moi.cool

To address some of what is being said on this thread...
Firstly to be clear I'm not a founder, but have been with the company for 25 years. I'm officially appointed as Managing Director of the company, but also use CEO as my title as that is my role in terms of how other countries would view it.
Both Canva and us have made 100% clear we are committing to perpetual licences always being available. That will include V3 or any other future major upgrade of our apps which are released. What's more I will say with Canva's backing we are not under the same financial pressure we would have been to release a V3 anytime soon, meaning those of you using V2 will actually benefit from more features as free updates which may previously have been held back for a V3 if that makes sense. This is of great benefit from an engineering standpoint too as we are far better testing and releasing features in smaller chunks than saving them up to package up as a sellable upgrade. 
https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity-canva-pledge/
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/27/24113423/affinity-canva-acquisition-pledge-license-price-subscription
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/press/newsroom/affinity-and-canva-pledge/
As we have made clear there will at some point be a subscription option also which people can take if they choose to. I'm sure there will be additional benefits to that subscription in the future such as asset and document sync, sharing and collaboration and other things which naturally require a subscription as they are features which incur ongoing cost. It may also include other things which can be leveraged with a Canva subscription such as greater stock libraries of images, graphics and fonts. Hopefully that would just be considered reasonable and understandable. There will certainly not be any cynical cutting down of features or limitation of ongoing support in our existing apps just to force a subscription play.
I understand examples of previous acquisitions can make some of you fearful, but they are just historic examples - it has no bearing on what will happen in this case and we are genuinely doing something here which is very different and special. Everything I said on Tuesday, and what both Canva and us pledged yesterday, is 100% true and we are going to stand by it. That includes keeping our entire team here with no layoffs, and continuing to be based in Nottingham. 
If you want to believe this or not is up to you, I'm not sure what more we can say at this point to convince those who doubt it. We'll deliver on this over the coming months and years so whatever is being said right now I know it's going to be all good and assuming you are still using Affinity apps you will be happy with how they have developed and that we have continued to be fair and inclusive with our pricing.
Also to follow on from Patricks point - I can take some of the personal attacks on me, but I have to say some of the conduct on this thread with some of you being very quick to attack other community members just because they hold different opinions is really disheartening to see. You can absolutely give your opinion on this deal for sure, and we are happy to leave this as an open forum within reason, but that does mean being courteous to other forum members and not just repeating the same points over and over.
Thanks,
Ash
 

The only reason that I use Affinity is the lack of a subscription model.
If (probably v3) there wil be a subscription model I will drop it like a brick.

Petition
I found a petition to make Affinity Animator a thing! If you sign it and maybe we can move mountains.

Hi All,
I’m pleased to say that we have just be pushed 2.3.1 (2212) to beta and plan a full 2.3.1 release next week (if nothing new & significant is found). There are only a limited number of fixes as detailed in my post here. 
We think it's important to address a few high customer impact bugs quickly in a 2.3.1 release, in a fast/stable manner.
The release of 2.4.0 with improvements and features and many other fixes will likely take a while to be "release ready" (need a longer beta testing cycle due to having more significant code changes). We have been internally testing 2.4.0 and so @Serif Info Bot has been posting about fixes found in 2.4.0.xxxx, and those fixes will be appearing in the next release cycle, not 2.3.1
With that in mind we will be starting 2.4.0 beta very shortly (hopefully in just a couple of weeks). Looking forward to seeing you all on here for that!
Thanks again,
Patrick Connor

Thank you Tim for your analysis. I would love to be able to keep all the 2D drawing licenses and modify the files to match Designer. However, the problem is with the .DWGs I get from architects, surveyors or exhibition venues. If I have to rework the .DWG in Autocad, I might as well stick with Autocad. I think that's a shame because Designer is very intuitive and powerful. I don't have this problem importing certain fairly simple files. Ideally, I'd like to be able to clean things up directly in Designer.
Thank you very much for your invaluable help and I'm going to continue thinking about a 2D drawing solution with Designer.

Some companies do that if they consider "dot" versioning being decimal or something.
It definitely doesn't look like Serif would be one of them.
That pretty much sums up my Designer feature wishlist as well.  

serif is trying really hard to disappoint their users @Ash

since several years now people from all branches are asking kindly to implement the blend tool to affinity
functions that were working perfectly for years had to be reinvented after the relaunch last year and some of them took several month to be bugfree again and make the applications usable again
as the announcement to the beta 2.3 still does not contain this function just let it be clear:
if you don’t plan to implement the very needed function of a blendtool you are invited to say so and people can move on and more importantly away from serif 

no problem!

regards

@Pšenda you may not be aware that you can criticize and point out obvious faults in affinity's methods and choices and still love and appreciate their software. The two are not mutually exclusive. 
Why yourself and others blindly defend affinity so vigorously and give them a free pass for everything is beyond me. 
I can't imagine what else affinity has been doing the last couple years if the only thing they release this summer is the iPad publisher app. What are the other teams doing? Affinity is going to need cashflow at some point and it would make logical business sense to use this release of publisher for iPad as the chance to move everything to 2.0
 

Some people can not see or do not want to accept that AI is the future.
@Johannes I really hope affinity will take advantage of the opportunity - better late than never. In my opinion, time is really running out.
I don't know how it will turn out for a software company of this type that won't rely on AI. If it persists, I think it will become a niche product without AI.
If there are no features coming in this regard in the next few months, I expect to leave Affinity Suite as it simply takes me more time to get something done.
I will get hate again for this view on AI here, but that's just my view.

I also support this request for proper Japanese/Chinese layouting:
Proper character spacing (essentially putting each character in a square) Vertical text Ruby/Furigana "Reversing" the page layout (i.e. starting from the right). I can imagine that this would require a major refactoring, but it would be at least nice to be able to start with some of the easier features. For example, Gimp and Inkscape can both use vertical text at least in smaller boxes, which would at least be fine for captions.

I have no knowledge of what's coming but I'm hoping that variables will be added at the same time as scripting. It's hard to write complex scripts without document variables for storing data in the file.

Hi,
I'm in the dark hour of having to plan the forthcoming work for my team. Some of us were confident to be able to switch from InDesign to Publisher during this year, but at the moment this looks unlikely.
While Serif doesn't reveal the future features, let's see if they can at least say what will not, for sure, be implemented from now on. At least, we will know if a fundamental feature will never be implemented, and think to possible solutions (or lack of them).
This must be clear: we expect that Publisher will also include things that InDesign has stopped developing, after switching to subscription. But, at the moment, feature parity is an absolute priority.
What we need to replace InDesign is the following.
- Export to IDML, and continued support for IDML import. This is needed both (a) to maintain compatibility with the team members wanting to remain with the Adobe suite, and (b) to interface with translation support software. Members in the CJK and Middle East countries can't, at the moment, even think of switching to Publisher. This might look a niche problem to most users, but it is a major one for some. While the Affinity Suite is labeled as a "design" suite, the sad reality is that from the time Publisher was released it also had to deal with text…
- Export to DOCX. This is needed for reusing the text content for advertising, videos, and even translators preferring to work in Word or LibreOffice. And it is the needed link for ePub and HTML, being the accepted file format for programs that can help generating these outputs. For example: we heard that Publisher will export in fixed ePub sometimes, but we need reflowable. And there are already tools that can help us with it.
- Long tables, extending over multiple pages. We have tables extending over many pages. There are no viable workarounds that I can think of, apart for – using InDesign…
- Object Styles. We have to adapt our visual styles to the different products and output targets. One of the most common situations is the difference between printed materials (with fewer visual effects, less dark areas) and onscreen ones (richer in visual effects).
- Text Variables. These are really huge time savers sometimes. Text Variables make adapting a manual to a different product a matter of hours, instead of days.
- Conditional Text. This is another of the things making adapting a book to a different context something quick and error-free.
Are these features for sure excluded from development, in the next months or so, or even excluded forever?
Paolo
 

FEATURE REQUEST:
I use some applications that support the SVG file format and I open Affinity Designer from within those applications.  The problem that I am having is the Affinity Designer will not save the UPDATED as SVG unless I export it as SVG.  But if I export as SVG, I lose the connection from the other apps. 
Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer support the Enable "Save" over imported PSD files which keeps the connection with other apps if you are working with PSD file and the workflow is very good.
It would be very helpful to have the same feature with SVG file support, Enable "Save" over imported SVG files option in preferences, since I am using Affinity Designer right now as my exclusive Vector App.  This will improve my workflow and the workflow of users that us Affinity Designer and other apps together in this way.
Cheers!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++10086

To all our forum members,
Unfortunately we have become aware that personal data relating to users of these forums may have been accessed from outside the company following a cyber attack on 6 April 2023. It appears that an administrator’s account was compromised, allowing access to our forum members list.
What data was accessed?
The data which may have been accessed is what is on your public forum profile (e.g. username, post count, reputation, joining date, etc.), but additionally includes your Email Address and Last Used IP Address which would ordinarily be private. Thankfully we can be sure it would not have been possible to access your forum account password so that has definitely not been compromised in this breach.
What information is available on your public profile depends on what you have previously given. You can view your profile by logging in to your account and clicking on your avatar in the top right-hand side.
Please be reassured that any information accessed does not include any financial data, purchase history, physical addresses, phone numbers or anything else held within your main Affinity account / AffinityID. The forum is a standalone system which is completely separate from your Affinity account.
We cannot tell what proportion of our forum members’ email addresses were accessed so we are making all members aware as a precaution.
We have reported this incident to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) as well as taken immediate steps to make the forum system more secure to avoid this type of attack in future. 
What should you do?
We do not think you need to do anything, other than be mindful that this happened and to follow general advice around email and online account security.
One thing to be particularly diligent with is possible email “phishing” attempts. This will be when someone contacts you pretending to be us, requesting you change your password or give other account information to them. If you are concerned about any email being legitimate, don’t click any links in the email. If you wish to update any of your forum account details type forum.affinity.serif.com into your browser and log into your account from there to be sure.
Generally, if you do receive any suspicious email which you think could have originated via this breach (for example if an email you receive addresses you by your forum username) please let us know.
If you wish to make any such reports or have any further questions, then please contact us at dataprotection@serif.com. Full details of Serif’s Privacy Policy are available on our website https://affinity.serif.com/privacy/.
As well as this forum announcement we are notifying all forum members about this via email.
Customer data security is something we take extremely seriously and, while cyber attacks are an unfortunate reality of doing business today, we are incredibly sorry that your data may have been accessed in this way.
Sincerely,
Ashley Hewson (Managing Director) & Patrick Connor (Data Protection Officer)

I can confirm what Paolo has shown above, so there's no point on adding anything else to those issues. Hopefully this can be solved anytime soon 😊
- Enrique

I was ready to drop the money for Publisher 2 and ditch InDesign for good. But have not found any release notes regarding support for East-Asian language typographical layout support. There were many feedback posts in the now archived V1 forum. 
Come on, it's 2022, and and there are 1.5 billion CJK speakers in the world that Publisher cannot serve. 

Perhaps somebody should let Affinity know about the quality of programmers in both China and Japan being significantly above average. Except at Yamaha.
 

I am genuinely wondering why Affinity did not implement the vertical writing feature in this paid update.
If that were the case, both new and existing CJK users would have clapped their hands and purchased the universal license.
Well, if they were going to do such a nasty thing like implementing vertical writing immediately after the discount period, I would understand (in this case, I feel sorry for those who didn't buy it).

@rayRyo
 I doubt Serif would do such stupid thing. It is literally smashing their brand.

Vertical text is quite important. Pressing "Enter" after each character is quite frustrating.

The vertical text function is important, and I need it too

Let me add from the side.
In Japan, vertical writing is used not only in ancient texts, but also in novels, manga, and other familiar texts.
Therefore, software that does not have a vertical writing function is not the way to go.

Still haven't fixed this bug

Hello to all you guys and congratulations on the release of Affinity V2! Huge update and I waited for it.
Unfortunately, this problem is still the same. Can you tell us more about it @Gabe?
Is brush opacity on pen pressure intentionally left out?

This is a really important feature for painters. Thank you so much for looking into it.

This is how I would like it to look like(from another software, but was possible in Affinity Photo back in earlier versions):


And this is what I get in Affinity Photo v2: