homeyJay

I'm not sure how to do a screen cast but if anyone out there with V2 on a Mac wants to have a go at this (looking at you Affinity support) knock yourselves out!

Ok, thanks. I'm slowly working through this. It looks like when I declared a spot colour and then had to subsequently edit that colour (by right clicking the spot col on the panel) it stops being a spot colour. Im not sure why this is but the little spot vanishes after changing the spot colour. I just assumes once the spot col was declared, it would stay that way. Have I missed something?

I've declared a couple of spot colours in a document - they appear in the document pallet but when I export the document as a pdf and examine it in Acrobat (print production --> output preview), no spot colours are listed. I've obviously chosen "honour spot colours" in the export dialog. What do I have to do to get this working?

Thx, I just discovered that and am playing with it right now! Hopefully that will be an answer!

I did find that earlier on but it just saves the window position relative to the monitor and not to the app window! If the app window is moved or scaled, the unfixed panels will appear in the same place.

Thanks Walt, you're right - I was talking about the Studio panels and not the tools! Sorry for the confusion, and yes, I'm on a Mac and you can't seem to make a second panel column. They do float and are a pain because when you resize the app, the tools stay where they are relative to the display and not the app. I can't even see any way to save a layout..

Yes but isn't this only for the tool icons on the left? I need to columns of tool palettes on the right!

I've seen a couple of vids on YT where there appears to be two columns of tools on the right of the screen. Try as I might, I can't replicate that. Has this feature now gone?

Ok, what has Chat GPT got to do with it? May as well ask Burger King to fix the problem!

I love the Affinity suite. I’ve used it for a few years now but over the past few months I’ve found that nearly every printer that I’m sending PDF files to is coming back saying that they’re unusable when imported back into Illustrator (which they ALL use) for pre-press. When the pdf is opened in Illustrator, all they see are a baffling set of clip groups, nested layers, no transparency etc. Pre-Press departments don’t have the time or the inclination to deal with a 50 layer document that should really be a 7 layer, well labelled and organised pdf and so they reject it. Strangely, when the pdf is opened in Acrobat viewer on my Mac, the layers are there and readable but sadly not in Illustrator at the print shop. Sadly, after a few years of using the Affinity Suite and feeling like there’s finally an alternative, I’ve had to return to reality and subscribe to Creative Cloud because I need to eat. My last two jobs that were done on AD and rejected by 2 printers have now been submitted using Illustrator and printed with no issues whatsoever. I hope that Affinity can sort their PDF output out but I don’t remember having these issues when I was using V1.x.

YES! That's it. Thanks lacerto, that seems to work perfectly!

Damn! So the only way to achieve this is to cut the shape out using subtract, if pdf export is the final destination?

Still need the edibility of the yellow rectangle, not just the shape destructively cut out of the larger rectangle! It looks like using the the Erase blend mode is not recognised / unsupported by the pdf conversion but can't be sure

oh wait, there's no yellow rectangle with an erase mode anymore! That's cheating!!

Woohoo, YES! How did you do it??