papamumin

Well, it says Ctrl (not Alt) in the status bar of my version of Designer. I cannot get Alt to do anything at all - but I'm only a rookie. (I have used Illustrator before, but that was years ago). The problem is that I don't use a mouse, just a Magic Trackpad. You have to use 3 fingers to drag for creating curves, which I now find pretty easy. I've also found that Command on the Mac switches to the node tool. (What on earth would they use on Windows?) The Workbook is already 2 years old ... perhaps the latest version of Designer, 1.7.1 has changed things on the Mac. Who knows? Who cares? Perhaps this will all come clear with the fullness of time!

I'm learning Designer, using the official Serif workbook. On p. 95, I've had the devil of a trouble introducing a sharp corner at the intersection of the body and guitar neck. The text says: "without releasing the mouse button, hold down the option key (Mac) or alt key (Win) and drag the leading control handle along the guitar neck's outline to the guitar head, then ...". It also has the Alt key in the Designer's Help system under pen tool modifier keys. However, looking at the Status bar in the Designer interface, it says to hold down the Ctrl key to click/drag the node to draw a straight line. How has such an important thing not been picked up? Designer isn't new, so I guess its users are mostly seasoned pros who have no need to do these simple exercises! Can you please confirm this? Thanks. William

Hi everybody I'm William from East Kent. I've been interested in DTP for over 20 years. I started out on PageMaker at college, but never really fully grasped the principles until I got my own PC and PM. I dabbled in the first version of InDesign on Windows, but felt that it was slow and overly complicated. I've also used Quark on Windows before transitioning to Mac. Quark is much more like PM and user friendly, but expensive for the dabbler. Currently, I'm trialling a student version of Creative Suite. (On a new 27" iMac with Core i9/40 GB RAM/SSD - aren't I the lucky one). The tutorials from Adobe's Classroom in a Book remind me why I never liked InDesign. The program is much more solid and full-featured, of course, being iterations down the line. But ID is resolutely professional; I don't like all content within frames, and find the wealth of panels and option overwhelming. I already own Affinity Designer (hardly used, though I mastered the basics of Illustrator back in the day). So I'm looking at acquiring Affinity Publisher, as a route back into DTP. I hope Affinity will publish a book on Publisher as they did with Designer, so I can learn along with that, too. William