4. Artboards should be independent

Artboards should be independent


  • Currently artboards share everything, which is confusing.

    • layers are shared, they should be unique per-artboard
    • coordinate 0,0 is on the first artboard, it should be per-artboard
    • etc
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  • administrators

    Yes, artboards are just guides for printing and export on a single canvas.
    This is by design, and I would not change this approach.

    This is similar to what AI does, but it is the opposite of AD.

    Some advantages of this approach:

    • you can place objects or groups that span artboards.
    • you can arrange artboards to cut parts of a larger artwork for printing or export.

    Related to this:
    In VectorStyler a document contains multiple canvases. Each canvas is a separate space for drawing, and only one canvas is visible at a time. But multiple document views can be opened on the same document to show different canvases.
    Canvases are managed from the Canvas menu and the Canvas & Artboard panel.
    Canvases are organized in hierarchy into 3 categories.
    Each canvas can contain an arbitrary arrangement of artboards, that can also be freely rotated and overlapped.
    It is recommended that for regular artwork create new canvases under the Normal Canvas group.
    The Reference Canvas group is used for reusable assets, like symbols, styles, etc.
    The Master Canvas group contains canvases that can be used as templates for regular canvases (a.k.a master page).

    In a future version, there could be a document mode where content is owned by artboards, or artboards are top level layers (more like what AD does), but not in version 1.

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  • OK, I've never used Illustrator so I will have to get my head around this concept. This is new and scary for me.

    I come from Freehand/Xara/AD route.

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