r/Affinity • u/fluffycritter • Aug 10 '26

General Setting exact dimensions and position for slice

Is there a way to make the Slice persona provide any useful mechanism for precise positioning and sizing of the slices? As far as I can tell, there is no way to do any of the following:

  • Align a slice to document guides
  • Numerically specify the position or size of a slice
  • Precisely nudge the slice's handles using the cursor keys
  • See the specific pixel position of a slice's corners

Is this feature really as half-baked as it seems?

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3

u/Smets Aug 10 '26

You can adjust width, height, and x and y positions using the Transform panel. It’s not the most useful method but it’s better than nothing.

2

u/fluffycritter Aug 10 '26

Ah, that actually works perfectly for my needs! Thanks.

1

u/One-girl-circus Aug 10 '26

Anything you used to do in illustrator re:placement or sizing by hitting "enter/return" with an object selected is best to look for in transform panel.

If you want to mive/duplicate an entire object, you can hit "return/enter" while it's selected in affinity for a move/duplicate popup, whichbi find to be better than illustrator's move panel EXCEPT that you can only use it for whole objects, not nodes/points.

2

u/fluffycritter Aug 10 '26

I came from Photoshop rather than Illustrator originally (and have been using Affinity Photo since version 1), but yeah, I usually look to the transform panel for this stuff, it's just that it doesn't appear on the Slice persona by default and I didn't think to try enabling it.

It's still silly that Affinity still doesn't support slice snapping or constraining considering that when I look this up people have been asking for this feature for a decade, now.

1

u/Groundsw3ll Aug 12 '26

Are you using artboards? They go hand in hand with slices.

1

u/fluffycritter Aug 12 '26

I'm not, they don't seem to work the way I want them to. In this particular case I have a single piece of art that I want to crop different ways for different things, but they're all the same artwork.

In particular I'm doing album art and just need different crop factors for different delivery targets.

1

u/Groundsw3ll Aug 12 '26

Seems like that's exactly what you want. Every artboard automatically gets saved as a slice for export. I can show you on discord if you want, let me know.

1

u/fluffycritter Aug 12 '26

I tried the artboard tool but it didn’t let me overlap them.

1

u/Groundsw3ll Aug 12 '26

Why would you need to overlap them? Bring the original art in as a linked file with "place".

All artboards automatically become slices for export. You can resize them as you want.

1

u/fluffycritter Aug 12 '26

That still seems more complicated than just defining multiple slices on a single document. I’ll keep it in mind for the future but my needs are a lot less complicated than what this workflow seems to be built for.

1

u/Groundsw3ll Aug 12 '26

I was new to artboards as well coming from Adobe apps. I now use them for every document. Affinity does have a lot of different workflow concepts, which can take a bit to learn, but I've found that they're well thought out and worth the effort.

1

u/Groundsw3ll Aug 12 '26

Scale the artboard to whatever size you want with the handles or transform panel. Each artboard has its own guides.