sfriedberg

CorelDRAW also does a pretty good job of this sort of thing. I would not buy a CD license just for this function, but as I've already got it, it's what I would do the simplification in. Actually, given the current statue of Affinity suite booleans and the just-added contour operator, I would probably do the vector graphic work in CD at this point in time.

You guys are late to the party, but welcome. There are many people who agree with you, and many threads already open on this functional omission.

What are the terms of the contract? Or did you mean to add "for free"? [Added in edit] Is this just a matter of implementing the design in Affinity Publisher, or do you also need design/consultant services? Have you already settled on the book design? Is going to be the sort of deal where you give a hand-wavey general description of what you want, and after 40 hours of labor, you then tell the worker "No, no, that's not right at all. What we really want is more something else."? Or do you have a written-down, with measurements and useful sketches, plan for how you want this 500 page book laid out? Have you selected your fonts? Do you have a style scheme? Is the book broken into sections or chapters which can be worked on independently, or is the text all one giant blob? Is the text raw key strokes (often preferred) or does it come pre-styled in some word processor? If the latter, what word processor, and did you use styles consistently or is it all character overrides all over the place? Does this book involve any significant number (like more than 10 total or 1 on any given page) of footnotes or endnotes? If so, Publisher is not (currently, v1.8) the tool of choice for the task. What is the general subject matter (this will tell us a lot about expectations for the layout)? Casual? Novel? Poetry? Academic? Mathematical? Legal? Standards document? Lots of illustrations? No illustrations?

This might be relevant or this

Because conceptually there is something different about clipping or resizing the (vector) canvas that is not conveyed by intersecting/trimming the contents of vector layers with a rectangle. The implementation may well be the same, but the workflow and mindset are different.

Yes, and exactly which of those search results was an explicit feature request?

By no means a show-stopping omission, but I have a couple of projects in the last 10 years (using other software, obviously) that benefited from custom arrow heads. Basically, you have the list of built-in arrow heads, and also a way of vector drawing new arrow head shapes and indicating where the nominal end of the line falls with respect to the new shape. Once a custom arrow head shape is defined, it gets added to the list of available arrow heads. In the apps I have used, this list is global across all documents, so you define it just once and don't have to explicitly export/import it into every document or define a special template document containing it. [Added in edit] To clarify, I am talking about line end properties, not stroke brushes.

Hahahahaha. Sorry, I shouldn't laugh, but I really can't tell if you are trolling or not. Despite its present shortcomings, Affinity Publisher's ambition is really not to replace $10 shovelware from the local Office Depot or Staples store. They (claim to) aim at professional pre-press layout where document/book design is a significant part of the process. Nobody uses a template to to make a book, because every book design is different. (And volumes 1-24 of Genre Fiction by House Author, all laid out the same, that's a deliberate choice and the series book design was unique.) And clip art? Clip art? This is not the early 1980's when software came on floppies, nor the 1990's when it came on multiple CDs. Today you can find more clip art, free or paid, on the Internet than anyone could possibly cram into an application product package. If you want to complain, complain that AffPub didn't come with a larger variety of built-in links to large Internet stock art sites, but for crying out loud don't complain that it didn't come with polka-dot kittens, plaid teddy bears, and anthropomorphic numbers and letters.

Late to this discussion, but I have another example to add to the case for a richer layer structure. In CorelDRAW, which is my primary vector graphics tool at the moment, I have a family of about 40 related documents. From each document, I export several types of files, including a PDF for double-sided printing by the customer, a set of GIF files (eight to the document page, odd pages only), and two sets of SVG files containing different features (also eight to the document page, odd pages only). These exported files form a product line which I sell. Each document has a number of layers. In addition to the per-page content, there are registration marks for in-house automated cutting, cut marks for customer manual cutting, background pattern for odd pages, static text for even pages, drawing guidelines to assist in drafting new content, and a number of other things. For each of the export formats, some of these layers should be included and some should not. Whenever I make an update to a product, I do the appropriate edits to the per-page content, then export the various output files. To alleviate the tedium, the most laborious parts of the export process have been scripted. In addition to those "global" layers, the per-page content also has layers and this layer structure is highly repetitive across pages. There are two major variants of the content, in separate layers, and each variant is organized into a pair of layers (themselves with nested layer content) which can be exported independently. Different exported files are produced using different sets of per-page content layers. Prints for in-house production are made with a different set of layers than PDF exports for customer production. In Affinity Designer, I can mimic much, but not all, of this structure through the use of separate master pages for odd and even pages, where each master contains several layers. Here are a few things I currently cannot do in AffDes. 1) Global layers in CorelDRAW can be set to any level of the effective per-page layer stack. So I can have the equivalent of one master page providing some layers above all per-page content as well as layers beneath all per-page content. 2) I can turn an individual global layer on and off across the entire document with a single click. 3) Layers in CD can made visible/invisible and made printable/unprintable as independent properties. 4) Layers in CD can be locked. Really locked. 5) Layer manipulations in CD (such as making a layer printable/unprintable) can be scripted. (The lack of scripting in the Affinity suite is a whole separate topic.) However, even in CD I cannot do all that I would like to. For example, I cannot turn the per-page content variants on and off across the entire document with a single click. Instead, one must visit each page and adjust its per-page layer visibility/printability. This is actually a case where AffDes master pages look more convenient than the CD layer structure, as I could define master page layers as placeholders for per-page content.

Oh, October 1 of this year. Let it ripen for another half decade. <wince>

Not for another 10 years, sadly. And I am already a grey beard.

It's because you have the Vertical Alignment on that Text Frame set to "Center Vertically". Look at the Vertical Alignment subpanel of the Text Frame panel. (View Studio to find it if you don't already have it open.) Select that text frame where the text starts about 1/3 of the way down. Select the icon on the left for "Top Align".

You're not alone. Please see You can also try dragging one point (with the Node Tool) over the second point until the yellow snapping cue appears superimposed over the curve belonging to the second point. (Assuming you have the appropriate snapping options turned on.) I find that too fussy to be practical for more than one or two joins.

Look at the Text Frame panel. You can set insets separately for left, right, top and bottom of any text frame. If you don't currently have the Text Frame panel showing, open the View menu on the toolbar and find it there.

You mean the Leading field in the Paragraph > Spacing subpanel? That sets the style value, for which the Character > Positioning and Transform subpanel's Leading Override is in fact a local override. In other words, don't set the paragraph style leading in the Character panel. Set it in the Paragraph panel. Apply the leading override in the Character panel only to "clown shoe" characters that don't fit the body font without adjustment. I agree that having font size and leading not immediately adjacent to one another can be annoying when you are used to it. But when I have the Paragraph panel at the top of the studio stack, and one of the text tools selected, the font size on the context toolbar and the leading on the Paragraph > Spacing subpanel are only about 1.5" apart on my screen.