gaufde

I completely agree! Please add robust relative path support. To me, this seems like a relatively small software change that will make a huge improvement for users.

Hi support & forum,
I use the cloud for collaborate work.
The problem with linked resource: On other machine, the path will not match and we have to relink each resource.

So currently I can't find a solution to use linked file in collaborate work, because the link is absolut!

Would be great to could set «path relative from current file».

Currently I can only link resources «absolute»:


The path is clickable but not changeable:

Would be great to change link-path to relative:
Maybe if this could change (path editable) of our own: with (os x) 2 dots and slash, for «from current file -> one directory down and then ...» -> go to (E.g.) directory «Media» and use the file «Image.png» within.



Advantages:
This would make it possible
to use the linked resource also on other machines. to simplify the use of new directory-structure.  to move old projects to other destinations (external drive/cloud/...). ...
Maybe there is such a solution, but I can't find it.
If anybody has a hint or work-around, I would love it ;o))

Otherwise Feature-Request: I'm sure, to use a relative path would help a lot of «professionals» to work more with an ease.

Regards
Martin
 
 

I purchased Designer and Photo years ago but I just couldn't replace Illustrator & Photoshop because of a few missing features that are just workflow basics. I've moved to the Windows platform and just downloaded new trial versions of them to give them another chance, and these problems persist. Most of them relate to features that prevent the user from making critical, unprofessional mistakes like inconsistent color use across multiple documents. If you are deigning a flyer, a business card and a name badge, you can't have variations between them. These are a few [very] minor omissions that I am missing that risks me making amateurish mistakes:
- Global swatches don't carry to another document when copy-n-pasting a logo from one document to another (same as in Publisher)
- Swatches not carrying over to the new document also means that overprint setting are lost because overprint is defined in the swatch, not in the object.
- I can't tell what color mode I'm working in. If my mode is RGB for a flyer, I need something to shout out at me, or at least give me a clue that my print job is going to be disaster. A simple RGB/CMYK icon would suffice. Even Photo displays its color mode in the document's header, but Designer [where it's more important] doesn't.
- The colour picker only picks up RGB/CMYK values, not a global swatch. Even if I've pasted a logo into a new document and it's displaying a global color, the eyedropper doesn't read it as a global color so I can't even reliably copy colors from my source logo. 
- To duplicate an object by dragging it, I have to press the Alt key before I select the object, not during the drag. Most of the time, I need to be certain I have selected the correct object before I duplicate it, however, now I have to duplicate something and then find out if I selected correctly. I don't know how many times I have moved items I want to duplicate and duplicated items I didn't want to duplicate because of this. An application is not fast to work in if I'm constantly undoing my actions.
- Changing the colors of margins & guides. If I design a blue brochure, my margins and guides disappear. I need to make them red or yellow or anything. I don't expect to be able to mix my own colors, but a dozen pre-mixed swatches to choose from would solve this problem. (apart from working in wireframe mode)
- Connecting the selected transform corner in the transform palette to the free transform with the move tool. It's very strange that I can select a corner in the transform palette, but then I always rotate around the center. I have to manually type rotation values in degrees to get the rotation around a corner. Why the disconnect? This disconnect is similar to the disconnect I experience between the swatches, color mixer and eye dropper.
- Previewing at export. Even in Photo, I can't see the effect of the level of JPEG compression being applied to my exported files (neither in Designer nor Photo). I have to export a file half a dozen times until I hit upon that sweet spot of small file size to barely noticable quality loss. Even the open source GIMP does this with a live preview at export. I can do awesome professional work, and then break it all with a poor export... and not even realise it.
- Proofing colors. I really need to be able to see how my colors will separate before I save my PDF. If I've accidentally worked in RGB, this will reveal my mistake as I go to repro. Overprinting and knockout will also be a disaster if not picked up in time. (Who here hasn't experienced the dreaded white text set to overprint and wondered where all your text went?). This feature alone forces me to keep a professional, licensed copy of Adobe Acrobat around to preview color separations. In my final repro file, I have to know if my spot colors are still spots and if I'm printing fine black text as 100% black, or a full color breakdown that will turn my single color print job into a full color one. Previewing the separations (or channels in your photo editor) points out my potential errors.
- Overprinting settings. The previous point leads straight into this one. Why is over printing set in the swatch and not the object? If I want some small paragraph text to over print, but large display text to knockout, I have to make 2 identical black swatches to do this. Why can't I specify this on an object-by-object basis? I guess "Multiply" does the same thing and works as a work-around, but you're targeting print designers, and use the term overprint yourselves so why the strange and risky implementation.
- Snapping to "round" values. When manually selecting a color in CMYK, we are inevitably creating a color using round number values from a color chart. It's slow and frustrating trying to select exactly 50% in a slider as it hops from 49 to 51 and back again while we search for that perfect pixel placement. How about snapping to increments of 5% by holding down the shift key? Your snapping features are awesomely powerful, but only in the document. Why not extend this into the sliders and the rest of the application? (Admittedly, I don't know any other application that does this, but it makes sense and would be welcome.)
 
Basic features that are even in open source software seem to be missing. We waited for years to get arrow heads. You claimed it was because you wanted to get it awesome, but they are no more powerful/different to anything else out there on the market. I suspect we only got them when Publisher was released. Did we have to wait for a whole new app to be leased to get arrow heads? Now we sit with other missing basic, common features like:
- Blend/Interpolate
- Stroke drawing tools like a grid tool and a straight line tool. These are enormous time savers.
- Tabs. (I understand you want to protect Publisher by keeping high end text features like hyphenation, drop-caps and text wrap out of Designer, but this feels like a very basic feature compared to your range of kerning, alignment and Opentype features already here from day one)
 
I understand that everyone's needs are different and you can't satisfy everyone, but you are targeting print designers as well and illustrators and web designers, and  these are all features every professional expects and is surprising that they're not here. You give us features that most professionals just leave on the defaults because few of us even understand them (like color profiles and LUTs), but then drop the ball by not pasting a global swatch from one document to another.
It's confusing and just doesn't make me feel confident in the files I send to print.
Please can you look at these issues before adding new features. I understand that new features are needed to sell products, but a lot of us early adopters are just wondering where the small tweaks and refinements are.
It seems that your development team needs to consult with an old school designer or printer to get these fundamentals right. It feels like you've only got young designers who have grown up with an RGB workflow and have never had to bang out 6 flyers in an afternoon and send them to print with the job being rejected.
 
 

I just played around with the new features a bit and they look great!
@MattP how hard would it be to integrate the contour tool with the power duplicate feature? I'm thinking it would be cool to be able to duplicate a shape, add a contour, and then power duplicate to keep creating "nested" shapes.

I just played around with the new features a bit and they look great!
@MattP how hard would it be to integrate the contour tool with the power duplicate feature? I'm thinking it would be cool to be able to duplicate a shape, add a contour, and then power duplicate to keep creating "nested" shapes.

I just played around with the new features a bit and they look great!
@MattP how hard would it be to integrate the contour tool with the power duplicate feature? I'm thinking it would be cool to be able to duplicate a shape, add a contour, and then power duplicate to keep creating "nested" shapes.

I just played around with the new features a bit and they look great!
@MattP how hard would it be to integrate the contour tool with the power duplicate feature? I'm thinking it would be cool to be able to duplicate a shape, add a contour, and then power duplicate to keep creating "nested" shapes.

I do agree that many professional editors and publishers do not use LaTeX. In fact, I'm mostly thinking about my own personal use, of course. But honestly, although I admit it's strictly a thing of preference, I never found any click-GUI-based solution better than good ol' LaTeX. I've tried MathML myself, as well as Mathematica/Maple/Matlab and different flavours of LaTeX and editors. I, for one, love things text-based, for example, for around 2 years, I'm living in the plain-text world almost exclusively (with Markdown and LaTeX).
 
Formula integration, without actually relying on LaTeX is a good idea and I see its benefits. The main problem is that for my use, at least, I'm integrating the drawing into a LaTeX-typeset document, so there are a lot of concerns about the fonts (which I like customizing, away from the "Times" and the classical serif that LaTeX uses).
 
Again, I cannot speak about professional publishers and editors and there may be a reason why InDesign + MathML or other plugins are industry standards. But I started the discussion completely from a personal point of view.
 
At the present time, I would use LaTeXiT over any alternative any day. I use my own preambles and font preferences, mostly relying on built-in libraries and styles and I love it. I was mostly thinking about this kind of integration inside Affinity Designer.
 
But yes, I do agree that I'm a niche user and maybe it would not make a lot of sense for the majority to have such a feature. Nevertheless, I'm happy to see some echo.
 
As for a non-destructive graph plotting tool for Designer...man, that sounds like heaven! :) (although most likely not going to happen, given the main target and philosophy of the app)
 
Thanks for the replies, great to read them!

Hi All,
Thanks for the help and interest so far!
I just did a few more tests to try and isolate the issue.
First, it appears that the program crashes mainly when I have the move tool active while I use cmd+c to copy the layer.
The conflict appears to be coming from keyboard maestro (8.2.4) , and so I was able to solve that issue in keyboard maestro preferences > Excluded > The following applications are excluded from the clipboard history unless you explicitly read the clipboard. I then added Photo to that excluded list.
This made it so that my steps outlined in the first post no longer cause a crash; however, I haven't been able to test this more thoroughly with other files.
It still seems like there could be some sort of bug present based on what Puck and madflute (from the other thread) have described.

Hi All,
Thanks for the help and interest so far!
I just did a few more tests to try and isolate the issue.
First, it appears that the program crashes mainly when I have the move tool active while I use cmd+c to copy the layer.
The conflict appears to be coming from keyboard maestro (8.2.4) , and so I was able to solve that issue in keyboard maestro preferences > Excluded > The following applications are excluded from the clipboard history unless you explicitly read the clipboard. I then added Photo to that excluded list.
This made it so that my steps outlined in the first post no longer cause a crash; however, I haven't been able to test this more thoroughly with other files.
It still seems like there could be some sort of bug present based on what Puck and madflute (from the other thread) have described.

What strange behavior! This almost intrigues me more than the actual bug itself.
 
Also, I found a similar thread right after I posted here. MEB's reply asks if the OP of that thread had any sort of clipboard managers/similar utilities running in background. I don't know about you, Puck, but I have Alfred and Keyboard Maestro (and some other utilities like Hazel) running in the background so it looks like I will have to try some more tests to isolate if any of them are causing issues.
 

I would like Sreif to bring back "real" vector brush from DrawPlus to Affinity.
Affinity's vector brush is actually a raster brush stroke with a curve, pseudo vector brush.
Why this has been changed when Affinity was developed?

In no particular order:
Bug fixes Develop persona: Batch processing and non-destructive RAW development (sidecar files) Develop persona: Eyedropper for white balance Develop persona: Support for CHDK DNG opcodes / dead pixel interpolation Develop persona: Wider parameter range for adjustments that are limited to 25% or 50% today (saturation, for example) Develop persona: Better support for OnePlus DNG files (currently they always get a green tint and almost no saturation whatsoever - Lightroom handles them correctly in these regards) and other RAW/DNG files that have similar problems in Affinity today Photo persona: Numeric parameters in Curves Photo persona: Eyedroppers for whitepoint, blackpoint and graypoint in Levels and Curves Photo persona: Numeric parameters in auto adjustments (auto color, auto contrast, auto levels etc) Photo persona: Both Fill and Opacity parameters like in Photoshop, especially for "special" blend modes like Hard Mix - and fix the wording in the Layer Effects window that says "Fill opacity" - it's just regular opacity, same as the one in the layers list. Photo and Develop persona: Crop tool extended with "Crop to bounds" and "Crop to opaque" like in Panorama mode Any slider, particularly in Develop and Tonemapping personas: Doubleclick to reset slider to zero/default.

Yes please, add seamless pattern function to affinity designer. And possibility to save it as a pattern swatch in Studio panel

@Sean P
Just downloaded the 1.8.3 RC Betas for Designer and Photo. I discovered that the zoom problems outlined above remain a problem.
In my opinion, this basic level of functionality should be addressed sooner rather than later. Maybe it's more difficult to fix than I can understand, but I imagine little bugs like these zoom behaviors and feedback would undermine new customers' confidence in the Affinity line of apps. 
Adding new features like Autotrace or Live Warp filters may be a big ask appropriate for a 2.0 release, but restoring the functionality of the zoom behaviors and feedback should be a priority even for these point releases to 1.8.x
Thanks,
Mark

Very glad to see the Affinity Apps import Adobe "Smart Objects" as equivalent "Embedded Document" layers.
I have a few questions:
In Adobe Photoshop, the primary usefulness of "Smart Object" layers is the ability to apply non-destructive distortions and transforms to the layer artwork. Do you plan for "Embedded Document" layers to share the same functional property?  In Adobe Photoshop, one can right click on a layer and convert it into a "Smart Object" layer to be used in non-destructive distortions and transforms. Do you plan to add that functionality to Photo? Can one right click on a layer in Photo and convert it into an "Embedded Document / Smart Object" layer? Is there a plan to allow both the Perspective and Mesh Warp tools to be applied non-destructively to "Embedded Document / Smart Object" layers? This is relevant to those of us who build mockups of packaging and 3D objects, where the need is to convincingly shape and apply logos and other artwork to boxes and bottles, and still have the ability to replace the artwork in the "Embedded Document / Smart Object" layer.   Is there any chance that Affinity "Embedded Document" layers can be exported out to PSD files as "Smart Object" layers rather than flattened raster layers?  

I think I just found a small bug in the Resize Canvas feature. When resizing the canvas by a small amount, say a change of 0.25 inches in one dimension, the constrain proportions feature doesn't work. Instead, only one of the document sizes is changes and aspect ratio isn't preserved. Affinity Photo 1.7.3, Mac OS 10.14.6.