pathtools.*;
the existing commands, tools and menus are unchanged.
A built-in add-on in Effect › Color Effects and Object › Plug-ins › Color Effects:
- Exposure (stops of linear light, offset and gamma), Desaturate and
Invert Colors as live colour adjustments, evaluated in stack order with
those of Effect › Color Adjustments.
- addon.color.filter applies any colour adjustment to the colours
themselves, through the Edit Colors pass, as one undo step.
- A panel picks an adjustment and its values, then adds it as a live
effect or applies it as a filter.
The add-on lives in its own modules (effects, engine and ui-egui addons
folders) and leaves the existing effects, commands and menus as they
were.
A built-in add-on under Object › Plug-ins › Artwork Cleanup:
- Simplify Anchors (Keep Shape) removes anchors while the outline stays
within a tolerance, optionally keeping sharp corners.
- Document Health Check finds and fixes 16 kinds of problems in the
selection or the document (stray points, duplicate and collinear
anchors, tiny handles, nearly closed paths, needless groups, compound
paths and clipping groups, unpainted and invisible objects, duplicate
objects, art off every artboard, empty artboards…), with Show, Fix
Selected and Fix All, each fix one undo step.
- Deep Ungroup and Rejoin Path Pieces.
The add-on lives in its own modules (pathops, engine and ui-egui
addons folders) and leaves the existing commands, tools and menus as
they were.
PDF export (and the PDF-compatible .ai it writes) cut each gradient mesh
patch into 8 x 8 flat-coloured quads. Viewers showed colour bands and
hairline seams between them, and files with many meshes became very
large and slow to write.
An opaque mesh is now written as one Type 6 (Coons patch) shading
(ISO 32000-1, 8.7.4.5.7) filling its outline, through the PDF writer's
MeshGradient: each patch blends its corner colours bilinearly, as the
canvas draws it. Colours go through page_color as other fills do, and a
mesh mixing RGB with other models goes through RGB. A mesh with
see-through points, an invalid one, or one past the coordinate range
keeps the quads.
A PDF-compatible .ai whose PDF part's pages are cropped to its art (each
page the box of all the art, the editing data's bounding box) rather
than to its artboards came in as that PDF part: the editing data's
artboard wasn't the page's size, so its layers were refused. With
several artboards every page held all the art, so the document had a
copy of everything per page.
When the artboard isn't the page's size but the editing data's bounding
box is, the layers are compared with the page on that box and keep
their artboards. The comparison of their art with the page still
decides whether they are used.
With Preferences > Performance > Real-time Drawing and Editing off, tool
previews are deferred to the release, so a guide dragged out of a ruler
(guide.add) or moved with a selection tool (guide.move) showed only its
position label until the button was released. Guide previews now always
apply as the guide is dragged: the guide is all such a drag shows.
#4646's units and guides lost on reopen don't reproduce for a native
file: a new millimetre document's ruler guides and units survive Save,
Close and Open in .vectorcraft, PDF, .ai and EPS (new regression test,
and live in the app with Background Save). An SVG saved without Preserve
Editing reopens in pixels with no guides, as the reporter saw.
Eraser Tool Options' Size takes Fixed or Pressure and a Variation as the
Blob Brush's does: the tool records the pen, and path.eraseRegion outlines
the squashed drag at the pen's widths, stretched back to the tip's angle
and roundness. The pressure parsing and outline move to draw2's common
helpers, shared by both commands.
Blob Brush Tool Options' Size takes Fixed or Pressure and a Variation, as
the brush options' Size does: with Pressure the brush is Size − Variation
wide where the pen presses lightest and Size + Variation where it presses
hardest. The tool records the pen pressure of each point and shows each
step of the drag as wide as the pen pressed there; path.blob takes
[x, y, pressure] points with sizeMode and sizeVariation and outlines the
stroke with that width profile. A stroke without pressure keeps the Size,
and Fixed with no variation stays the default.
https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/desktop/paint-and-fill/learn-painting-basics/blob-brush-options-and-best-practices.html
From the review of #4605. TraceParams::swatches isn't in the settings' JSON (serde skip), so a Document Library trace whose swatches were edited while it ran still applied, with the old colours; the trace's inputs now hold them. The 100 ms repaint that keeps background work moving left traces out, so without input a finished trace could wait for the next event.
In Affinity Designer, Recolor Adjustment layers (RcRA) can be attached to
vector groups/shapes via AdCh. Lightness 1.0 recolors target elements to
white. Import visible RcRA layers as ColorOverlay effects and apply them
during node appearance evaluation.
Create Gradient Mesh's To Center / To Edge highlight lightened every point
towards RGB white, so a CMYK (or grey) point became display RGB. A patch with
any non-CMYK corner then mixes in RGB, and the PDF writer separated those
colours back to CMYK with K = 0, moving ink off the K plate. Points now
lighten towards white in their own colour model (no ink for CMYK), so the
mesh stays CMYK and K shrinks with the other inks. Flat meshes (highlight 0)
already kept their inks.
An 8-bit PCX file whose image data is followed by the palette marker
(0x0C) and fewer than 768 color bytes was read as gray levels. The reader
now notes where the run-length encoded image data ends, and when the
palette marker follows it without all 768 colors, refuses the file as cut
short. An 8-bit file with nothing after its image data still reads as
gray levels, and a gray level of 12 that falls 769 bytes before the end of
such a file is read as a pixel instead of as the palette marker.
A new reader, written from the ZSoft PCX Technical Reference Manual, decodes
the run-length encoded scan lines of 1-bit images in the header palette's
first two colors (black and white when the version has no palette or the two
colors are the same), 1-bit images in two to four planes and 4-bit images
with the header's palette (the EGA colors for versions 0 and 3), 2-bit CGA
images in the colors that the header's CGA background and palette settings
pick, 8-bit images with the 256-color palette after the image data (gray
levels without one) and 24-bit images in three planes. The image is stored as PNG at the resolution of the header's HDpi and
VDpi fields.
Open and Place list PCX, and pasting a copied .pcx file and Glass's Load
Texture… read it by its header. A file of another depth or plane count, one
cut short and one whose pixels as RGBA pass the pixel allowance are refused
with a message before its pixels are decoded. The desktop packaging does not
associate .pcx files, and no export writes them.
Docs: docs/file-format-parity.md, docs/target-app-parity.md, docs/mcp.md,
docs/releasing.md.
Pages that share one Contents array made the name of a refused stream read that array once per page, quadratic in a crafted file. Each object is now read once, and a page's own array as before. From the review of #4612.
A page's Contents can be an array written as an object of its own (/Contents 6 0 R). Its streams were named "a stream in it": the reference was compared with the stream, not the array's items. From the review of #4603.
Tracing a photo or a large image ran inside imageTrace.make on the UI
thread, so the window froze for as long as the trace took, with nothing
to say it was working.
A trace the user asks for (Object > Image Trace > Make and Make and
Expand, the task bar's Image Trace, the Image Trace panel's Trace and
presets) now runs on a thread of its own, as heavy plug-in filters do.
The status bar says so, and after 0.4 s a progress window shows how
many of the image's colors are traced, with Cancel and Continue in
Background (imageTrace.cancelRuns, imageTrace.hideRuns).
The result goes back to the command it was prepared for
(cmd::TraceRun, Traced::hand_in), which takes it only for the same
object, image and settings, so the edit is one undo step as before. A
newer trace of the same object replaces one still running, and a trace
whose image or settings changed meanwhile changes nothing. The control
channel, MCP, scripts and the web trace at once, as before.
The tracer reports its stages and color layers to a callback and stops
when it says so (trace_watched).
A page drawing one form over and over made its art again for every drawing
with no limit (a 1 KB file took 877 MB), and a form decoding to 64 MiB drawn
a thousand times hung. The import now makes at most half the objects a saved
document may hold (2M, 256K on the web), leaving the rest out with a warning,
and the scan reads at most 2 GiB of form content per page before refusing it
as past the reader's limits.
The reference app's Flare tool rotates the rays as the center is dragged
out, Shift constrains them to their original orientation, and Space
held moves the shape being drawn. VectorCraft's Flare tool drew the
rays in one fixed orientation and ignored Shift and Space.
shape.flare takes rotation (degrees, clockwise), which turns the rays
about the center and leaves the halo, the center and the rings as they
are. While the center is dragged out, the rays turn with the pointer,
as a polygon's first corner does, and a drag straight up leaves them
unturned. Shift keeps them unturned, or turned by General › Constrain
Angle as a polygon drawn with Shift is. Space held during the center
drag or the drag that places the rings' end point moves the flare at
its current size, and the drag goes on from there when Space is let
go, as with the shape tools.
Docs: docs/mcp.md, docs/target-app-parity.md.
In typography and Illustrator, Shift+Enter inserts a soft return (forced
line break) rather than ending the paragraph. Text wraps to the next line
without applying paragraph-level spacing (space before/after, first-line
indents), list continuation lines keep their parent item without repeating
markers, and justified text does not stretch lines ending with a soft return.
- Forward active modifier keys for Enter in ui-egui shortcuts so the tool
detects Shift+Enter.
- Type tool inserts U+2028 (LINE SEPARATOR) on Shift+Enter.
- Text shaping and layout treat U+2028 as an invisible zero-advance control
character, breaking the line in point and area type.
- Paragraph spacing and list markers apply once per paragraph as intended.
With nothing selected, a click with the Eyedropper picks up an object's attributes and an Alt/Option-click on another object applies them, as the reference app's Eyedropper does. Alt-click only copied from a selected object, and with nothing selected it failed. The session now keeps a copy of what appearance.copyFrom picked up last, and a reversed copy with nothing selected applies it.
Preview, Embed ICC Profiles, Create PDF-Compatible File and the other VectorCraft Options went back to their defaults for every document not saved yet. A native Save or Save As now records the options it used in the preferences (not the artboards it picked, nor Use Compression, which its preference decides), and file.formatOptions offers them for a document not yet saved as a native file. A document saved before keeps its own.
While an opacity mask is edited the Layers panel lists only the mask, so a new layer was added where no row showed it, and only the panel's layer count went up. Both commands are now disabled then, as isolation commands already are (outside_mask_editing).
bflatastic