Andy05

As for your example, that's a simple task for a Xor-boolean function. There's a workaround ("Did I just say that bad word?") for simulating some of the aspects of Illustrator's shapebuilder as seen i. e. here at Youtube.

I've done some design and layout work for a client in Australia, who published books for children with dyslexia. First choice was open dislexic as font for obvious reasons. But comic sans was tested as the most useful and most helpful font among all those, which are available when installing MS Windows. Maybe that's different for adults, but when we tested fonts with children (up to 14 years old), comic sans beat all other "windows fonts" by far.

Wenn der Hintergrund nicht transparent sein muss, gibt es eine Möglichkeit Erstelle ein Rechteck für den Hintergrund und fülle es mit der Farbe der Rechtecke (!) Erstelle die Zick-Zack-Kurven in der Farbe, in der sie erscheinen sollen und platziere die Ebene über der Hintergrund-Ebene. Erstelle ein weiteres Rechteck, vollformatig für die Seite über der Kurven-Ebene. Dessen Farbe ist irrelevant. Kreiere die vier Rechtecke für die Inhalte (Farbe ist erneut irrelevant) und platzierst die vier Ebenen über die des eben erstellen Rechtecks. Erstelle eine Compound-Gruppe aus den 4 Rechtecken für die Inhalte und dem Rechteck. Weise der so entstandenen Gruppe (!) die Farbe des gewünschten Seiten-Hintergrundes zu. Die Compound-Gruppe erstellst du ähnlich, wie du es bisher gemacht hast per Boolean Funktion, aber dieses Mal "Subtract" statt "Add", und dabei die [Alt]-Taste gedrückt halten, das ist wichtig! Am besten funktioniert das über die Werkzeugleiste oben. Der Unterschied ist, dass die Rechtecke weiterhin als Einzelobjekte editiert werden können. Das Bild veranschaulicht den Aufbau - ich habe bewusst extreme Farben benutzt. Die Rechtecke lassen sich mit dieser Methode weiterhin mit dem Auswahlwerkzeug über das Ebenenmenü auswählen und dann frei bewegen. Die Kurve im Hintergrund scheint dann nur in den Rechtecken durch. Ein Nachteil bleibt: Du musst händisch die Inhalte der Boxen einzeln verschieben. Aber das macht weniger Arbeit als die Gruppe der Rechtecke ständig aufzulösen und wieder erneut zu kombinieren.

There's one thing about comic sans which lots of people don't know actually: It's one of the best fonts in terms of legibility for people with dyslexia. And unlike some special fonts for this matter (i. e. open dyslexic) it's widely available as per standard on a lot of systems. So, especially for use in schools it's not the worst choice for a teacher to use comic sans.

And seriously, with all the quirks and needed workarounds in the current affinity suite, I hope they do not focus on releasing another app prior to fixing the existing ones and adding essentially missing stuff to their current products.

Alternatively, you could have put your design into a vector shape (i. e. triangle, rectangle) and use latter as clipping mask. [EDIT: sorry, didn't see that @Old Bruce mentioned that second solution, too.]

Did you try asking them? Some printing services provide templates for some of their products as they want to sell them and hence, make it as easy for potential regular customers as possible. For something like the newspaper, it'll be most likely an InDesign template, maybe a PDF. Even if it might not work 100% when imported, you might get an idea of how the layout should be done.

Good question! Now I'm worried for the same reason, too!

I'm not sure if I understood you correctly. You masked the circle with the image, exported it as PNG and imported it again? That doesn't help, it'll cause the same issues as it's again a PNG with transparent areas. Instead, mask the image and put it—inclusive mask—into your designer file. There's no need to export it as PNG as additional step in between.

Use a Mask for the image rather than relying on PNG's transparencies. Latter very, very often causes trouble—that's not an Affinity problem. PNG was initially meant to be used for digital purposes only, not for print (i. e. one of the problems is that PNGs don't support CMYK).

I think this is a very, very good question! Affinity files can become quite large. And it make take a while longer than a user would think for all the buffers being flushed onto the external target drive. I know a lot of people, who pull out the USB sticks immediately after copying a file, which could cause problems as the file might not have been saved completely yet. The bigger the saved file, the higher the risk of doing something like that, I suppose. So, it really might have been the case that people are done with today's work, save, power off the drive—too early—and do something different just to find out that their file got corrupted when they try to load it next time.

That's basically it, I think. Incremental saving of files has enormous speed benefits as less data needs to be written. But on the other side, it's riskier as even the slightest "hickup" will cause trouble in contrast to a completely save/load procedure (and this method produces bigger file sizes, hence "save as" usually creates smaller files than just "save" in apps like Affinity's). Complete/non-incremental save may also create corrupt data, but in that case the program or the OS even usually instantly notices this and asks a user to re-save or gives a warning at least. Unfortunately, if Affinity would create some security features into their save routines, the speed benefit would be gone. But as it's now, Affinity's save procedure seems to be overly error-prone when saving to external (or net) sources. Unfortunately, lots of devices are getting smaller and smaller for more portability, so one has to rely on external drives or network drives. In particular since working with tons of images can become quite demanding in terms of drive space needed.

This could actually become some serious issue, if Affinity sells his software "for professionals" and after some professional lost a customer because he couldn't finish by the deadline due to a bug, which Serif is aware of for quite some time now. This might open an opportunity for suing Serif for compensation. Their terms of use might render invalid in regards of bugs they've been told about ages ago (I found some reports in the fora dated back to 2014 in which the staff confirmed trouble with their apps saving files to external sources). It depends on the judges. I wouldn't want to take that risk if it'd be my business.

With all this corrupted files' bugging happening, I wonder if Affinity apps should pop-up with a warning, if someone tries to save on an external drive?

I'd ask the other way round. Which vector app does not have any vector warp/envelope features? Should be the way shorter list of apps.

That's what I'm currently doing, yet it's no satisfying solution at all. Also, it's not working with all filters (i. e. if they read and write in their own system of subfolders). As said, I'm using multiple apps which use the plugins. It can become quite a chore, if you have to do this all the time for all plugins and apps. And your tip requires manually copying files within sensible areas of an operating system. This isn't a problem for me at all, but might become an issue for less experienced users. A simple checkbox in front of each plugin in the setups in order to activate or deactivate a plugin is a plain and simple solution. The list is already there. I'm missing such a feature in some of the other programs I use, too. But that doesn't mean that serif could or should not consider such an option in their apps.

(Sorry, if this has been requested before, but I couldn't find anything in this forums using the forum search.) I use multiple software which can make use of a lot of Photoshop compatible plugins. But I don't want to install all of latter multiple times for each program individually. Instead, I use a shared location for them. Now, the problem is, that some plugins don't work in affinity. Sometimes it's even just half of the filters of one developer's package of plugins. They all appear as separate plugins in the preferences setup (under "unknown"). I'd like to see an option to enable/disable individual filters in that menu for use in affinity photo. Right now, we can only disable all "unknown" plugins at once, but not individually.

You obviously never tried to add some vector gradients to a design and tried to sell it at stock pages... Edit for adding a brilliant work, done in Affinity: Now, make something like that useable at stock pages for vectors.

Thanks for just describing, why it's not working in a professional workflow. In other software, I can create such things without spending plenty of time with such gibberish workarounds. Not even mentioning that vectorising images always needs a lot of extra time afterwards for fine-tuning the results (correctign lines, removing excess nodes and so on). You actually just proved my point.

Don't tell me. Tell Serif.

Let me know, how you create some true vector illustrations with some more complex vector brushes for selling them on stock pages. Let me know, how you make text filling a shape in a non-destructive way (and no, working rasterised in pixels is not an option). Just two examples of many, which can be done intuitively and quickly in other apps since decades and which aren't some "exotic" jobs to be done. Sure, you can use the node tool for the second example. But that will leave you with a non-editable text and takes multiple times longer than a native warp function.

You clearly confused marketing and targeted development.

Sure. But from a professional point of view, just one or two mid-ranged jobs should pay that price already. Whereas you have to spend probably 1-2 hours longer on such a job due to fiddling with workarounds in Affinity apps. And then the same story with the next job. And the next job. And the next job... That's why I expressed my opinion several times here in the fora already about the target market of the Affinity apps. I think they are targeting for the sector of the market of private users, artists (painting features are quite nice in their apps) and semi professional graphic designers. Their suit is still far from being an alternative for a real professional workflow—even after years of development. Unfortunately, as comfortable the (studio) linked communication between Affinity's apps might be, it can't make up with the missing basics. Whereas the "workarounds" for Affinity's studio link feature in Corel's or Adobe's suits aren't that difficult (import/export/copypaste).

I second that rather than the OP's issues for most of the time. But sometimes the apps just close without saving or any other reaction, which is kinda annoying.

Did anyone see the new features of CorelDraw 2021? (AI) features of Photoshop and Luminar have been mentioned in these fora already, too... Seriously, Serif needs to pay more attention to the current versions of their competitors. I hope it's not a strategy of holding back some essential features (true vector brushes, non destructive vector warp, anyone?) for their apps in order to convince more users paying for a version 2.x. To me, personally, Publisher is still not a "real V1.x" for production rather than an advanced beta of a layout software. I truly wish, that Serif would add some of features which have been standards for ages, sometimes decades instead of trying to add fancy new stuff. Managing the balancing act between being more inventive than others and offering at least very basic features is difficult. I get that. And by "I wish Serif would add..." I don't mean they should add any of them "for free" to the current version within a month or two. But the longer it takes to provide those features, the further away the competitors' apps will move. It's not like any of them are on stillstand. You can't get and hold customers for ages just by being less expensive. At least if one also targets for a more professional market. Time's money. A professional, who'll need plenty of time consuming workarounds in order to get his job done, will swallow the pill and move to the expensive alternatives. It's probably way about time to move ahead and focus on the release of V2. For adding more basic features, more AI features, for earning new money for further development of their apps. I wholeheartedly hope for this kind of progress soon-ish.