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sfriedberg

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Everything posted by sfriedberg

  1. As a PhD in Computer Science (1988 University of Rochester), whose day job was in OS internals for decades (file systems and network protocol stacks) and is now in complex data visualization including GUI work, I largely disagree with you. There is a large element of craft. But if you are not using mathematical principles and engineering methodology, you are doing it wrong. Full stop. I could entertain the argument that CS is not science, but only by the same arguments that one would argue that mathematics is not science, and that debate is not going to be settled in our lifetime. (E.g., is mathematics a process of discovery or of invention?) [Added in edit] My grad school divided CS into Systems (i.e., operating systems, networks, databases), Theory of Computation, and Artificial Intelligence. None of those divisions lack engineering, mathematics, or science. (Well, maybe ToC didn't have much engineering at UR.) And UR had/has a strong cross-disciplinary Cognitive Science group, which absolutely involves science, in the traditional testable laboratory sense, as well as mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. You can work on a car without knowing a lot about engineering, and without knowing anything about logistics or factory production. You can even customize your car by installing a fancy new sound system or shiny wheels. But no amount of "art" will let you design and build a car from scratch, much less produce a model line of reliable cars. Similarly, no amount of "art" will let you design and build a reliable, efficient, software system on time and on budget if you lack (or refuse to apply) the appropriate mathematical and engineering tools.
  2. That ship has sailed, sir. Beta activity takes place before public release. V2 has had its public release. There won't be a public beta for V2 at this point. If you have feedback to give, by all means give it here, and let it be heard.
  3. Yeah, I can't select the text directly from the Layers panel, but it does let me get the cursor into the table. Once Publisher cooperates that far, normal mouse selection seems to work within the table, even if I jump from one cell to another.
  4. If you mean a regular brick pattern, but the individual bricks are a bit distinctive (chipped, warped, set imperfectly), it may be easiest to start with an exactly regular pattern of equally sized rectangles, convert the rectangles to curves, then add points to the curves and tweak them appropriately. You don't have to do an entire wall this way. You can tweak a repeating/tiling group, then replicate and offset the group. If you combine that with brick coloring variations whose repeat pattern (if any) does not align with the tweaked brick group repeat, you get a pretty convincing "old brick" wall. If you mean a dressed fieldstone or ashlar wall, where blocks are substantially different in size and shape from one another, there are a couple of ways to proceed. One way is to start with a fine square or rectangular grid as snapping guides, and a pair of dice. Work left to right (or the reverse) and bottom to top. Roll the dice to get height and width in terms of grid lines for a block. Always use the larger dimension as the width. You may want to limit proportions so you don't have 1x6 rectangles, or you might like that. Draw a rectangle for the block at an appropriate place in the wall you are building up, like playing Tetris. If a block must span over gaps in lower layers, create blocks to fill the gaps. Do as the brick wall above to add irregularities to the block outlines. If you want noticeable mortar joints (many ashlar walls are laid dry, without visible mortar), use the contour tool before adding irregularities to shrink the blocks for a consistent mortar seam width.
  5. As an option, yes. Frequently, I do not want (bitmap) fill to be warped, as a deliberate design choice. Consider these two workflows: 1) Create a shape, warp the shape, then apply an unwarped fill to the warped shape. 2) Create a shape, apply an unwarped fill to the unwarped shape, warp the shape (and contained fill). In both cases, there is an initial shape, a fill, and a warp group, but the ordering of operations is different and the visual results are different. When expressing the order of operations through a layer/group nesting hierarchy, you'd expect the 1st workflow to have the fill associated with the warp group, not the shape, and in the 2nd workflow, the fill would be associated with the shape inside the warpgroup. That's not how the current system works. AFAIK there is no way to apply a fill "to a warp group", and applying the fill to the inner nested shape does not currently warp the fill.
  6. It seems to be a progression from the "modern" borderless window/button UI stylings. That's not a justification or a validation, just an explanation. It's clear you write your questions with considerable sarcasm, or at least tongue firmly planted in cheek. So I will play straight man and reply "None", "None" and "No, quite the contrary." IMO, this is a clear defeat for Usability at the cruel hands of Style.
  7. Yes, this is very annoying. I much more frequently have pinned tables rather than pinned text frames, and for those I select the table in the Layers panel. Then I can easily get a cursor inside the table. I will have to try the ALT-click tip to see if it works with tables, too.
  8. I am one of many people who would like dynamic graphic styles which act like text styles. But this is a feature request for something different, which works within the limitations of AffDes's existing graphic styles. When tweaking the appearance of a drawing, it is pretty common that I want to change some aspect of a style before I settle on the final appearance. Right now, the workflow for updating styles is pretty terrible (even ignoring the absence of dynamic graphic styles). I make the changes to some curve or shape, then create a new style from it, delete the old style, then rename the new style to have the now-deleted old style's name. (And, of course, reapply the new style to every element in the drawing that needs it, thus the desire for dynamic graphic styles.) It would be significantly faster if the Styles panel hamburger menu, or the right-click context menu on individual styles, had an entry for Update Style From Selection.
  9. End of the line, generally not end of the sentence. So (pardon my vestigial Czech, these are all cut from the web) something like: Jsem z Prahy. or V létě pojedeme k moři. K, S, Z, and V are all one-letter prepositions in Czech. And A and I are one-letter conjunctions.
  10. The "deal" is that the Affinity suite is still in its first release. It is true that Publisher lacks many basic prepress functions, and has poor or limited support for others (like color management). We can hope that the early advertising copy touting "professional" capabilities indicates where the suite is headed. But don't hold your breath. It may be several major releases before some of this stuff appears.
  11. Since this thread has been reopened, I'd like to add two more ways to get part of the desired functionality. In the Text menu, Reapply Text Styles and Reapply Base Styles will affect selected text. (I have not systematically tested with simply planting the cursor in a paragraph.) However, I can never remember what the effect of each action is, because the menu names aren't super distinctive. Reapply Text Styles removes all local formatting, leaving both paragraph and character styles. Reapply Base Styles removes all local formatting and character styles, leaving paragraph styles. So Text > Reapply Base Styles seems to address one of the original desires to remove all formatting except the paragraph style.
  12. @L Fritze, the --no-dwm-warning flag worked perfectly well for me on Windows 7. I used the Affinity suite with that flag, quite happily, over an extended period (18 months?). I did finally take the plunge and upgrade the W7 system to W10, but this was driven by considerations other than the Affinity suite.
  13. Actually, this is the intended effect of a feature that frequently catches newcomers off-guard. Down at the bottom right of every text frame there are two corner drag handles. One resizes the frame, and the contents reflows to fit. The other rescales the frame, including its contents. It is a very common mistake for people to drag the rescale handle, and then come to the forums asking why their text is all too big or too small, but only in certain frames. On several occasions, I have wished that I could build a hierarchy of styles where font sizes were expressed proportionally relative to the parent style, rather than in absolute sizes. I.e., define a child style font size change to 0.85 the parent size, rather than to 10pt. I resign myself to the lack of that feature by telling myself I'd probably want to tweak the results by hand anyway. If you built a style hierarchy that way, just changing the size on the Base style would ripple down through all the descendants automatically. There is absolutely nothing stopping the Affinity suite from presenting (and allowing edits on) font sizes in relative mode, rather than absolute mode, regardless of how style properties are stored internally. But I think the OP got the clean, and desired, behavior from rescaling all the text frames.
  14. For what it's worth, I have a technical document which uses IPA combining diacritics U+031F and U+0320 to place plus and minus signs below various letters. Using Cambria italic, this seems to export correctly to PDF with AffPub 1.10.5.1342 on Windows 10. However, this is a simpler case than the original (only one combining diacritic at a time), and I have not formally validated the PDF, only viewed it and printed it. test.pdf
  15. The book and booklet modes for Publisher are a tiny little entry into the field of imposition, which is based on folding large sheets into signatures for binding into a book. These modes are not what you want if you just want to print pages two-up. For that, use the two-up feature of your printer, not the imposition features of Publisher.
  16. I would construct a dummy document with the appropriate sizing, general layout and style definitions (etc.) then save it as a template. Or even just save it, and make sure to Save As a different file when opening it to start a new document. [Added in edit] Spacing between objects is a bit harder to capture, but if you routinely put the objects in frames, you could pre-define some assets with appropriate insets to handle part of the requirement.
  17. I don't understand why people do this. Presumably NPM's comments/hints were useful, but now he/she has gone and edited away all the text, replacing it with "N.P.M." I have seen other people do similar things when they find they cannot delete their postings altogether, but I do not understand the motivation one bit.
  18. I've noticed something similar with placed SVG images/files, and I'm sure it's from the same basic print engine cause, and totally bypasses the question of PDF interpretation. If I export from AffPub, then print the PDF, I get nice crisp vector graphics at the printer's limiting resolution. If I print directly from AffPub, I get rasterized graphics with artifacts that are not difficult to spot. This has not been a major problem (because export to PDF for better-than-draft printing is not a problem), but I had been meaning to discuss the issue. This seems like an appropriate time and place.
  19. I don't recommend this as a general practice, but you can go into the paragraph properties on a numbered list paragraph and make the start number whatever you want. So if you can't hack the styles to do what you want automatically, you can repair any numbered list that restarts when you don't want it to restart.
  20. I think Glinkot and PauloT are in violent agreement about the utility of tables spanning (many) pages. The difference in viewpoint seems to be "I use Publisher for publishing, so it needs to support it!" versus "If I need to make catalogs now, why would I even attempt to use Publisher?" I suspect we all agree that getting the functionality into Publisher would be a positive thing.
  21. If we treat this as a database problem, you need to create/script a query on your catalog that joins the necessary tables and produces a (single) file for use with Publisher data merge. That way, your database stays nice and normalized (non-redundant), and there's a procedure for getting the data formatted properly for Publisher.
  22. Would be especially nice if we got that together with the ability to auto-flow tables across page boundaries without manual intervention (like cutting the table contents into page-sized bites).
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