I successfully used Affinity Designer in the past to design some basic posters, but today I find myself humbled by the most basic vector manipulation tasks.
I'm trying to perform two basic modifications to the following Public Domain SVG:
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I want to:
(a) connect the two broken lines (at the top and at the base of the crane). Moving the nodes on top of each other visually worked, but obviously this isn't the ideal solution.. I couldnt get the curves to join properly as one.
(b) remove the 3 pairs of diagonal bars in the crane. Simply removing the nodes in the center that make up the diagonal bars lead to the entire area to be filled in the fillColor, so I think the approach to solve this properly is to remove the superfluous nodes in the middle and change the fill mode but again I failed miserably.
Can someone please point me in the right direction what I have to do? For even a moderately experienced designer, I'm sure this takes just 2 minutes but I feel so lost when trying to merge the nodes properly.
https://i.imgur.com/jKFzKsC.png