A_B_C

An update to the beta has just been made live (Build: 1709). Some of the main changes included in this update are listed in this post.

Below is the list of all new features and improvements included in the 2.1 beta. This new functionality is in addition to the many bug fixes and stability improvements in this version (currently 2.1.0.1790).
Depending on how the beta goes / how many issues there are to fix it's possible some more items will be added to this list before 2.1 is officially released - follow this topic if you want to be notified if that happens.

To learn more about these features please click on the link to go to each feature's dedicated post. To give feedback or report bugs against any of these features please reply to that same post (also check out bug reporting and feedback tips).
Features and improvements affecting all platforms
Balanced dashed lines and other stroke improvements (new in build 1730) Running headers in Affinity Publisher (new in build 1730) Show special characters added to Designer and Photo (added to iPad too in 1730) Adjusted Mask Behaviour (new in build 1730) Auto-select options in move tool (new in build 1713/1714) Square bracket stroke width adjustment expanded functionality Blend mode keyboard shortcuts Alt / Option - drag to duplicate in Layers panel Alt / Option click to expand / collapse all in Layers panel Crop tool improvements Auto clean added to paint mixer brush Paste inside picture frame Vector Flood Fill Guides improvements Vector warp nodes now obey snapping Brush panel improvements Raster perspective and mesh warp live filters added to Designer Search bar added to your add-ons (new in build 1713/1714) Analytics Windows and macOS features and improvements
WebP and JPEG XL now available in batch export (new in build 1736) Migrate retail version content and settings to beta version (new in build 1730) Cross references available in Affinity Publisher (this has now been pushed back to 2.2 as announced here) "Close All" added to File menu Asset panel reordering improvements Rename... added to Layer menu & tab behaviour Mask to below... added to Layer menu Measure tool now available in Photo and Publisher Place tool now available in Affinity Photo Drag / Drop bitmap fill to colour and swatch panel Zoom tool context options in Develop persona iPad features and improvements
New left swipe options on iPad layers panel (new in build 1736) Redesigned edit menu (new in build 1730) Some file management changes to iPad (new in build 1730) Style picker added to iPad apps (new in build 1713/1714) Drop down menus with checkable options no longer auto close New keyboard shortcut options added Reset rotation in navigator with double tap Pencil double tap option to open quick menu Long press geometry operation to create compound Tapping warp group thumbnail now selects node tool PDF options now exposed when opening Modifiers now available for Select Object Hide Layer type icon now available Main view rulers added  
If you have not enrolled into the beta program yet and would like to take part, you can do so here. This will immediately give you access to the latest 2.1 beta builds to try for yourself.

On a notebook, every (non-retina) screen pixel counts.

Hi there,
I'm sure this has already been suggested, but it’s one of those little annoyances that create friction in the daily workflow.
When you drag a guideline from the document ruler, View > Show Guides should be automatically enabled. For when I drag out a guide, it is easy to imagine that I would like to see it afterwards, isn’t it? — I really shouldn’t have to enable Show Guides manually.
  

Guides.mov   
Please fix this example of needless bad UX. Thank you. 🙂

From a technical point of view, you are very right, Dave. But from a user’s perspective things look a bit different, in my opinion. The Layers panel presents itself as a list, and according to all customs and conventions, it seems natural not to look at the bottom of a list to find the first item on the list. I am quite sure that nobody reads a list from bottom to top, regardless of the technical aspects that might underlie the creation of it … so the confusion is all too understandable …  ;)
 
Never mind, the implementation of a Pages panel should solve this problem …  :)
Cheers, Alex

Another Sizzler image...
 

Playing with Blender 3D to create this mockup for a fictional brand of potato chips.
Textures done with Affinity Photo and Designer
Here's also a Turntable animation. https://www.instagram.com/p/CniJqVVhImy/
 

I'm sorry that you're dealing with this bug and I empathize with you but there's nothing any Mac developer can do.
Here's how the pinch to zoom gesture works: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/touches_presses_and_gestures/handling_uikit_gestures/handling_pinch_gestures
Gestures are a type of event and as with other events, application can listen for them and then execute code when they are notified the event has occurred. Gestures are contiguous - they have a start and continue as the gesture continues - the bug in macOS is that the system isn't notifying apps that the gesture has started. Affinity doesn't even know you're using the trackpad.
You might want to try Pinch, a tiny app a developer created to fix the problem.
https://github.com/danqing/Pinch
Cheers

Same here (perhaps to add another data-point): If I launch Affinity Photo 2 (or Affinity Designer 2) after ... some days.. of dormancy or after power-up,  then it takes 20-30 seconds to startup!
Once it's up, I close the app, re-launch it and: bang, it's up and running in 2 seconds.
Clearly "something" is written to cache somewhere and allows the app to launch fast but after ... days?... that cache is cleared and it takes a long time to launch again.
I have a MacAir M1, 2020, 16gb Mem, running macOS Monterey 12.6 and Affinity Photo2/Designer v2.0.0 was loaded from App Store.
PS: since I read this "sandboxing" discussion...  for what it's worth... no other app, apple-native (iMovie, Photos, etc) nor non-apple (MS Excel, MS Word) exhibits this lag. It's clearly an "Affinity thing", imho.

Hi Lee,
I am not using the app store versions - I use the Affinity Store download versions.
If this is caused by the sandbox creation process of macOS - why is only the Affinity Suite affected (and not all other software)?
I always shutdown the computer. Currently the problem happens every few days/times when I startup. I have not found any pattern as to why/when it happens.
Peter

Thank you, guys!
Oh, this is an important point. There must be a way to share pages, along with guides and stuff, directly between documents. If that isn’t a feature request already, please understand that I would love to have the mentioned option. 
Yes, Alfred, it is possible to place a document into another one, and the placed document will have its margins and guides, when double-clicked, but the margins and guides won’t “show through.” They won’t be active in the document where it has been placed. Hmm. 

Well, of course, you can zoom in on the export preview to inspect your fine details. So that’s not an argument in favor of the request that there should be a button to turn export preview off.
I think the main argument remains that (a) export preview is not necessary for all jobs, and in such cases (b) creates needless UI friction by imposing a psychological hurdle to the user against quickly pressing the Export button. It is a simply a psychological fact that we are all trained to wait and expect something when we see a spinning wheel icon on a screen, even if we know that, in a particular instance, this spinning wheel icon does not tell us anything and does not want to make us wait with respect to our next action. Good UI/UX design should understand the importance of such psychological facts.
A toggle switch, two lines of code to hide the left panel of the export dialog – this should be done in a moment. Would it be so difficult to add this?

To infinity and beyond?

For now, it would be quite enough if they add footnote/endnote import in Publisher.

Hi,
I believe that a list of compatibility could be useful, to understand what is preserved and what is lost when importing/exporting IDML files to/from Publisher. I will therefore maintain a list, that you can enrich and discuss below. I'll add the features as long as they are confirmed by the fellow forum members.
Ça va sans dire that this is intended as a feature request to add the missing features.
Please, don't use this thread to discuss about workarounds. Just report about missing or added import/export features.
Paolo
----------------
FEATURES MISSING ON IMPORT
- Soft edges/feather
- Footnotes and endnotes
----------------
FEATURES MISSING ON EXPORT
- Everything!
 

Get rid of the Stroke Width slider, along the screen's left, when in Point mode. This is taking up valuable real estate, we all know where to find it the few times (never for me) one may want to use it editing points.

Well, of course, you can zoom in on the export preview to inspect your fine details. So that’s not an argument in favor of the request that there should be a button to turn export preview off.
I think the main argument remains that (a) export preview is not necessary for all jobs, and in such cases (b) creates needless UI friction by imposing a psychological hurdle to the user against quickly pressing the Export button. It is a simply a psychological fact that we are all trained to wait and expect something when we see a spinning wheel icon on a screen, even if we know that, in a particular instance, this spinning wheel icon does not tell us anything and does not want to make us wait with respect to our next action. Good UI/UX design should understand the importance of such psychological facts.
A toggle switch, two lines of code to hide the left panel of the export dialog – this should be done in a moment. Would it be so difficult to add this?

I think the clue is in the date in the first screenshot - it's trying to open in Publisher 2.0.0 because that's the version that was released on November 21 and which you likely downloaded that date.
I assume you have upgraded to 2.0.3 by now so perhaps you have two versions of Publisher 2 installed and double clicking is opening in a different version than you are normally using.
Please right click the document file and mouse over Open With - what is listed in the menu? I have nine choices, including the three v1 apps and and the three 2.0.3 beta apps that have been surpassed by the final version of 2.0.3. Do you have two Affinity Publisher 2 non-beta items listed?
If so, it might be because:
You installed 2.0.0 from the Mac App Store and 2.0.3 from Serif, or vice versa - did you ever install from the Mac App Store? If so, you should decide which version to keep and which to uninstall. You installed both versions from the Serif site but you're running 2.0.0 from Applications and 2.0.3 directly from the mounted DMG (disk image) file, or vice versa. If it's the latter situation, go to Applications and see which version is there. You should be able to tell if it's 2.0.0 from the date (Nov 21) but if not right click it and choose Cmd+I and Finder will show you the version.
If the copy in Applications is 2.0.0, drag it to the trash. Then find the mounted DMG in the left sidebar of a Finder window, click it, and drag Publisher 2 to Applications to install it. Then unmount the DMG by hovering over it in and clicking the eject icon. Then find the DMG file (likely in Downloads or your Desktop) and delete it. If the copy in Applications is 2.0.3, find the mounted DMG in the left sidebar of a Finder window, and unmount it by hovering over it in and clicking the eject icon. Then find the DMG file (likely in Downloads or your Desktop) and delete it. After doing this, right click the document file again and hold down the Option key. Then choose Publisher 2 from the list of Always Open With options to associate the afpub file type with your real Publisher 2.0.3 application.
If none of this is applicable to your situation, I'm out of ideas. 🙂 

Sorry; no more ideas from me.

The Portrait / Landscape icons are indeed hard to find, if you don’t know where to look. They should be in the document setup section, bottom right of the new dialog. I get the idea that you can now switch *all* templates from Portrait to Landscape orientation at once, but still, when I’m setting up a specific document, I usually don’t care about the other templates, and it feels slightly unintuitive that I cannot switch the orientation alongside page dimensions settings etc. 😐

Status: Beta
Purpose: Fixes and updates
Requirements: Licensed Affinity Publisher 2 (registered to an Affinity ID account)
Mac App Store: Not Submitted
Download: ZIP Download
Auto-update: Not Available
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We are pleased to announce that the first Affinity Publisher 2 Customer Beta 2.0.3.1674 is now available as a download from the link above.
This beta is an update to the 2.0.0 version recently released to all customers and will form the basis of our first patch for 2.0.0. We recommend that you use this beta in preference to the release version if you are affected by any of the issues listed below.
If this is your first time using a customer beta of an Affinity app, it’s worth noting that the beta will install as a separate app - alongside your store version. They will not interfere with each other at all and you can continue to use the store version for critical work without worry.
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- New Document: Custom Document Preset order is not retained between app sessions
- afpackage fails to find Resources on Open
- Fixed spurious future version error under certain circumstances
- Improvements with PDF Import and Layers
- Fixes for RTF import - font name discrepancies, fields in footnotes
- Update for HEIF importer
- DWG Import scaling improvements
- Fix for export of Books with Bleed
- Preview exported PDF fails on book exports
- Opening and closing chapters in a book can leave the files locked / read only
- Crash opening a bunch of chapters from a book simultaneously
- Export Panel UI fixes
- Fix for Booklet printing model
- Fixed some tool drawing issues relating to selections across spreads etc
- Pen tool tweaks and fixes
- Fixed hang that could occur composing vertical centre aligned text
- OpenType handling does not respect lookup flags such as IgnoreMarks
- Hit box of scaled text could be incorrect
- Gradients on text strokes don't render unless the fill also has a gradient
- Fixes for line breaking in some odd cases with punctuation
- Merge runs of tabs using leaders
- Resource Manager updates
- Fixed various issues involving handling of placed document files
- Placed documents with bleed can fail to render the bleed correctly
- Fixed Help menu links
- Light UI Improvements
- Fix for disappearing rulers
- Many and various Layers Panel updates and fixes
- Auto flow place: Added an option to auto-flow place to replace the content of already populated picture frames
- More attributes are retained when replacing images in frames
- Pages Panel, double clicking does not zoom page to view
- Ensure global colour edits update live
- Select Same Name should only select objects with user supplied names
- New clearer icons for stroke properties (cap, join, align)
- Localisation updates
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To be notified about all future Mac beta updates, please follow this notification thread 
To be notified when this Publisher update comes out of beta and is fully released to all Publisher customers, please follow this release announcement thread

The Portrait / Landscape icons are indeed hard to find, if you don’t know where to look. They should be in the document setup section, bottom right of the new dialog. I get the idea that you can now switch *all* templates from Portrait to Landscape orientation at once, but still, when I’m setting up a specific document, I usually don’t care about the other templates, and it feels slightly unintuitive that I cannot switch the orientation alongside page dimensions settings etc. 😐

Hello:
Now that I'm starting to use v2 of the Suite for my day to day I'm getting to notice these issues.
In general the change of Interface is positive; it looks like a new coat of paint.
The new tools icons are probably a user per user preference (but I remember going through this many years back when Cinema 4D changed their whole iconography), it took a couple of weeks to get used to this but then I liked it.
 
Having said this there are some issues which could be improved:
1) This has been mentioned before , but the new Stroke control icons are a step back. (I'm attaching a screenshot)
The icons are borderline blurry and they are hard to read (compared to v1). I have to squint and take a couple of seconds to read them and see which one is which.. the ones with the blue dots were easier to interpret at a glance.
 
2) The Portrait and Landscape icons are definitely blurry in my screen. (iMac 21.5 Inch) Non retina.
And they are kind of buried in the new document window (attaching a screenshot)
 
3) The dot replacing the turn on/ off layers is a little bit small and hard to hit... Not saying we return to the checkbox but I think it could be made a few pixels bigger so it's easier to turn on and off.
 
In general I see you went with smaller fonts and toggles/arrows in the new interface but I'm agreeing with other users that it could be polished a little bit and make it a few pixels bigger so the elements are not hard to click upon.
 
4) And lastly, I guess I was one of the people that wanted the Preview image integrated into the Export window... but as you implemented it (and using it now)  I would also suggest to have the preview as optional. Turn it off or on with a checkbox or have it inside a collapsable panel.
 
Hope these suggestions help and thanks for the hard work.
fjv

The preview is a useful feature but can get in the way.
I searched for an on/off toggle when exporting several large prints in Designer with different ardboards.
On export, the dropdown to select the artboard does not respond for a few seconds due to beachballing for the preview. (MBP M1 Max 64GB)

This saddens me. In preparing for Comicraft Fonts' annual sale, I had chosen some variable fonts that looked cool. I hope Serif implements this in future updates.