crow

Hello! Been using AD for some time now, really liking it. Thanks for the great product!
 
However, I’ve got an issue with text layers when exported to PSD—they get rasterized. I've tried exporting large documents as well as documents with just a single line of text—the results are the same.
 
Any advice please?

Kudos on the great app. 
 
 
This is a fairly basic ease of use suggestion...
 
When you are dragging a selection box/circle or dragging out a shape, it'd be splendid if holding down the spacebar would move the selection/object. 
 
 
This makes it easy to get an exact selection... or enables you to size and position in one simple move saving a lot of futzing and keeping you in flow. 
 
This interaction can be found while taking a native screenshot on your mac (shift+cmd+4+drag... + hold spacebar) or on all the other drawing apps made by the company named after dirt bricks.... and Affinity is better than dirt bricks' products.
 
 

It would be great if the rulers had the following functionality:
 
Right-click: change units
Cllick and drag on the upper left corner: Set the page's origin (zero point)
Shit-drag: moves the guides in whole digit and fractional increments (0.25", 0.5", etc.) This could also be a Preference setting (increments).
 
Additional unit: Percentage (of document width and height), so I can drop a guide at 25%, 50% of the width or height of document... real handy :)

Please enable the ability to force a locked layer to become a snapping candidate. Often times I lock layers so I don't accidentally edit them, but periodically I still want to snap other objects to them.
 
A suggestion would be to hover over a locked layer while holding Alt (to ignore the fact that it's locked) to add that layer to the snapping candidates.

Hello!
 
 
As a Fine Art Printmaker who uses Computer Design tools to create prints for Screen Printing, Lithography, and Intaglio, CNC woodcut,  it would be amazing if 
 
I could separate colors and control half tones size shape (line, dot, etc) and color.  
 
I imagine being able to work in CMYK layers and being able to apply color halftones to shapes based on percentages, or change the size and shape of the individual color channel half toning. 
 
It could be applied in any document setup really  
 
 RGB document with a simulated color / spot process: Red, Yellow, Blue, Purple, Green, Turquoise, Grey and control the halftone percentage, size and shape.
 
grey scale: black, 25% grey, 15% transparent white
 
LAB would be fun, you could control the lightness darkness of the halftones maybe have an option to constrain the gamut inside of lab to a specific set of colors like CMYK but still have lightness control. 
 
In my imagination the possibilities are endless for options like this. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
"MOONSHOT" : to have RIP like printing control inside this program, where I wouldn't have to worry about the printer I am on to get circular halftones (this might be next to impossible but I am ignorant when it comes to the programming side of hardware interactions) this would be just insane and might require a new type of universal file format I have no idea but it's something I dream about, being able to go to Kinko's or some other local digital print shop and be able to print out my files without having to worry about the print shop getting the settings right in their computers and on their printers, the employees being inept, or any other stupid thing that happens because you don't have enough money to buy the hardware that you need.
 
 
 
and finally
 
 
 
 
"MOONSHOT": A new type of color selection palette based off of a Warm/Cool, light/dark, transparent/opaque
 
warm adds red
cool adds blue
lightness adds white
darkness adds black
transparent/opaque self explanatory 
 
but the twist is you pick initial colors as a base and those colors become the colors you base rest of the interactions between the colors on like paint
 
For example:
 
Here is a shorthand RGB two way conversion to Paint/Ink color palette equivalent 
 
 
Red (Pantone Uncoated 032)
Yellow (Pantone Uncoated 123)
Blue (Pantone Uncoated 300)
Purple (Pantone Purple)
Green (Pantone Uncoated 354)
Turquoise (Pantone Uncoated 312)
Grey (Pantone Cool Grey 8)
100% opacity White
15% opacity White
mixed or printers black (R 54, G 54, B 57)
Black
 
 
now imagine you have picked these colors as your initial palette and have set them inside of a grid 
 
each color has the same basic controls
 
warm/cool:                    add red/add blue
light/dark:                      add white/add printers black
transparent/opaque:      increase decrease transparency/opacity
 
 
 
Now for example you activate the red, white, and yellow channels
 
you now adjust warm/cool light/dark transparent/opaque sliders around to just work within the constraints of those colors selected from you base palette
 
this gives you a sub palette of yellows oranges and reds based of your real world/RGB equivalents
 
this would work for CMYK as well
 
This would be a great tool to have I think
 
 
Thank you for reading and for your consideration
 
Nathan Henry

Hello crow,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
I'm not able to see any image. Have you forgotten to attach it?
You can snap an object to other object's nodes in Affinity Designer (except in very specific cases).
 
To do it, change to the Node Tool, make sure Snap to selected curves is enabled in the context toolbar, click over the object you want to align to select it, press ⌘ (cmd) + A (to select all nodes and move the whole object rather than just a node), ⇧ (shift) click the second object, and then pick one of the nodes from the first object and drag it over one of the nodes of the second. The nodes should change to a yellow circle/square when they are overlapping. 
 
Currently you cannot simply drag/move an object from one of its nodes and drop/snap it over another with the Move Tool (including its nodes). I already requested this to developers but I do not know when or if it will be implemented at this point.
 
Let me know if you still have trouble.

Hi crow,
This was already requested/discussed in other threads and will eventually be added as soon as we can. It's just a case of rounding the numbers for display. Affinity precision isn't affected by this.
Note that you can also perform math operations in the input fields. So for example to reduce a 5cm rectangle in half just enter /2 in the width input field (Transform panel) after the value that's there.

Really like your idea of PSD export avo! I would ditch Photoshop completely, if I wasn’t doing some PSD web mockup now and again.

We support the standard Edit > Emoji & Symbols panel. Unfortunately it looks like Yosemite has crippled it making it less useful for browsing characters by their code. You can still type a Unicode value into the search panel, eg U+2020 will find the dagger. You may need to expand the panel first. We don't currently have any way to insert characters by their font glyph id.

Yes, I think we will at some stage.

Thanks! And yes Crow I agree.

Hi!
 
I have Fontexplorer installed where I have a font with some graphical glyphs in it. The glyphs have a character code / glyph id and unicode.
 
How can I insert these types of graphics into Affinity? I struggle to find a way to insert font chars based on a "code"..
 
I would optimally as a long time Adobe user see a way to "show glyphs" of fonts and insert them "that way" (like in Illustrator).
Thanks for any help!

Great to know.
And, when it gets available in Affinity Publisher, the same code will be used throughout all application, becoming available in Designer and Photo also, right?

Hi Rui,
No, not possible yet. I believe it will become available with Affinity Publisher.

Is it possible already? If it is, I didn't found how.
I remember back in old FreeHand days we had the option to turn on the Hanging punctuation where all commas, colons, semicolons, periods, etc, would be placed outside the text box, allowing the text characters to align properly.
As it is now, we get this:
 

Currently, text will always export as rasterised.  This is an area of PSD export that we will be improving over time.  It is probably the most difficult part to write, as text is very involved and we handle it differently to PSD, so please bare with us.
 
We'll look at adding exporting of text as curves/paths soon, but fully editable text is going to be a BIG job. That will come much later.

Welcome to the forum crow :)
 
It's not possible to export to a PSD with editable text, sorry. It is something our developers are hoping to improve over time.

Oh, i've searched the forum for such a topic but couldn't find one. I'm okay to wait, of course. 
 
Then something like export with specs would help, until the proper PSD export will be realized... Like if you get an additional layer while exporting, where all the font characteristics are written close to the text block they relate to. 
I've attached a sketch what it could look like... 

Would love to see this feature and other advanced typographic features added to Publisher/Designer/Photo, since I deal with type a lot. Cheers!

I’ve asked this question before. Seems like we have to wait for a while. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/9208-psd-export-with-text-layers/