A_B_C

I did understand that, and as I said, I didn’t mean to reply to your post or any of your earlier remarks. They make much sense to me and mirror my experience quite closely. 🙂 Yes, I wished *so dearly* that the developers would just take one, two or three weeks off, leave their planned schedule, and fix all those little things that add so much friction to the daily workflow. I provided an initial list earlier, but you could easily expand this list by reviewing what has been posted over the years on these forums. To repeat, these are really tiny annoyances, but they add up. The suggested solutions would non-disruptive and should be largely non-controversial, so I just hope that after bringing the suite to its full cross-platform extent, there will be some time for the developers to make improvements in this area.

@Kal, seems we cross-posted, so my post shouldn’t be read as a direct answer to yours. Rather to the endless discussions about the term “professional” that tend to derail useful threads like this one quite regularly. I think the problem is that “professional” is a semantically open term that can have a lot of meanings which are largely context-dependent. So everyone may understand something slightly different when using this term. Some authors in this thread have successfully, as I think, explained their specific use of the term. But the semantic openness remains. And if we consider the matter carefully, it is precisely this semantic openness that invites marketing folks to employ this term in their communications. It helps them establish a certain perception of their products without promising or advertising anything too specific. Should they rather not use this term? — Maybe. But I doubt anyone in a marketing department will lightly forgo the benefits that result from the semantic openness of the term and the specific air it carries. Up to a certain point, this is … understandable … I fear. 😉

If we could just leave this talk of “professional” versus “prosumer” versus “amateur” behind us, once and for all. — In the end, it is all about tasks that can be fulfilled with the help of a particular software and about the level of difficulty or ease of fulfilling these tasks. Also, and not to forget, about the way in which the design of a particular software can inspire us in doing our work. Tools can be inspiring, remember. What @debraspicher said earlier in this thread made a lot of sense to me. Forget about labels like “professional,” as they really do not tell anything in themselves. Rather talk about use cases and tasks. That will be more fruitful. I’ll give you an example. When Affinity Publisher came out some years ago, I had hoped I could soon start using it for typesetting press-ready academic books with the application (my focus of work has changed to a different area since then). But without footnotes and an option to organise Publisher documents into books, that was unfeasible. In Version 2, we have a footnotes system as well as a book system now, and my first tests show that Publisher does handle large documents with footnotes quite well. Unfortunately, we still lack a robust cross-references system that would also be required for the intended task, at least for the kind of publications I have in mind. So I have to conclude that for the specific task of typesetting academic books with footnotes and cross-references, Affinity Publisher is still lacking an essential feature. Such a description does not make use of the word “professional” or the like. It just describes requirements for fulfilling a task, and I think it does not really make much sense start a debate concerning the question whether a “professional” DTP application must be capable of being used for typesetting publications whose production would require a robust system of cross-references. Remember that housands upon thousands of books are printed and published each year that do not contain a single cross-reference. Ironically, a majority of academic books and publications are today produced by people who wouldn’t call themselves “professionals” in the area of typography or book design at all, for these books and publications are typeset by their authors themselves. The typical work environments of these authors are LaTeX or Microsoft Word. So when you take a look at the provided example, I think it should be sufficiently clear that using the word “professional” is highly uninformative in comparison to descriptions of tasks and task requirements. Please let’s leave this debate behind us, as it really doesn’t get us anywhere, does it? In short, I found @Kal’s approach at the beginning of this thread very fruitful, and I hope this post may contribute to get back to the intention from which this thread was started. 🙂

No, there is no dedicated text editor in v2, unfortunately. 😟

Regarding variable fonts, they are unusable. While the master instances (maybe also other instances, I haven’t checked) are displayed in the style dropdown menu, the Affinity apps seem to read the metrics information for each instance from the main master. Which, of course, creates that kind of garbled mess @tatanka reported. (Other issues may be present as well.) Concerning the text engine, it is difficult to understand why the implementation does not make use of existing libraries. What are the expected gains of trying to develop a new text shaping engine, when a reliable and time-proven system like Harfbuzz is readily available? 😟

Yes, unfortunately. In general, I don’t like it when an application tries to be smarter than I am (which, in itself, may not be too difficult for any entity other than an app), so that was among the first settings I change when I installed the Affinity suite anew. 😉

But this may be due to the settings you made under Preferences > Tools > Move Tool Aspect Constrain. Set this to Do not constrain by default, and you should be fine. 🙂

If I may copy my earlier remarks from an obviously off-topic place here, as this is a better place for them, I would really love to see improvements in the “little things” along the version 2 development cycle. By “little things” I mean those usability improvements that save us clicks in frequently performed tasks, most of which have extensively been discussed on these forums. Such as Alt+drag to copy objects in the Layers Panel, Alt+click on layer’s or group’s triangle in the Layers Panel to open or close the entire subtree structure, as it is the case in macOS Finder, Shift+drag to constrain the aspect ratio of the Crop Tool rectangle in Photo, the option of having the Crop Tool remember its last-used state (make it a preference, if you don’t like to make it the default behaviour), the option of setting a custom default tool for an app and for embedded documents that are opened in a new tab (Photo, for instance, always defaults to the Hand Tool which is of no use if you have a trackpad), copy & paste of slices in the Export Persona, the option of adding the Snapping Options Buttons to the toolbar of the Export Persona, the option of holding down a key to temporarily activate a tool just until key release, the option of moving selected pixel content with marquee tool and Command key pressed, etc. None of these improvements should really be controversial, overly difficult to implement or break any existing workflow. Let me detail just the first item from this list. In January 2015, in one of my first posts here, I had already suggested that the simple option of Alt(Opt) + dragging an object in the Layers Panel to clone the object to a new location in the layers tree should be implemented. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/4006-some-layer-things/#comment-16292 To my understanding, this has never been an outlandish request. The respective option has been available in competitors’ apps for ages, should be implementable with a few lines of code that won’t break anything (don’t tell me otherwise: if the team can set up nondestructive RAW developing and vector mesh warp, this should be an apprentice piece), does not require the implementation of additional UI elements (it is an “invisible” improvement that does not complicate the UI and changes the UX only for the better), does not interfere with Alt(Opt) + clicking for solo mode, since we are talking about Alt(Opt) + dragginghere (choose a different modifier for drag-cloning, if you consider it a problem), should be absolutely non-controversial as a most helpful option that speeds up layer workflows considerably, and does not break any existing workflow (if you don’t want to use it, just leave it aside). Considering these arguments, I think there’s really no good reason for not implementing this feature, and honestly, its implementation should also not fail due to missing workforce capacity. And it’s not that I would have been the only one asking for the feature. Here are a just a few threads that turn up in a superficial forum search: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/7545-add-new-layer-above-current-object/ (April 2015) https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/17984-duplicate-a-layer-by-alt-drag-drop-in-layers-panel/ (February 2016 – November 2021) https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/28802-altdrag-layer-to-create-a-copy/ (November 2016) https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/163101-how-to-copy-layer-mask-and-paste-to-another-layer-in-affinity-photo-ipad/ (June 2022) So when you look at these comments (one could compile a similar list for many, if not all of the other features I mentioned above) and when you see, at the same time, that this simple quality-of-life feature has not yet been implemented, after seven years of development time and countless beta cycles, you cannot help to think “Well, they do theirs, don’t hold your breath.” Which will, inevitably, cause frustration. 🙁 I’m not saying this in order to bash the Affinity team or diminish their efforts. I just believe that after the great process they made with the new versions, it would be time to seriously turn their attention to these small features that come at virtually no development cost and would improve our daily lives tremendously. 🙂

+1 😀

Thanks for checking out. 🙂 — Problem D. I can confirm that the Customize Toolbar issue does not happen when you use a mouse. So it is trackpad-related. Please check with a MacBook Pro and the internal trackpad. — Problem E. Cannot reproduce the problem anymore, unfortunately. Images were loaded from desktop or a folder inside my user folder. Crash logs not available anymore (system cleanup).

Oh my … is there nothing you can do about this, Lee? On a 2019 Intel Mac, you can wait for almost half a minute sometimes. Does the sandbox have to be created every time after shutting down and starting up the computer anew? 🙂 (Sorry for that probably somewhat naive question.)

But one probably shouldn’t examine every single remark in this thread against the question whether it is exactly on topic. I would have to consider my own, earlier comments as off-topic then as well … they are probably even more off-topic than BigGandalf’s cursory remark … 😉 😁

Yes, I fear that over the strive for the big advancements the Affinity developers forgot to care about these seemingly “small things” that would nonetheless significantly improve our workflows. Over the years, nobody really seemed to have paid attention to the respective user requests, and this is what I feel to cause frustration in the long-term user base. 🙁 Let me give you an example. In January 2015, in one of my first posts here, I had already suggested that the simple option of Alt(Opt) + dragging an object in the Layers Panel to clone the object to a new location in the layers tree should be implemented. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/4006-some-layer-things/#comment-16292 To my understanding, this has never been an outlandish request. The respective option has been available in competitors’ apps for ages, should be implementable with a few lines of code that won’t break anything (don’t tell me otherwise: if the team can set up nondestructive RAW developing and vector mesh warp, this should be an apprentice piece), does not require the implementation of additional UI elements (it is an “invisible” improvement that does not complicate the UI and changes the UX only for the better), does not interfere with Alt(Opt) + clicking for solo mode, since we are talking about Alt(Opt) + dragging here (choose a different modifier for drag-cloning, if you consider it a problem), should be absolutely non-controversial as a most helpful option that speeds up layer workflows considerably, and does not break any existing workflow (if you don’t want to use it, just leave it aside). Considering these arguments, I think there’s really no good reason for not implementing this feature, and honestly, its implementation should also not fail due to missing workforce capacity. And it’s not that I would have been the only one asking for the feature. Here are a just a few threads that turn up in a superficial forum search: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/7545-add-new-layer-above-current-object/ (April 2015) https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/17984-duplicate-a-layer-by-alt-drag-drop-in-layers-panel/ (February 2016 – November 2021) https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/28802-altdrag-layer-to-create-a-copy/ (November 2016) https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/163101-how-to-copy-layer-mask-and-paste-to-another-layer-in-affinity-photo-ipad/ (June 2022) So when you look at these comments (one could compile a similar list for many, if not all of the other features I mentioned above) and when you see, at the same time, that this simple quality-of-life feature has not yet been implemented, after seven years of development time and countless beta cycles, you cannot help to think “Well, they do theirs, don’t hold your breath.” Which will, inevitably, cause frustration. 🙁 I’m not saying this in order to bash the Affinity team or diminish their efforts. I just believe that after the fantastic process they made with the new versions, it would be time to seriously turn their attention to these small features that come at virtually no development cost and would improve our daily lives tremendously. Hope you understand. 😀

Hi Ash, my sincerest congratulations to version 2 of the Affinity suite, to you and the entire team, and thank you for your explanations! The new version offers great improvements to the entire application suite, and the new solutions you found are extremely well thought out. 😀 Keep up the good work! And if I may add this here, I would really love to see improvements in the “little things” along the version 2 development cycle. By “little things” I mean those usability improvements that save us clicks in frequently performed tasks, most of which have extensively been discussed on these forums. Such as Alt+drag to copy objects in the Layers Panel, Alt+click on layer’s or group’s triangle in the Layers Panel to open or close the entire subtree structure, as it is the case in macOS Finder, Shift+drag to constrain the aspect ratio of the Crop Tool rectangle in Photo, the option of having the Crop Tool remember its last-used state (make it a preference, if you don’t like to make it the default behaviour), the option of setting a custom default tool for an app and for embedded documents that are opened in a new tab (Photo, for instance, always defaults to the Hand Tool which is of no use if you have a trackpad), copy & paste of slices in the Export Persona, the option of adding the Snapping Options Buttons to the toolbar of the Export Persona, the option of holding down a key to temporarily activate a tool just until key release, the option of moving selected pixel content with marquee tool and Command key pressed, etc. (… I’m sure you’ve compiled a list of these little things over the years yourself …) None of these improvements should really be controversial, overly difficult to implement or break any existing workflow. At the same time, their absence is felt every day and slows down workflows considerably, especially when taken together. Sure, it’s unlikely that you win any new customers by adding such options (alone), but you will make a lot of existing customers happy. Now that you have all three apps up and running on all target platforms, I think it would be a great time to add these “little things,” and it would add additional emphasis on the fact that you care for your user base … 😀 Again, thank you! Alex 😀

Of course, this is not to say that if the Affinity developers find a fix, it would be awesome if they could share it. 😄

This is most likely a macOS-based issue that cannot be solved by the Affinity devs. After upgrading my system from Catalina to Ventura, I get the same behavior. It’s annoying. Make-shift fixes to try: In Terminal, restart the dock process: killall dock — does not work for me Uncheck and recheck the Pinch to Zoom checkbox in System Preferences > Trackpad — works reliably for me Enable three-finger swipe-up for Mission Control and use this gesture to reactivate Pinch to Zoom — seems to work sometimes, more experimental data needed Start the screen saver — never tried this, more experimental data needed Sources: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254332660 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253369850 https://forum.figma.com/t/pinch-to-zoom-unreliable/13184

— Problem F. As described by others, the first startup of all apps of the Affinity Suite is very slow — to give a ballpark figure, about 30 seconds. The second startup is faster then, about 5 seconds.

— Problem E. Photo crashes immediately when I try to replace an embedded image by another using the Replace Image button on the context toolbar. 😿

— Problem D. When trying to customise the toolbar, it happens that dragging an icon will move the entire Affinity Photo main window. Customise-Toolbar.mov

— Problem C. Here’s another one. Sometimes the Pinch to Zoom gesture on the internal trackpad of the MBP gets disabled without rhyme or reason. I don’t know what triggers that behavior. I will have to go into System Settings, uncheck and recheck the respective option to make Pinch to Zoom work again. It is weird and disrupts the workflow. However, I’m not sure whether this is an Affinity Suite problem or rather a Ventura-related issue, as I found this post on Reddit, related to macOS Monterey (I had recently updated from Catalina to Ventura): Is there a way to fix this? Does anyone know?

Hi there, here are two problems I experienced in Affinity Photo 2. First, the specs: MacBook Pro 16'' 2019 2,6 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7 Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB AMD Radeon Pro 5300M macOS Ventura 13.0.1 (22A400) Performance settings: — Problem A. I am consistently losing the brush outline (not the brush preview) after drawing a few strokes. The outline will be replaced by the Arrow Pointer, and I will have to zoom in and out to get the brush outline back. EDIT. Already logged with the development team. Brush-Outline.mov — Problem B. Affinity Photo will often become unresponsive when I try to save an (opened PSD) file for the first time to the desktop. I will have to force quit the application to proceed. Version 1 handles the same file without problems. The respective reports were sent through the Apple Problem Reporter. Thanks for having a look, Alex 😀

Great report, Garrett. 😀

Oh my goodness, Walt! Thank you so much. Now I am feeling embarrassed, and rightly so. 😳

Hi there, I’m pretty sure it hasn’t been that way before: when you draw a shape with one of the shape tools, for instance, with the rectangle tool, the newly created shape isn’t selected after you lift the mouse button. This is a productivity impairment. For what would you like to do after having drawn a shape? — Right! You want to style it. So it should be selected automatically. Please, if that’s by design: could you please change it? 🙂 Thank you, Alex Deselected.mov

If the space characters are present in a font, Affinity Publisher seems to use the metrics information from the font. I just checked this with a few examples yesterday. Otherwise, Publisher turns to fallback values. As @Wosven said earlier in this thread, most fonts do not support all the spaces in General Punctuation (U+2000..206F), but some do. So to avoid making methodically misleading comparisons, one would have to check first whether the spaces in question are present in a font.