claidheamdanns

I thought when the paid update to v2 came out, we'd have GREP in Styles by now. No dice! 😪

At work now and looking at this again. I didn't save all the different settings that I tried, but this is one of them:

I tried LOTS of different PDF export options, but I'm at home right now, so I can really check. I used PDF (press ready), with Color Space set to Gray, and Profile set to Generic Gray Gamma 2.2. I also think I tried pretty much every option that under there that seemed like it might lead to a true black only PDF. None of them worked. As one person said earlier on in this thread "it shouldn't be this hard to accomplish a basic task."

I think that you are misunderstanding. We are talking about exporting here. If you export a grayscale Photoshop file as a PDF, you get a black channel only file, used for printing single color printing. If you export a grayscale AP file as a PDF, you get a CMYK file, which cannot be used for single color printing. That's what this entire post is about.

I've never had Photoshop treat Gray mode as RGB.

I would like to chime in and say that this is infuriatingly complicated. Just for giggles, I created a new blank document, set as Color Format: Gray/16 Color Profile: Generic Gray Gamma 2.2 Profile I added one word in black only, and exported it using the Preset: PDF (press ready) Results opened in Acrobat Pro: CMYK black text Good thing I have Pitstop Pro to convert the text back to black only again. But it's ridiculous that this doesn't work correctly. I'm trying to teach a customer how to export their files correctly when they send them to us to be printed, because they are using Affinity, so I downloaded the apps to my computer. But I'm an hour in and haven't found any way to get their files to export as grayscale. Nor could I get the simple file that I created to export as Grayscale. I've read through this entire thread and tried all the options suggested here, and none of them have resolved this.

I keep coming back to this topic, hoping to see movement on it. At work we still use Adobe, but at home I don’t. At work, I use GREP in styles Every. Single. Day. Many of my documents at home had GREP in styles built into them, back in the days when I used Adobe. All this was lost, coming to Affinity. Was moving to Affinity the right choice? Absolutely. Do I still wish GREP was implemented in styles. Absolutely. Any time you have repetitive, predictable, pattern-based formatting, that is a job for GREP in styles. Set and forget. Let the program do the mundane, allowing the human to focus on the parts the program cannot.

Yes, now you can, but not when I wrote my question. It's fixed now.

I'm talking about starting new documents. All new documents started in mm when I first wrote my question. It looks like that's been fixed now.

Why, oh why, is there no way to set a default unit of measure? This seems so basic. I don't want to have change to Imperial on every single document. I work in the US, where we use Imperial for everything in print (unless we are sending the ducument to a foreign country). And no, I don't have any interest into getting into a discussion of which is better. I just want to be able to set it for what we use, and have it stay that way.

Never mind @dominik. I found it. Here it is, if anyone else is looking for it.

@dominik first page of what? Could you post a screen shot. The ability to assign hot keys to styles is very important to me, and I stumbled on your note here, but can't follow it to find where to do this.

Mac keyboard shortcuts for the ones that @walt.farrell mentioned are: Option + Command + C (⌥⌘C) for Align Center, Option + Command + L (⌥⌘L) for Align Left, and Option + Command + R (⌥⌘R) for Align Right. Also Option + Command + | (⌥⌘|) for Justify Left. Please note that | is vertical pipe, so you actually have to hold down Option + Command + Shift + \ (⌥⌘⇧\) to get Justify Left.

Thanks, I was having the same problem and baseline grid was turn on for every new text frame I'd created. I absolutely hate baseline grid. I've never intentionally used it in my 22 years of Prepress work. Any way that this can be turn off permanently in the app? A default OFF instead of default ON? Thanks!

Okay thanks, I see that I can now add a "shift tab" right indent tab, after importing the document. But, it still doesn't come in with the IDML import. And it lost all the leaders for the right indent tab, too. I was able to add those back in using a right align tab. Right now, we have a slow time at work, so I'm mainly just seeing what "breaks" when I bring an InDesign document into Affinity Publisher. We believe that Affinity will eventually be the replacement for Adobe, especially among freelance graphic designers who can't afford to "rent" Adobe software. So, we want to: 1. be aware of what is going on in AP files, and its limitations, and 2. be knowledgeable about how to use the suite of apps, so that customers trust us to help walk them through things they can't figure out. We have some customers who still use that other Publisher (ack!) by Microsoft, and we would LOVE for them to move over to Affinity, and provide us with more professional files from which to print. But we know we will need to be ready to hold their hand and walk them through it.

This would certainly answer some of the things that I use GREP for, but there is still a vast sea of application out there which it doesn't cover. One small example from a book that we printed from InDesign, which I then pulled into AP for testing. Example: I have a "In Memorium" list from a club, and under each person's name, where applicable, it gives their official title in the club, if they held an office, along with the year served. John Q. Public Director — 2012 The paragraph style has after space to separate between the names, and the leading keeps the title/year up close to the person's name, via leading and a soft return. I used GREP embedded in the Paragraph Style to look for every place where there is a soft return, followed by any text that ends with a 4-digit date, and then a paragraph return. To this found text, it applies a character style making it smaller and italic (similar to the John Q. Public example above). The beauty of this is that the entire list can be kept in one paragraph style, and the titles of each person, if applicable, get automatically formatted. Each quarter when we update this club directory, we can just drop in the new names, if any, and they automatically adapt to the same formatting rules. Kind of "set it, and forget it." This is just one small example. I do massive documents where GREP is invaluable for looking for patterns in the text and auto formatting things that would take a lot of extra time/effort, and allowing me to focus more on all the other things. —— Update: this particular example I gave here, I did just now figure a way to accomplish the same thing, by setting the title/date styling as the styling for the paragraph, and then applying an initial word character styling to everything before the name title/date. A different way of thinking of it, but it did work.

I agree on this. InDesign has both a Right-Aligned Tab, and a Right Indent Tab, which is very useful. I brought an InDesign document that we just printed into Affinity, just to practice on, while it was fresh in my mind, and I notice that all Right Indent Tabs were missing, including their leaders. I had to go into the tabs bar and rebuild them using a Right-Align tab. Another thing that was broken in this same regard was the hanging punctuation, which resulted in the typesetting of the list looking less professional. I did find where I could fix this with "optical alignemnt," which ended up looking better than the INDD doc, by the way. But still, it didn't do this automagically, per the INDD doc, but had to be manually fixed after import.

I 100% agree with this topic. I use Affinity both at work and at home, and I would like to be able to use my same workspace in both. Right now, I have to rely on taking a screen shot and then setting things up the same on the other computer.

Packaging files is a must, in order to make the leap to Publisher. @F+C is spot on. This is industry standard for printers/design agencies. I came across this thread, because I was trying to walk a customer through how to package their Affinity Publisher file and send it to us, only to find that there was no such feature. So, count my vote for this feature, too.

Thanks @Patrick Connor

When I click on "Please visit the forum for the latest release notes." in the updater window in the Mac version, it brings me to these notes about the Windows version.

There are times when I very much prefer to use "balance ragged lines" for the same reasons stated by @garrettm30. If nothing else, it provides a good starting point. Other times, this provides an undesirable effect … but is, after all, why we still have human typesetters, right . "Balance ragged lines" is a tool, like any other in our toolbox, and it's nice to have it available.

@James Ritson, would you mind sharing what software you are using to create your tutorial videos, for those of us who might also be interested in sharing a tutorial?

Okay, I reboot every day, and when I rebooted this morning, it was there, so I think you can mark this as solved. Or, if it happens again, I will try to determine what steps occurred before its disappearance. Thanks, Gavin

Normally in a Mac program, you will have a search menu under Help. This helps find functions in the menu which might otherwise be unfamiliar to the operator. And just starting to use an app like this, pretty much all of the menu hierarchy is unfamiliar 😛 Are you using the latest release version? Yes Can you reproduce it? Yes Does it happen for a new document? Yes If you cannot provide a sample document then please give an accurate description of the problem for example it should include most of the following: What is your operating system and version (macOS Catalina) What happened for you (and what you expected to happen): No search field under the menu heading Help. Both other apps have a search field, like all other Mac apps. Provide a recipe for creating the problem (step-by-step what you did). Open any existing or new document. Click on Help. No search field. Screenshots (very handy) or a screen capture/video. Added 🙂 Any unusual hardware (like tablets or external monitors or drives that may affect things) or relevant other applications like font managers or display managers. Nope. Did this same thing used to work and if so have you changed anything recently? (software or hardware) Not sure on this. I just bought and started using the suite last week.