MartinMHC

@walt.farrell thanks so much! I must have inadvertantly unclicked that setting in the menu. Thank you! @Pšenda thanks for the resolution on Designer. I use Designer much less than Photo so am less familiar with it..

I have used many painting programs and I have been using Affinity for a while and always understood that erasing things left a grey/white square block visual to show there was no colour or content to show at that point. However, today, working on a graphic in turn in both Affinity Photo 2.4.2 and Affinity Designer 2.4.2 I use the erase tool, the flood erase tool but with either I absolutely can not make the erased area appear anything other than white, despite there being nothing below the layer. I have explored the settings for if there's a custom colour to set for erasure but no luck. Web and forum searches also turn up nothing. Working on a predominantly white image this is extremely awkward. How do I set that running erase on any type of layer shows that when there is no content to show for that point on the image that it displays the usual grey/white square blocks rather than any block colour (in this case white). Thanks I think this has occured since the 2.4.2 update last week but I am not certain.

@R C-R default doesn't select groups. That's the issue, that I can select objects OR groups but I can never select EITHER.

@R C-R from my use of Designer 2.21 today, re: "Isn't that in effect what the Move Tool selector offers?" No, the move tool allows EITHER group or object selection but NOT BOTH . Auto select seems to not select groups, in my usage, maybe because objects vastly out numbers groups in the document I've been working on so the program decides I don't want to ever select groups, but either way, it is what it is ... "How would a 'both' option determine if you wanted to select groups or objects in them?" I have no idea how this works! 🤣😂🤣

Per version 2.2.1 The Move tool has a drop down selector for canvas selecting either objects or groups, but not both.

There are some utterly bizarre changes implemented in V2. As stated above, this change is deeply frustrating when working with many objects and a few groups, I can't select the groups, or I can select the groups but then can't select the objects. Why the flying fudge can't I select both or either? And @R C-R saying that this was requested by some users, that's fine, but any modern developer should implement optin-optout ability for anything like this, so that I as a user can then turn this new feature off if desired. This is another fking hassle. Sorry I'm stressed as something that was previously easy to do has become tedious with this - along with other - "updates" to Affinity Designer V2.

And bingo. Got it. The client had given me a source otf font face that was ~63Kb . Searching online I found the same font with a ~101Kb face which appears to be an updated version. Using this seems to resolve the artefact issue. Thanks for the pointers.

Yes, @joe_l I have tested this by changing the font on the layer and I can't recreate the issue. It does seem specific to this font. Exampled; 2b is the Fucxed latin and 2c is the Franklin Gothic Medium font. print_pdf_glitch2b.pdf print_pdf_glitch2c.pdf

@joe_l I can't disagree. The font has been supplied by the client and appears to be their own font. However, the font installs and works correctly on my system and the issue _appears_ to be the font being used as/in an Artistic text rather than a Framed text . I don't know enough about fonts to judge this fonts usability but even so, it appears absolutely fine on saves and raw images / afdesign files but has issues outputting to PDF.

This issue is also occuring on other files using Artistic Text. Please see attached a seperate but identical incident. four.pdf print_pdf_glitch2.afdesign

Further to last please find the isolated layer on it's own file. This file's PDF export still causes the same artefacts. prin.pdf print_pdf_glitch.afdesign

@Callum I have exported, and I have noted that the type of PDF makes a difference. All PDF exports are 300 dpi and area = whole document. Issue occures on: PDF (for print) / PDF (press ready) / PDF (digital - both) / PDF (for export) / PDF/X (all) Issue does NOT occur on PDF (flattened). After checking each layer the issue is caused by the Green "Artistic" text layer. All other text is "Framed". I will find out how to send you the file on the forum...

Yes I am reading and doing that now. Thank you.

This exact same issue occurs to me on all Affinity products v1.10.5 minimum. Is there a scope that Affinity can release a patch for this as it seems to be that the OS updates that cause this are increasing....

I have an image file that I have worked on in Affinity Designer and I export it to a PDF using raster DPI = 300 and none of the checkboxes ticked. The PDF export always has dark marks on it that do not exist on the original image / designer file, following my previous similar query about JPEG artefacts on Affinity Photo And the advice here to turn off Hardware Acceleration support, which I have now done on Affinity Designer but I can't stop these artefacts being generated on PDF. There are no elements on the image layers that these artefacts seem to correlate with. How can I improve the export to remove unwanted artefacts? IN DESIGNER: IN PDF VIEWER (Adobe) but also tried other viewers as well.

Thank you both. I will check this out tomorrow and try to create a video.

No, this is what happens when double clicking on the child on the image itself. The solutions presented all seem like workarounds. Maybe a possible solution is as mentioned to select the child and press a key to move up to the parent but that's the closest solution so far.

In Affinity Designer 1.10.5 I have a group of many objects (all curves) as a ,well, group. When I click on the individual objects, the curve rather than the group are selected. I want to select the group as a complete group rather than the object as an individual element. I have read the help topic here ( https://affinity.help/designer/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=pages/ObjectControl/group.html?title=Grouping objects ) , which states: To select objects (or groups) in a group: Double-click on the object. If the object itself is in a group, the group will be selected first—double-clicking again will select the object. But this does not happen. When double clicking on the object in the group the object becomes focused and zooms to fill the screen. I want to automatically select the whole group when clicking on a child element. I have also tried locking all child elements in the group and this sort of almost does what I need, in that the child curves are not selectable but it also excludes them from passing the focus of [double] clicking on to the parent group, so I can only select the group from the layers tab. How can selecting only the parent group when selecting a child element be done? Thanks.

Well I've updated and done that, so will see if this issue disappears. Thanks.

Is that a standard solution to this issue? I never knew! thanks.

Affinity Photo Version 1.10.5 I work a lot with JPEG and PNG images. When exporting these images using File > Export and saving them as JPEG or PNG files I will quite often (1/30 times) later discover that the exported image (when re-loaded) has artefacts that were not on the original and not visually apparent at time of export. The artefacts are always square or rectangular and usually wide letterbox sizes. The Artefacts are quite large relative to the image size. ~ 100 x 10 px for example on a 1000x1000px image. Artefacts are mid-tone gray or sometimes transparant and appear to maybe be caused by overlay windows (possibly even the export modal window) seeming to make Affinity "forget" part of the underlying image underneath the export window. I have found today that the artefact was caused by the "flatten image" command from the menu (image was an edited JPEG to be saved as-is). This is more common with large images (3k+ px width or height) and very furstrating. Once an artefact is seen, it's very hard to then keep exporting the same image until there are no artefacts on the export. Usually requiring 5+ exports. If the Artefact is not seen in time, then the source of the exported JPG image will need to be reopened and rebuilt (cos, you know, JPEGs are flat). Interested to know how to establish the cause of this issue. DXDiag attached herewith and most recent image this has happened to. I have edited/captioned the image to highlight the problem. DxDiag.txt

Well that did the trick, thank you, although it's only a short term solution (10 days!) . Of note; once the document is opened within Affinity Publisher, each page can be opened again and edited in Affinity Designer or Photo from the Publisher main menu, so it seems straightforward for other Affinity products to be able to import IDML documents. Hopefully this import ability can be added in an update.

@Pšenda I understand IDML are multi layered documents and PDF are flat. Therefore if that's so, PDF is not an ideal solution.

I have Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer but I apparently need Affinity Publisher to open these file types. I have been given these file types and need to simply import them to convert them to .afdesign . How can I import these files without needing to pay for Publisher as I can't afford it (£50!!) purely for converting file formats. Is there an Addon for Designer that can do this? Is there any other way that I can open these file types in Affinity Designer?

@Ron P. Awesome, many thanks for clarifying that. I will be aware of this going forwards! Thanks again!