F+C

Thanks for replying - but no. Especially as it's been asked for since v1. Let's say you have halitosis - and didn't realize it. Most people won't say anything (to your face at least). But a true friend will. He just wants you to know about this shortcoming - he still thinks you're awesome. Programmers tend to do be attracted to "cool" features - they're fun to think about, fun to figure out and interesting to implement! But, just like when you go into a professional kitchen you won't see many wacky kitchen machines, professional production for the most part is pretty dull. The big creative stuff is already done so production is all about execution. And that is often where a good chunk of the profitability comes from. These pretty dull "features" might not be that critical for a home or occasional user, but when you're interacting with the program for 8 - 10 hours a day and creating hundreds or 1000s of pages a year, these things really add up. Affinity is doing some great stuff and there is a real interest in the market for what they have, and they have a lot of "wow!" and "creative" features that are fun to play with, but they often lack day-to-day workman like features that make it unsuitable for a professional use. Just like the guide colours issue - if they sat down with an experienced (as in 5 - 10 years of production experience) print production person, they'd use the program and say "oh yeah, you just need to be able to change guide colours and you never know what kind of wacky background the art director has come up with". These aren't edge use cases but just a "we have to pump out 200 plates, one every 3 mins for the dinner service" kind of thing.

*sigh* Really surprised on the lack of Global Layers. Everytime I try to bring Affinity products into a professional production environment, they always come up short. I really applaud Affinity for what they are trying to do, and often come so frustratingly close to achieving it. And never because of some wacky, edge-case use either, just lacking in production level, everyday use features. Affinity, I know you think we're "just complainers", or "just out of touch" but keep in mind that some of us have been doing this longer than you've been alive, and believe it or not, we actually do know why these "boring" features are critical in professional use. When you're pumping out 100's of pieces a year, these things make or break production teams. I wish you'd at least hire a consultant with more than just peripheral professional print production experience. There are real-world reasons why these things are being asked for, we're not "just being dicks".

So put the two fields in the document setup panel. Have one for margin, one for other guides (they're speced in the code anyway). That would solve 90% of the issues people have. This has been solved by other applications.

Sweet jesus - how hard can it be to write RGB values to a plist file?

Open and Save UI elements should not be tied to the main document frame. Many professional users have multiple monitors and it's very awkward to use. Not everyone is on laptops. Thank

I remember back in the early days of the Mac, I thought it was weird that every new version of PageMaker required that old documents be "converted" and how the UI was "just a bit odd" from release to release. (The company I was working at was a Quark user due to it's superior kerning abilities). I read an interview with someone who was part of the PageMaker team at Aldus, he said it drove them crazy. Everytime they tried to add a simple feature (I remember something about adding a new measurement option or something like that) the whole thing would break. So every new version of PageMaker was almost a re-write of the program (a problem with first to market products). I think it really held them back. Perhaps this is the case here? This seems to be a feature that would be easy to implement, but I didn't write the code. I do wish they'd bring on an experienced print production person on their team. They would understand why these little things are so important to people trying to use their products in a professional setting.

That line is the bottom of the selection. Selected Stretched the section up 10px. Dd the same thing in PS - no line

it's really as simple as that Open an image Select part of the image Scale the part that you just selected. Looks like you have to "Rasterize" first. although now it leaves a white line on the edge of the selection for no apparent reason. This is a 30 sec operation in PS

In PS, you select a part of an image and you can just scale it or do whatever. No other steps are involved. Can't seem to figure out how to do such a straight forward operation

very true. In fact, most professional design work is pretty boring. After the conceptualization it's really about execution, and that's the difference between pro's and normals. A pro is more interested in speed of layout, stability. It's more about getting 15 ad's out by 5, or that 75 page AR that the client has been slow at getting the source material to you so you're 2 weeks behind and it needs to get to proofing next morning and it's 3pm. You don't get a chance to do all the wacky things that the programs allow you to do in real-life.

Agreed. I think Affinity needs to work with an experienced production consultant. Someone who has spent many years in the print industry and agencies actually producing printed material in the real world. There are really good reasons why Adobe stuff does what it does (although they've added a ton of other features) - it's not just a feature. They could hire me, I started with Quark 2.11 . . . and paste-up!

In production it would be great to have a "replace selected item", instead of just a "place command". Select the logo on the business card go to File->Place Click box in dialog "replace selected item" Select the file that the client should have initially sent you click "ok" The new graphic is in the same place with the same scaling, effects, etc Very useful when having to replace logos or graphics in documents

(everything updated) Create a new document open the stock panel put in search word Select thumb in the sidebar Drag to document Cursor drags thumbnail to page with green "+" sign Release mouse button Image is not added to page

Click on a text block. There is no "small dot in the lower right hand corner" to allow one to resize text frame while keeping text size the same

yes - please add sub-folders. Kinda useless otherwise (in production enviroments)

Came here to find out how to do that -

It's so weird. I wonder if this is a much more complicated feature to add than we think. The Guides manager has a lot of options so it's a very odd omission. I wish companies would monitor these forms and reply. Imagine if they said "hey there, we tried to add this feature but it's gonna take much more work than we thought. I don't think we could get it implemented and tested for the next release or so". We all would think "drag, but ok". Silence is never a good reply to ones customers. It's ok to say no, just don't make it seem like you ignore your customers.

Well it can be tricky - I remember thinking how odd it was back in the day and just started with this stuff that PageMaker's doc formats would change from version to version. They got "converted" when you opened it with the new version of the program. At a User Group meeting I had the chance to meet someone from Aldus and he told me that the way they started the code made it so whenever they added a feature it would often break the whole thing - so they'd need to almost re-write it to get around their limitations. Programming can be hard and it's hard to know what to focus on (which is why a clear vision from the start is so important) AND, this is a $79 program. I think we should keep that in mind.

It's super weird and always behind the tool bar. Could you make it float on top and just be a normal save box? Thanks

It's super weird and it's always behind the toolbar. Just let it float on top of the window and be repositionable like a normal app save window? Thanks

yeah - totally I think they'd have to get some "older production folks" to consult on their application to get it to be a real pro level application.

Sigh - so true. Affinity Publisher is like that friend who is a really good person, who you'd like to hang out with more but keeps on doing dumb things. BUT it's also so much cheaper than the other program so I guess you get what you pay for. I've given up trying to use it for production tasks and stick with CS. Perhaps in v2 these issues will be fixed but I fear as the team is apparently made up of non-production industry types this will continue to be a consumer level product (which isn't bad - it's just not a pro-level application)

It does seem odd - I can't imagine that it's that hard a feature to add. Affinity is very frustrating - I really want to love their stuff but it always just falls short of truly professional applications. I think the big issue is their programmers have never really worked in a production industry role - the kind of "crap, I have to get 10 ads out by 5pm and sent to San Francisco" kinda world. they probably look at our requests and think "why the hell would you want that?". Us old industry folks know why we need them. I think they're going for the pro sumer market, which is a shame but perhaps a bigger market than trying to appeal to Advertising, Marketing agencies and printers. I think someone will go after the same market as Adobe CS, but probably won't be $70!