Nazario

Semantics as I explained.

Apologies Thomaso. Bad choice of wording on my part. The file technically opened but was showing (at least i thought) no information, it was a completely blank page. Even MacOS quicklook, the PDF and the EPS the company provided all did the same thing so I was a little stumped. I've contacted the company and they said they will be changing the files that are available for download so thanks to you guys and my oversight this will be fixed for many people going forward. :)

DOH! Haha yes it was the layers unticked! My bad. Because the PDF and EPS they supplied also did the same thing I thought the original was corrupt. I guess the layers turned off are honoured in the PDF and EPS too upon export. I better tell them as its probably caught a few others out too as its a publicly available download. Thank guys.

Strange I've tried on two different macs and two different MAcOS versions. Nothing will open it but then I don't have the latest Adobe CS so I'm guess that is the problem. Really appreciate your help.

I hope this is ok by forum rules, if not my apologies. Im trying to open this AI file but CS6, Affinity Designer nor any online AI converters seem to work. I believe its been created in a much newer version of Illustrator but Im not sure that the file may also be corrupt as even EPS and PDF version I've been given won't open in any of the above applications. Would someone be so kind as to convert it to a Designer format and post back here? It would be very much appreciated. 10x13-poly-mailer-template.ai

Thanks Old Bruce. I know how it works but its very clunky and unintuitive. If you're working with a hundred colours you have to click that little button a hundreds times. They should just get added to the palette if they are active on the canvas in my opinion. In the setting you could set if you want auto added colours to be global or not.

Agreed I was thinking of Designer and Publisher more than Photo when writing this. The last idea would obviously be done when nothing is selected on the canvas.

Can you please take another look at the colour palette and swatches panel across Affinity suite. Its bugged me for a while and is very poorly implemented. The colour palette is horrendously clunky to use and EVERY time you start a new document you need to manually create a new Document palette or else working with colour will drive you insane. A blank document palette should automatically open by default and be the current active palette. As you start working with colours they should be automatically added to the palette. So for instance if you created a new document and then created a triangle and chose a colour from the swatches panel, that colour should automatically get added to the document palette which should be independent of the swatches. At the moment as you work nothing gets added to a palette and so the so called palettes are not really palettes they are still swatches i.e. colours to choose from. A palette is a collection of colours that are in use is it not? The document palette should be independent of the various inbuilt swatches. You should be able to import colours to the document palette from the inbuilt swatches and/or any swatches that you create (from the document palette). At the moment swatches and palettes are essentially the same thing in Affinity and they should be treated separately as they work differently. A palette is colours in use. A swatch is a collection of colours to add to the palette. Furthermore when working on a complex design, having to manually add each individual colour after previously manually creating a document palette gets very tedious. It would be much more efficient to select the item you want to recolour, create the colour in the mixer and the colour should then get added to the document palette as it is now active on the canvas. At present it only gets added to a crippled 'recents' palette. The recents palette would not be required if you use the method I describe as any colours used in the document will be present in the document palette therefore killing two birds with one stone. Colours should also be made drag and drop able as at present the recents bar you have to unselect any graphic elements, select a recent colour and then click 'add to palette' if you forgot to add one of the colours you used earlier. If you don't unselect the currently selected graphic element when trying to add a recent colour other than the current active one to the palette then you incorrectly colour the element and have to undo. Therefore meaning all but the last colour in the recents bar are irrelevant as you currently have to make it active again to then click add to palette. A quick drag and drop of any colour (active or not) from recents bar to the palette below would be much more intuitive and efficient. A third idea is If you have the Colour panel open alongside the swatches panel you could also quickly create a batch of colours (albeit one at a time) and drag and drop these across to the adjacent document palette. You cant currently do that. This too would speed up working with colour no end. Just a couple of ideas.

Why are you trying to learn every program known to man? Figure out what you want to achieve and use the appropriate tool. If its graphics and logo design use Designer. If its image manipulation use Photo. If its layout design use Publisher.

You need to figure out who you are selling to and why they would want to buy what you are creating. Does it serve a purpose or is I art? I cant figure out what the graphics are above. Are they informational because if so they are the message is not clear. If it is simply an art piece I personally would not be interested. If you are learning and wanting to become a graphic designer then google everything about graphic design. Look at famous logos and read the many texts written about why they work. Find out about typography (type design), editorial layout (magazines) , informational graphics (signage), web design, app design etc. Affinity and Photoshop etc are just tools. They won't make you a good designer they just help you create your vision. Knowing how to use your tools will make things easier not better. Knowledge makes your work better. If you want to master Affinity find some graphic that you like and try to recreate it. This will give you some boundaries (i.e. it needs to look like this) and will, if needs be, force you to investigate the tools a little more in depth to get things looking correctly. Its a bit more of a challenge than creating your own work and helps you learn your tools faster. Tutorial videos help too.

I too would like larger Quicklook previews from Affinity Suite in MacOS. Currently they are too small to accurately determine content within and lead to loading up the full file.

I too would like larger Quicklook previews from Affinity Suite in MacOS. Currently they are too small to accurately determine content within and lead to loading up the full file.

Yeh it’s no biggie just strange it keeps happening.

I can't get it to reproduce on another resolution. If it ever does I'll report back here. Think it's just 5120x2880. FYI its a 5K iMac I use but the resolution is set to default which "looks like 2560x1440". Maybe something there to look at?

Nailed it. Think it might be due to the fact one layer is 'pixel' and one is 'image'. It doesn't always do it but I have yet to see it happen when both layers are rasterised. I work quick so what I did in the video is open an image. Open a document preset. Copy and paste image into new preset doc. Drag and drop second image (without rasterising) into doc then export as jpeg using shortcut. The result in 50% of cases is corrupt icon preview. If I move the icon to a new folder for example the preview seems to get fixed. It's not a massive issue just a little inconvenience. Jpeg result also attached. icon_preview_corrupt.mov

I'll see what I can do. All I have to do is move the file to another location and the preview fixes itself. Maybe its a Finder issue but it only seems to do it with JPEGs from AffinityPhoto so maybe not?!

I can't immediately replicate the issue. If it happens again I'll post it here.

'Merge selected' results in very pixelated image. The layer order merges correctly now but the result is very pixelated so effectively still can't merge layers!

FYI Still get this issue on 1.8.4 under MacOS 10.15.6.

In 1.8.4 the marquee selection tool no longer deletes the last placed node when drawing a selection path. Pressing backspace actually now deletes the layer and the selection is lost when you undo the layer delete.

Obviously I meant apps that treat the PDF as it was meant to be treated. i.e. honour embedded fonts etc. This was all fine until some bright spark thought 'hey lets allow editing' and other developers didn't want to be left behind on feature set. Now its just a big bag of hurt again and a new 'PDF' format is required that can't be messed with so we're back where we started sending fonts and images back and forth. As a publisher, if a client sends you artwork you want to know for sure that the file is exactly as they intended it to look. I can open a PDF in publisher and it may look 'ok' but you have no idea that its different to what the client intended. If you send the file back to the client it will look fine for them as they have the fonts installed so they will say yes the proof looks great. You then send off the file to print and the next thing you have is a client refusing to pay because the artwork they sent is not correct. You can't convert to paths/TIFF if the font is not honoured. Its daft that you need Acrobat to do it which means you still have a subscription with Adobe and so you may as well stick with Adobe.

This is what stops Publisher being used in a professional environment. I really want to use it, I've paid for it, but simply cannot do what I need to do. So my money will unfortunately still be going to Adobe until Passthrough is implemented. In my opinion PDFs shouldn't be edited anyway. The whole point of PDF was to lock everything down so when it arrives at the printers there are no issues with missing fonts etc. Hence why its called 'Portable Document Format'. i.e. you can open it on anything and it will appear as it should. Now people start trying to edit them and all you get is issues with missing fonts etc. The document should be edited at source where all fonts, images etc are available to retain quality and control. Still not sure why Affinity don't implement this as it can't be a licensing issue as it was standardised years ago. Hence why other apps have no issue with PDF passthrough. I'm sure they have their reasons but until Passthrough is implemented Publisher is sadly not an option for professional use. I keep checking back when an update hits to see if it's been added... still nothing.

I get this too. Its so frustrating. If I switch layers it works but the one I need to paint on it doesn't. Everything is rasterised yada...!

Its down to the tracking and kerning built into the font. You can always use text with no background and then add the background manually then you have a little more arbitrary control over the layout. Just personal preference really.

Changing the physical size of the document i.e. a4 to a5 without downsampling the images will lead to little or no reduction in end file size. Most of the data is inside the images and they have not changed, yes they will look smaller but the dpi has now increased so they are essentially untouched and contain the same amount of data. You don't need to change the dimensions of the page as the ratio is still the same so simply export with images downsampled and the output PDF (tfnthats what you're using) set to the page size you require. All that being said though, and as others have pointed out, if it's only going to be viewed online being a4 or a5 doesn't matter in the slightest as people will be zooming in and out and viewing at different levels. As long as the images appear sharp at relatively comfortable zoom levels then thats all that is required. Export as PDF and play with image downsampling. Even Adobes 'one click' solution' will not be perfect (its effectively just a preset). Its better to have control of the detail and set accordingly so if you want something to look its best a one click solution isn't the best option. Spend that little extra time to get it perfect.