sfriedberg

I am a longtime CorelDRAW user and the CD blend tool is extremely powerful. I'd like to see Affinity Designer have a comparable blend tool, and enhance (and bullet proof) the contour tool to the level of CD.

When using the lasso to tweak your selection, turn on Antialias and/or set Feather to something like 1 px, 2 px or 3 px, instead of zero. Or, turn on Quick Mask and use the paint tools, setting a low Hardness on the tools.

I'll repeat a comment I made in another recent thread: I really wish Affinity had adopted the direction of directing side/foot/end/bib-notes into a stream ("story") and let the streams be assigned to user-specified linked text frames together with some selection of pin/float controls that related the reference marker position to the reference body position (in different text frames). The latter part would seem to be the harder part!

So basically, if you make a selection "off the grid", you want automatic feathering of the affected area based on the proportion of the selection that falls within a given boundary pixel? If so, you can probably approximate this yourself using masks while waiting for Serif to act on a feature request. And you should make that feature request. Are you doing pixel art or other super-blocky style? If not, I wonder if a simple smoothing operation at the boundary would serve as well as this more precise auto-feathering. If you do expect people to see the individual pixels, smoothing would look somewhat different, I am sure.

If Designer had more powerful blend groups (thinking of CorelDRAW style blends which interpolate both shape and color between arbitrary vector shapes, to any desired number of intermediate steps), you could get the effect of warping a gradient by drawing a few overlapped shapes of distinct color and blending between "adjacent" shapes. If you want to tweak the warp, just delete the blend groups (leaving the original shapes), and edit the shapes so their outlines better define the desired warp, then put the blend groups back on. I don't know how Vector VonDoom has the patience to do his vector-based shading without an industrial strength blend tool.

I would also like to see MathML support. I would prefer that Affinity spend its time on a more general tagged text replacement plugin system, and build equations, bibliographic reference processing, and lots of apparently unrelated things on top of that text replacement system. In fact, they should publish the plugin API and let the user community build the specific plugins. Such a system needs to take "tagged marked up" text of some variety, pass it through the plugin appropriate for the tag, and then replace the tagged marked up text with the output of the plugin, for the purposes of flow and typesetting. The tagged marked up text remains in the Affinity document, and possibly will be replaced with different output in the future. That's the view from 50,000 feet. Lots of details to work out, and you probably don't want a raw text replacement, but rather something based on a well-defined document object model (DOM) so you can insert images and multiline equation display blocks and something that supports fully styled text. That means Affinity would have to open the kimono at least slightly in defining the public API. Furthermore, to support complex 2D equation display blocks "natively", you need access to a lot more than character styling controls. You can do it with CSS controls, but in general you need nested 2D regions with inherited styling. That would have to be exposed through the DOM. The alternative is for the plugin to generate an SVG file (or something similar) and insert the image as the replacement "text", which is how I currently get my non-inline equations into Publisher.

I really wish Serif had structured notes a bit differently. I would have preferred a notes stream ("story" if you prefer), which could be assigned to any user generated (set of linked) text frames. If that had been accompanied by some pin/float references between notes and their reference marks, the result would have been more flexible. Actually, I would have preferred multiple, and more general, notes streams, because there are times I would like to use both end notes (text) and bibliographic references, and it seems pretty obvious to use the same basic mechanism for both, end note tags generating one stream, bib ref tags generating another, and both being mapped into appropriate series of linked text frames at the end of the section.

Some of us have seen the evolution (including ingestion of 3rd party technology) of other companies' graphics suites, such as CorelDRAW and PhotoPaint (current relabeled Corel Graphics Suite). I first used CorelDRAW 3. Not 13, not X3, not 23. Three. In comparison to the current CGS it was a kludgy, ugly, inconvenient, limited and annoying piece of software. The CorelDRAW 5 release was a tremendous step forward. Over the years, it has evolved to the point where I don't even bother looking at new releases more than every 4 or 5 years, because it's stable, reasonably comprehensive and I don't care for UI tweaks just to accomodate the latest trend (flat buttons, dark mode, disappearing scrollbars, no thank you). A user of CorelDRAW 3 would be justified in bitching about missing features, counter-intuitive UI design, awkward controls, and bugs. But if they predicted that CD would never be usable, and no professional would ever consider it in the future, they would be quite incorrect. Despite Corel's persistent corporate mismanagement, they manage to maintain some perfectly usable software. They brought in technology from Xara, which added a lot of functionality (and, I believe, considerable numeric stability). There are aspects of CorelDRAW I consider superior to the industry reference (and 800lb gorilla) Illustrator. They also completely abandoned Corel (formerly Ventura, formerly GEM) Publisher, which is what drew me to the Affinity suite in the first place. Some good decisions, some bad decisions. Everybody has their own list of "must have" features. Release 1 of the Affinity Suite didn't have some of the things on my list. That did not make it useless, because not every job requires every tool. But it did mean I had to fall back on other SW to do some of my work. Release 2 has filled in some of those missing pieces, but some of them are still quite rocky and I'd hope for continued improvement. There are still things missing, but I can do more of my work in the Affinity suite, and I expect this progress to continue. Meliora spero, it's not for you to decide that Affinity is dead. That's a decision for the marketplace. And it's not going to be decided by Affinity release 2 any more than the life or death of CGS was decided by CorelDRAW release 3. Furthermore, you are not accomplishing anything by repetitious venting about how you think Affinity is dead. You've made your opinion crystal clear. While my "must have" list is undoubtedly different from your, the Affinity suite is missing some essential features. Unless your principle is "misery loves company" and your object is to make everyone else miserable, consider your point well made and drop it.

The community can't help you sort this out without access to some or all of the files you're working on.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

You are correct. My mental model presents a facing-page master as two master pages, but it's not the same thing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Is there a reason no one suggested simply drawing two straight lines between the existing curved sidewall endpoints then combining the curves?

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.

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?

Because I have about 50 3"x3" artboards in the Designer document? Because I also need the SVGs for alternate (web) presentations of the content? Because it's a workflow I am comfortable with?

Similar experience. I usually make illustrations in Designer, export them in SVG, and place them in Publisher. When I use layer masks for cropping in Designer, the results often do not pass through Publisher correctly. I was able to work around this by using EPS instead of SVG for the relatively few affected illustrations. I have also noticed where printing directly from Publisher is not as clean as exporting to PDF from Publisher and printing the PDF. SVG (vector) images (without transparency, masking or other problematic features) made in Designer and placed in Publisher come out on (the same) printer noticeably coarser and with inferior text rasterization than exporting to PDF first then printing.