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sfriedberg

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  1. The community can't help you sort this out without access to some or all of the files you're working on.
  2. The Affinity Suite does not (yet?) support true vector pattern fills. It can, however, place SVG files as "images" without rasterizing quite nicely. It's my preferred method for bringing in artboard from Designer into Publisher (and others prefer other methods).
  3. I am using Montax Imposer. It's also a paid, non-subscription software, with a couple of different price points depending on how big a sheet you need to work with. For tabloid (11x17") sheets, it's quite a bit less expensive than the pay-once Imposition Wizard.
  4. As someone with a math background, color spaces and color manipulations themselves aren't the challenge. The challenge is that most app developers want to hide all the specifics and occasionally do silent automatic conversions behind the scenes to "make it easier for the user". Adobe has been as guilty of that as anyone else (e.g., automatic color space conversion when opening files). If this stuff is hard to learn, it becomes 10x harder to learn when the app refuses to tell you what it's doing. At one point CorelDRAW had the best presentation of what was going on for color management of any app I've worked with. It showed you the profiles in use for input document, output document, screen, and printer and also showed the flow (transformations) between those. Nothing about the process had to be guessed or inferred from fragmentary information.
  5. It means "use alternate glyphs from the Open Type font." The precise selection of alternate glyphs and their appearance was determined by the designer/publisher of the font. Some fonts have not alternates. Some, especially swash fonts, have multiple alternates for a given letter.
  6. This is one of those small mysteries of the Affinity suite. Vector patterns are classic. In the specific forms of cross-hatch patterns and regular tesselations they predate gradient fills and bitmap patterns by centuries. They are supported by most vector-based graphic design applications, and as noted above, fall into that "common denominator" of vector features supported by the SVG file format. It's puzzling why Affinity Designer does not have support for vector patterns.
  7. You are correct. My mental model presents a facing-page master as two master pages, but it's not the same thing.
  8. I don't assert that Microsoft killed Expression as an anticompetitive move, just that they acquired it, abandoned it and buried it. It is nice that they released it freely before purging most references to it. There are lots of examples of stuff that software companies have buried without intending it as an anticompetitive move. In fact, the entire reason I started using the Affinity suite is that Corel decided to drop Ventura Publisher a few rounds of development after acquiring it. Corel's claim that CorelDRAW acquired the layout and long document capabilities of Ventura is breathtakingly incorrect.
  9. Forgive me if this is too basic, but you should be creating two distinct master pages and creating your document with facing spreads. Assign the left and right master pages to the appropriate pages of a spread, then newly created spreads should be set up correctly.
  10. No, MS started adapting the Creature House Expression technology in Expression Design and Expression Web, but those adaptations really aren't the same thing. MS clearly changed their minds about branding several times, breaking the single C.H. Expression product into what was supposed to be an entire Expression-branded suite of graphics tools, and then rapidly dropping the entire suite. My impression is that the product line managers were very web-centric and when web-specific graphic design did not immediately catch fire, they simply moved on to something else. The last time I looked, MS Expression Design 4 did not have all the skeletal stroke features of C.H. Expression 3.3. Perhaps they are hidden somewhere in the the UI, but I've felt no desire to do a detailed point-by-point comparision. Expression 3.3 is basically legal abandonware at this point. It has been released for free but is extremely difficult to locate on MS's website. They have changed the download link multiple times and the last couple of times I searched for it, it was not indexed. [Added in edit] If you look at the Expression Design 4 link you provided, you will see it is a non-Microsoft website established precisely because finding Expression Design 4 on the MS website is next to impossible. So I will stick by my earlier expression of "before Microsoft purchased the product and buried it". However, my point was that the skeletal stroke features of Creature House Expression were extremely powerful, flexible and easy to use, and that it would be desirable if Affinity Designer acquired some of that capability over time. I suspect we are in agreement on the point.
  11. In the past I have said glowing things about the "skeletal stroke" vector brush functionality of Expression by Creature House (early 2000's, before Microsoft purchased the product and buried it). It would be wonderful if Affinity Designer gradually acquired that functionality.
  12. If you are willing to work "delicately", you can get much of the desired effect. Convert all the objects you want to manipulated to curves. (I.e., circles and rectangles won't do. Convert them to circular curves and rectangular curves.) Select all the objects you want to be affected by a particular move. Choose the Node tool. Select all the nodes you want to move. Put the Node tool over one of the selected nodes and drag. Nodes from different objects which were in the same location will remain stacked on top of one another when dragged. Unselected nodes (and unselected objects) will remain in their original locations. Objects with some selected nodes and some unselected nodes will be distorted when you drag the selected nodes. If you select all the nodes on an object and drag nodes, the shape of that object will remain unchanged. This is absolutely not as nice as an animation poser, nor as powerful as an animation rig. But it might suffice if you have a relatively simple skeleton of body parts to manipulate. Biggest limitation is that you can drag selected nodes as a (implicit) group, but you cannot rotate the group of nodes. For rotation, you will have to work at the level of whole objects, rather than curve nodes.
  13. Is there a reason no one suggested simply drawing two straight lines between the existing curved sidewall endpoints then combining the curves?
  14. Text styles are absolutely fundamental to stepping up to a layout/publishing program instead of hacking around in a word processor. They do not need to be a complicated scary thing at all. For starters, define a body paragraph style, probably a heading paragraph style, and an emphasis character style. Make a habit of never clicking the I for italic, always apply the emphasis style instead. And so on. You should eventually try to use defined styles for everything. Paragraph properties, text character span properties, table cell properties, table layouts, etc. But you can work up to it. Start with every paragraph having a style and every character override having a style.
  15. I have an ODG file (vector) created with LibreOffice Draw with lots of groups and layers. What's my best option for bringing this into Affinity Designer and retaining the structure for editing in Designer? I do have continued access to LibreOffice Draw, so could resave or export in an alternative format. One of the Windows Metafile formats? EPS? PDF?
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