setmajer

@R C-R Will do. Have an interview to prep for, so it may be a day or two, but will try & report back.

@firstdefence Yes, they display fine in other apps. The culprit seems to have been using ‘Metal’ instead of ‘Software’ in Preferences → Performance in Designer.

@R C-R Ah, there’s the misunderstanding: I wasn’t trying to export. It was what I was seeing on-screen that was the problem. Sorry for the confusion!

@R C-R Thanks — I’ll download your file & try. That said, I think the problem was I had ‘Metal’ selected in Preferences → Performance → Display. After switching to software, the rendering is comparable to Sketch, Acorn, OmniGraffle, Pixelmator, etc. A little bit different, but certainly no worse and in some cases a small but significant bit better. I really appreciate the help. Both Designer & Photo are pretty full-on apps. Almost Gimp-esque in the number and technical nature of the options. It’s going to be a little while before I really get to grips with them, but I’m having fun learning.

This thread was somewhat useful: I’m used to Sketch, Invision Studio, OmniGraffle, etc. where I work in pixels at 1:1 then export at several sizes (1x, 2x, 3x, etc.) for different devices. Designer apparently works differently. Setting it to Retina (2x = 144 ppi) helps some. Now, 16pt text (Gill Sans Light) looks like this: Still blocky, but not quite as bad. Changing the ‘Display’ preference from ‘Metal’ to ‘Software’ also seems to help: Much improved. For comparison, 16pt text @ 100% in sketch, same font (Gill Sans Light) looks like this: Smoother, maybe, but also a bit fuzzy. Bit like the difference between font rendering in macOS (non-retina) and Windows. So I think that’s that. Thanks for the help!

@R C-R I got it from Google Fonts. Other fonts show the same problem, so it’s not the font: Kairos Helvetica Neue Gill Sans: One clue, maybe: all the above are at 64pt. When I set it at 16pt, it looks like this: I’ve checked and re-checked and the zoom is set to 100%. So something is screwy with the way my artboard or document are set up, I think.

Thanks for the replies — much appreciated. Will have to keep investigating. FWIW, my setup: Affinity Designer 1.6.5, 20” 1920 x 1200 Eizo FlexScan, macOS Mojave version 10.14.3, Mid-2014 13-inch MacBook Pro, 3 GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, Intel Iris 1536 MB, 1 TB SSD

@carl123 Thanks for the tip, but turns out I already am in the Vector view mode. BTW, I just spat wine on my keyboard when I read your sig.

@Fixx You’re right, those do look fine. Not what I’m seeing. Seems the font is a red herring. Source Serif Pro Light shows the issue more clearly:

I do apologise as this is probably something stupid I’m doing, but when I add text to an Affinity Designer document in 24 pt Source Sans Pro it looks like this: Which is what I‘d have expected in 1996, but it’s a bit shabby for 2018. Here are my performance prefs: Here is my document setup: What am I missing? Something obvious, I expect…