sfriedberg

It's a problem if you want it to be a problem. On a press, it's 100% black. On a monitor, it's 0% grey/value. There is certainly room for confusion, but less room if you keep the context (print/subtractive, monitor/additive) in mind. I am sure the folks at Affinity would be entertain your suggestions for how this confusing labeling could be sorted out. How would you prefer this information be presented? (And do remember, there are lots of other users, many of whom will never go to press with their digital files.)

There are occasions where I would find this handy, myself. However, if you are using text styles consistently in a structured document, it's usually not too hard to change the style definitions. I seldom have more than 4 or 5 active font sizes for titles, headings and body text, some character styles perhaps with font sizes to tune subscripts and superscripts, and then usually 1 or 2 font sizes for footnotes, marks and similar. I have lots more styles than that, but they don't all involve size changes; most of them inherit the font size of the style they are based on. On the other hand, if you are using Artistic text to make some kind of word jazz text salad, I can see where you'd have many, many more sizes in play. But yes, it would be nice if you could define font styles with a size that's relative to the base style size, instead of an absolute size. Supporting either multiplicative (75%) or additive (-3pt) relative sizes would be convenient.

For "grey", mentally substitute "value" or "lightness". Black is 0% lightness, white is 100% lightness. The "grey scale" is the neutral hue scale of value/lightness. For printing, you want to know the percentage of black ink. So that's where 30% black comes from. However, the "grey scale" is not the "black scale". (There is no "black scale".) So 30% black is indeed 70% lightness. The confusion comes from putting additive (red, green, blue, value) and subtractive (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) terms next to one another.

Backspace probably doesn't mean what you think it means. In text context, it means "delete the character before the cursor". And when the cursor is at the beginning of a paragraph, the immediately preceding charater is the paragraph mark for the preceding paragraph. When you delete that paragraph mark, the two paragraphs are merged, using the paragraph properties of the following paragraph . Your example has some other complications, like initial words and/or character overrides, but that's basically what's going on. I assume (perhaps incorrectly) that you are accustomed to removing blank lines by backspacing over them (deleting them). If the spacing is due to inter-paragraph spacing properties, that won't work. You can turn on hidden characters to display line breaks and paragraph breaks, which will make much clearer what is happening when you backspace over (and delete) one of those hidden characters.

I just upgraded from 1.8.3 to 1.8.4 and tried unpinning/repinning/repeat a simple case, and it seemed to work fine. One great annoyance squashed! Thank you.

I'll echo this. Microsoft's UX guidelines notwithstanding, I never install anything that allows any option to do otherwise on the C drive of my main workstation. General apps (and app content like fonts, stock art, asset libraries, etc) go on the D drive. Games go on the E drive. (I have 14 spindles in that machine, six on mainboard SATA ports and 8 more on a raid controller. Several general partitions, a striped multi-disk Windows volume for video editing and other high-bandwidth apps, and a couple of RAID sets. Definitely not in the user-needs-mindless-simplicity category.) On my portable Shuttle "shoebox" machine, the entire C drive is only 60GB SSD, so I also make a very strong effort to move everything possible off the C drive and onto the slower, larger hard drive. I find it extremely annoying when app installers don't offer the option to customize installation locations.

Matte means no specular highlights, and usually limited shading. Try using a curves adjustment to flatten highlights, then mask out individual surface areas and apply a large radius gaussian blur to equalize shading. Do each area separately to avoid "bleeding" across distinct areas. If you need to retain texture in the individual surface areas, apply the blur to just the lightness/value rather than the full RGB. If you are dealing with a photo with substantial rim-lighting and a heavily sculpted surface, you are unlikely to produce a realistic matte version unless you also mimic ambient lighting in the shadowed areas.

I have seen something similar when I had the "no break" attribute (Character > Positioning & Transform panel) set on an unfortunately large piece of text. Try resetting your paragraph and character properties to default. Assign an unmodified paragraph style and see if that corrects this issue.

If you also have Publisher installed, you can find that via Document > Font Manager (toward the bottom of the Document menu). I don't find anything analogous in pure Designer. The Export persona might be a good place for it.

I find text styles essential for body-focused documents (books, brochures, reports), and less useful for display-focused documents (posters, web graphics, advertising splashes). If you are throwing up 20 different kinds of artistic text on a page, you probably don't need text styles.

+100 Absolutely. Color management is already complex, no app should doing "here, let me just quietly make this change for you" on any input file or device, monitor or other display, export file format, or print device. All color profile assignments must be explicit. No implicit, automatic profile overrides of a system- or file-associated profile. All profile assignments must be settable by the user, and resettable to the system- or file-associated profile.

Dick, see if you can find an app which converts ACVs to ICC profiles. While use of terminology differs, a LUT usually only applies to display devices like monitors. To affect color conversion in a workflow headed to a printer, an ICC profile is the general thing you want. And ICC profiles can be applied to display devices, too, but you clearly want a different ICC profile for a monitor than a printer loaded with custom inks.

Ranting is fine, and I hope you didn't take offense at a difference in opinion. As to when we might see a change or the addition of a user preference... Who knows? This thread is already in the feature request/feedback section, so we can hope someone from Affinity would have a look at it.

@Dazmondo77My personal preference is the opposite of yours, complete with opinion about "the only sane option". But I certainly support creating an option/preference setting which lets the user choose their desired behavior as the default. Example: 2018-2019 in CorelDRAW, I worked up a series of 39 documents , each with dozens or hundreds of graphic elements whose stroke and patterned fill all had to match exactly. Yet I had to occasionally scale these elements to get them positioned without gaps. However, when I went to create the cover graphics, using a selection of those elements, I wanted to really scale them up and have the stroke and patterned fill scale with the objects. So almost all the time, I had scale-with-object turned off, when one specific workflow where I had to turn it on. And, yes, I did forget to turn it on before doing the scaling several times during the production of those 39 documents. It was that project that made me realize that you really want to be able to control additional aspects of fill transforming, or not transforming, with the objects. For example, the "origin" of patterned fills. Sometimes you want the fill to be aligned across multiple objects, a la text baselines. Other times you want the fill to restart independently for each object. And a point I've made elsewhere, in CorelDRAW (as in several other illustration packages) but not in the Affinity suite, graphic styles behave like text styles. They are "live". If you make changes to a style, all objects assigned that style are automatically updated. So when I had to tweak the stroke and patterned fill of those dozens or hundreds of graphic elements (and such editorial changes were made several times during the course of the project), I could do it once per file, as all the graphic elements had relevant styles assigned.

Play with contrast. You've shown an image with very subdued highlights, and generally modest contrast. Try a curve adjustment to knock down the whites into the lighter greys.