sfriedberg

I remember Expression very well. The vector skeleton which included stroke width as well as position, combined with clever image- or vector-based stroke rendering, was exceptional. If that combination of features finds its way into Affinity Designer, I would be ecstatic. As an experienced Rhinoceros CAD and CorelDRAW graphics design user, I have a lot of familiarity with tweaking B-splines (there is a intimate mathematical relationship between B-splines and chains of Bezier curve segments). But the Expression stroke rendering is something I've not seen in another application.

I have no objection to activating the Desktop Window Manager service. It's the Aero requirement that I object to. I tried manually starting the DWM service, without switching to an Aero theme, but Affinity Publisher was not satisfied with that situation.

As a long-time user of Ventura Publisher (until Corel killed it) and no fan of the software-as-subscription licensing model, I was pleased to see the release of Affinity Publisher. I'm using Windows 7 Pro 64-bit on my primary graphics workstation. (It's not broken, it has a lot of $$$ software installed, so I don't plan to "fix" it.) The requirement for enabling Aero is absolutely unique to Publisher. I have literally dozens of paint programs, vector drawing programs, document layout programs, video editing programs, color correction programs, 3D CAD programs, and none of them require me to use Aero. Until I played with the Publisher trial, I don't believe I have had an Aero theme active on this workstation since the initial OS installation well over a decade ago. I find even the most stripped down Aero theme garish and repulsive on a machine whose background is intended to be as unobtrusive and neutral as possible to avoid distracting from the content being worked on. If at all possible, please find a way to eliminate the need to turn on an Aero theme for Publisher release 2. To be perfectly clear: My workstation is entirely capable of running Aero. If anything, the graphics accelerator and its drivers are massively overqualified for the task. I don't want to run Aero, because Microsoft made it impossible to create an unobtrusive Aero theme. So, when I need to launch Affinity Publisher, I switch to the least-obnoxious Aero settings, and when I am done using Publisher, I immediately switch back to what I've been using for over 10 years.