Nazario

Hi Chris. If it happens again I’ll get a recording. It’s intermittent unfortunately. 

Howdy,
 
I was disappointed to read a while back that Publisher has taken a back seat to allow for iOS development on the iPad Pro. (Correct me if I'm wrong on that I did read it a while back.)
 
With Photo and Designer coming along nicely I was hoping to be able to completely leave Adobe behind when Publisher launched as I believe are many other people.
 
Looking from the outside of the development of the Affinity Suite I think the delay might be a bad idea and focus should return to getting Publisher out the door first.
 
Many designers are stuck at a point of transition. Some have embraced the subscription model from Adobe, others have reluctantly accepted it and many flat out refuse to be held to ransom.
 
With CS6 being the last supported version of Adobes software on Apples latest operating system and Apple's change in release pattern to annual releases there is a strong possibility come October when the next OS is potentially released that it will break what compatibility CS6 still has with OSX. Indeed El Capitan itself caused us to have to download legacy Java software to keep running Illustrator CS6. I fear the next OS will break it entirely.
 
For those people that refuse to switch to Adobes subscription model and are waiting for Publisher to be able to completely leave Adobe, or those that are on the fence, and I believe there are quite a few, this will cause a problem if they wish to upgrade to Apple's latest OS when the time comes. If the new OS does indeed break compatibility and support is stopped for CS6, users will then be forced to either hold off upgrading their OS or reluctantly sign up to Adobes subscription model to bridge the gap. Thereby losing Affinity potential customers as by the time Publisher is launched they may indeed come round to being ok with using Adobe CC via subscription and not purchase Affinity Publisher at all.
 
If Publisher is launched before (probably not possible) or at least around the time of the new OS then this decision won't be so much of a headache and Serif/Affinity should make themselves available to many new customers. By delaying I think they're practically pushing potential customers back to Adobe.
 
I know developing is a very dynamic process and things move quickly at times but I think it bears thinking about somewhat. This is just my opinion obviously, what do you guys think?

Thats a fair point and you can't knock Affinity team for that. There needs to be some incentive to upgrade. However what is happening in my experience is some of these oft requested features that are in most professional environments essential and will not, or have not so far, been included, are eroding peoples interest in Affinity as they originally wanted to leave Adobe's money grabbing and bloated software at all costs, found they couldn't and now are slowly just accepting paying the instalments of a CC subscription so its going to be harder for Affinity to win more customers the longer the features are spread out. Thats my opinion anyhoo.
Im still holding out but can't forever as when hardware slowly gets upgraded for various reasons and it comes with the latest this and that it will unfortunately mean more subscriptions to the latest Adobe CC. Im trying desperately to hold onto Adobe CS6 so I'm not locked into the subscription if and when Affinity comes of age. If I end up all in with Adobe CC then it will be difficult to jump ship afterwards after my staff all get used to the setup.

Thats a fair point and you can't knock Affinity team for that. There needs to be some incentive to upgrade. However what is happening in my experience is some of these oft requested features that are in most professional environments essential and will not, or have not so far, been included, are eroding peoples interest in Affinity as they originally wanted to leave Adobe's money grabbing and bloated software at all costs, found they couldn't and now are slowly just accepting paying the instalments of a CC subscription so its going to be harder for Affinity to win more customers the longer the features are spread out. Thats my opinion anyhoo.
Im still holding out but can't forever as when hardware slowly gets upgraded for various reasons and it comes with the latest this and that it will unfortunately mean more subscriptions to the latest Adobe CC. Im trying desperately to hold onto Adobe CS6 so I'm not locked into the subscription if and when Affinity comes of age. If I end up all in with Adobe CC then it will be difficult to jump ship afterwards after my staff all get used to the setup.

InDesign if i imported a bitmap TIFF file I could set its colour quite easily simply by selecting the image and choosing a colour from the palette. This proves very useful when working with simple logos and symbols that require being a specific colour. You could also set the background colour of the box the logo resides in just as easily. So with a few clicks a black and white logo could become green with an orange background for example without having to manipulate the original file.
Ive been looking and still not found a definitive answer for doing this in APUB. How does one work with greyscale/bitmap TIFFs and easily convert their colour within APUB without affecting the linked file?
 

This is the solution to finally use Publisher as a real alternative to Indesign or Quark Xpress.
I produce a magazine with many ads included. I is impossible (not to mention illegal) to install all fonts that is included in the PDFs of our ad-clients to get a correct view of their content.
Unfortunately, I couldn´t do a complete program change in the past, because Publisher won´t support this feature.
 

They talked about substitution, not about editing text formatted with embedded fonts. Just personally speaking about Illustrator CS 6. If I open an "external" PDF in Illustrator with fonts I have not installed, Illustrator warns me and I have the opportunity to replace the missing fonts. In the end it is a legal matter, not all fonts are for free and the companies selling fonts won't be too enthusiastic, if their fonts will be available on people's PC who did not pay for the fonts.
What we do need is passing through PDF without the possiblilty to edit them. If you still need these fonts, there are command line tools for extracting embedded fonts and if you are lucky, then the complete font is embedded and not just a part of it.
 

Still no straight through PDF placement though.

Mark,
In order for 'Resize Document' to work efficiently and as quickly as possible, these improvements should be made:
• Percentage should be added as an option in the resize unit choice
• A reset button is often needed
• Results should be shown live - without need for tab (enter closes the window)
• The pixel dimensions and print dimensions should be shown together (attached sample).
(Allowing for the future possibility of creating resize scripts)
All professional graphic designers (or their employees) spend a LOT of time resizing images for use in Publisher or InDesign, we need to administer the settings in one place as quickly as possible, to see that the application has calculated everything OK enter, then get on to the next picture.
We would like the Affinity Resize tool to be as good as other apps, if possible better, but as it is, 'resize image 'in Affinity is inferior to all others.

Enter should be for applying the changes. Your method requires two hits of 'enter' to apply the changes unlike only one for other apps. Its a case of efficiency. I personally process huge quantities of images and small inefficiencies in UI can build up to a lot of time wasted with extra clicks, taps and mouse movements that are simply not needed.
In a one off instance one extra click is not a big deal. Its when you broaden things out to high end professional workflows where the current UI starts to fail. Its inefficient. As a side note I also suffer RSI (probably from my crazy work load) so on a strictly personal level its even more paramount regarding less clicks, obviously i don't expect you to take that into account Im just saying.
If the input boxes updated live, by that i mean as you type, the other fields linked to it auto update instantly, you then can see without having to click, or hit enter, or do anything what the results of your current input are going to be. If you're happy with them, hit enter to apply.
Think of a workflow where Im sent an image from a client. It needs resizing, the colours adjusting, maybe some editing. I then need to put that into Publisher, set the positioning, any possible effects etc. Along a workflow all those extra clicks really add up and thats just one image.
EDIT: A very clear example of the extra clicks here and there throughout the Affinity suite is the Colour Picker tool. There is a needless click required to make it work in Affinity. This even caught out the guy doing the Publisher keynote for Affinity Live (apologies i forgot his name - great keynote by the way). One would simply expect you click on the tool, mouse over the area you wish to sample and simply click the mouse to have the colour loaded and ready to go. Affinity's current implementation makes you mouse all the way back over to the Colour Picker window and then click the colour thats now appeared next to the eye dropper to actually activate the colour you've just selected. Its really not intuitive or efficient, especially on a 27" screen or multiple monitor setups.
 

This file isn't the correct format, just using it for illustration (I don't have access to the bitmaps at present so can't experiment) however the look is basically what im talking about. I want to change the black parts to a spot colour and have control over the colour of the bounding box. In Quark (shudder) it was very simple, InDesign a little more involved but simple enough. Import the Bitmap, click on the bounding box, choose a colour and it would fill the box with that colour. Select the bitmap within the box, select a colour and the bitmap would then be that colour. Then when it came to colour separations you knew for certain that the icon was the colour it should be. Using blends, masks and CMYK images does not guarantee correct colour and is also a lot more involved.

The editability isn’t really the issue. The Affinity apps don’t interpret the embedded fonts, which is what they would need to do in order to correctly display fonts which are not installed on the local machine. That same ability to interpret the fonts is crucial to PDF passthrough.

Hi Guys. We print directly from InDesign using our RIPs PPD file. From InDesign print dialogue we can choose which plates to send to the RIP. 
When we send a four colour document the rip receives/creates a plate for each colour. The plate is produced on our plate maker and manually put onto our litho printer and off you go.
Theres no need for us to create PDFs. The RIP has a hold queue and when we are ready to create the plates we then send them from the rip software to the plate maker (just like sending a file to print).

That’s another very slight issue whereby I think ‘image resize’ would be more in keeping with what Affinity Photo does and ‘Documents’ should be left for Designer and Publisher. Semantics really but I think it can also help a little with regards to clarity within the suite. 

Thats fine mate. Obviously i know you're all busy and so didn't follow them up. 
Im looking forward to seeing the improvements and actually finally using your products.

The bug has returned for me... sigh!
There is good news however and that is that Mark Ingram has said he has implemented a fix and improvements which will be appearing in a Windows Beta soon. One would assume the same fixes would also make it to the Mac version but there is no official word on that. I would greatly appreciate if someone from Serif could confirm this will be the case. I have 3 of your apps that I don't/can't use because one of them is fundamentally broken. Think about that.

Yes, exactly.
The situation is, you have an image and you want to print it at a certain size. In Photoshop, you would resize without resampling, specify the size you want, and you're done; the image is now the exact size you want without touching any pixels. In Affinity products, you have to resize without resampling, calculate current size ÷ desired size × current DPI and then set the DPI (which is also limited to integers so you can't even get exact sizes). Sure, that's possible, but why am I manually calculating ratios on behalf of a computer program? Especially if my workflow has me frequently printing images of arbitrary resolution at specific sizes.

Hi all, I've just added a fix and some improvements to the Resize Document dialog. It will be available in the next customer beta if you want to check it out. Hopefully with the "Resample" option disabled, it should do a sensible thing... Thanks for your reports.

Thank you Mark. We do appreciate what you guys do. I certainly do. I so want to love and use your products hence why I keep banging on about it. 

Literally the very first thing I tried to do with Affinity Designer was to drop a 1-bit logo file into a blank document. It was a bit disappointing to realize that I'd just bought a graphic design app that can't handle company logos or barcodes.
In InDesign or Illustrator you can just drop a bitmap logo / drawing into a document and change its fill to any color (very handy for designs that require spot colors). The bitmaps keep their crisp 1200 dpi resolution (and don't get anti-aliased) when exported to PDFs. It's a very hassle-free and effective way of working.
Am I just old-fashioned? Is there some new way of dealing with this stuff in Affinity Photo / Designer / Publisher that I'm just not aware of yet?
Every alternative suggestion I've seen on the forums has been far too complicated for what needs to be done. Following those suggestions would also lead to losing the benefits of working with 1-bit bitmaps anyway, resulting in downsampled and lossily compressed images in PDFs. Adobe's software offers separate downsampling settings for color, grayscale, and bitmap images, Affinity squashes all and everything with equal measure. That makes Affinity apps simply unsuitable for some print workflows, despite all the fantastic features they have. 
I'm aware that proper 1-bit color support might be technically more challenging to implement than it sounds, as it comes with the requirement to treat different image files placed in the same document in a different manner. That would probably pose new challenges for drawing the images on the screen too. And the PDF engine is probably a big hurdle too, since it is a third-party solution (as far as I know), and not flexible enough?
 
It would be nice to hear the developers' view on bitmap support. What's the reasoning for leaving it off the roadmap? Is it going to be added later (together with better tools to work with spot colors, maybe), or has the decision been made that it's simply not going to be supported and old-fashioned geezers like me should look elsewhere? Affinity Publisher's release is going to attract even more people fed up with Adobe's pricing model looking for alternative software. The lack of bitmap support might be a decisive factor for many, more critical than the design tools themselves. Some software can't deal with CMYK. Affinity stumbles with 1-bit images.
 
(I probably sound like a broken record at this point, having written many posts about this subject already. Sorry about that.)

I would like to add my voice to the requests for 1-bit support. I run the design / pre-press department of a printing company. We do spot-color offset and letterpress. I absolutely need 1-bit support for our workflow. Please, folks! This is a very important part of print production!
Thanks!

I think you need particularly the import from InDesign CS6 format. Many users do survive with this last perpetual version hoping and praying to be able to finally switch

We print 4 colour on a 2 colour litho press and so need to be able to separate the plates. How can I do this in Publisher?
EDIT: Just seen another post regarding this. Apologies for duplicate post. Separations preview and the option to print only certain plates is a must for me to be able to use Publisher.

Hi! I just purchased affinity photo and designer, using Place embedded document works alright for doing what I want in my mock-ups, but I want to apply a pattern to a MUG, but the warp Mesh Warp Tool rasterizes the whole embedded document, is there a way to warp the embedded document without rasterizing it? That would enable us to apply a design to circular objects and have instant results as how is going to be.

Sorry to keep coming back to this but I keep attempting to use Document Resize and its just bonkers isn't it?! Even with the bug fixed the implementation is crazy, you can't use it with any confidence at all. Absolutely daft! Definitely just sticking with resizing in Preview.
To the guys and gals at Affinity. Please acknowledge our requests to look at the Document Resize implementation you have created and refine it so it is actually useful. As it stands it really does not work as part of any meaningful workflow. Its great that you include all these new technologies to speed up the application but why then slow them down with an ill thought out user interface? I can legitimately open Preview app in MacOS resize an image and reimport it quicker than fiddling with Document Resize in Affinity Photo. On top of that the Resample tick box needs to be removed if it is not going to function based on the settings selected. Also please show the pixel dimensions alongside the print dimensions and make them live update. Live update throughout the Affinity Suite is a big thing that is missing and should have been included from the get go. Typing in a value in one box then having to click inside another box to get the value you've just entered in the first box to update really is very poor decision in my book. Thats yet another click thats completely not required but you insist on all these extra clicks all throughout the Affinity suite that are simply not required! Your apps are brilliant, its the UI and the experience using it that is very poor indeed. I'd be happy to write up a report on what I think could be improved on the side of the UI. Just message me and I'll be happy to oblige.