Stepaan

+1 this is so frustrating! Very often I need to do microadjustments to my text where switching between Thin and ExtraLight just doesn't do - I need the steps between. Many of my fonts just don't work with Affinity. And while I am a huge fan of the software, this really is a big pain-point.

It may be helpful to indicate the current in/visible state of the query by a different colour of the eye icon...

It may be helpful to indicate the current in/visible state of the query by a different colour of the eye icon...

Please, Serif, please!

I had to revert back to the terrible Illustrator just because of lack of variable fonts support in Designer. I almost forgot how outdated the Illustrator really is. Sure they have this 'awesome' text-to-vector 'AI' (huge selling point to some), but the UX and the user experience is awful. Adobe even messed up the variable fonts support in the newest InDesign 2024.
So yes, please, make the variable fonts possible across the Affinity Suite. Please!

Please, Serif, please!

Apps: Designer and Publisher (+ some changes to the existing feature in Photo)
Platforms: Windows and macOS
We have now added the States panel to Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher which previously only existed in Affinity Photo. Layer states allows you to either:
Capture the current visibility states of your layers across your document Create queries based on various criteria to use to make a selection or toggle visibility of layers This feature is particularly useful to manage different variations of your work. As an example, one of the social ad campaigns for our recent Black Friday promotion was created in Affinity Designer across multiple artboards. Each artboard had 4 variants for English, Japanese, German and French language.

 
Previously if you wanted to toggle between the English and French version for example you would need to toggle the visibility of the appropriate layers on each artboard separately - not particularly workable when you have many artboards / spreads. The new states panel gives you a new way to work with designs like this. 

In this case I could set up a query with criteria which captures all my Japanese layers. From the states panel click "New Query" at the bottom, I called the query "JA" and set up my criteria to be "All Art Text and Frame Text layers that have a layer name which ends in JA" as below:


Because on each artboard we had used the consistent naming convention that all Japanese text has a layer name ending in JA, all English text has a layer name ending in EN, etc. it made it easy to then set up 4 queries for each of the languages. We could alternatively have used a convention like all French variants are tagged yellow, English tagged Red, etc. 
So now to switch from English to Japanese across all artboards I can just turn off everything that fulfils my EN query, and turn on everything which fulfils my JP query using the visibility on/off buttons next to the queries in the states panel - so in two clicks end up with the below:

 
While this example is only including text, of course I may have had different imagery for each locale and could have included those in the same queries to still have one button to toggle text and images of each language on and off. Also, as it's set up a query like this, should I add additional Japanese specific layers to any of the artboards and name them ending in "...JA" my JA query will automatically pick them up.
In Publisher the same principles apply giving the ability to globally toggle different layers on and off across all spreads in your document which match the criteria you have specified. While building complex expressions is easy, you may also find you wish to have a query for something simple like "Layer Type is Images" giving you an instant way to turn all images on and off across your whole document.
Additional Notes
As well as toggling visibility of queries there is an additional button to make a selection of all layers which fulfil the criteria specified in the query. This is also a new function not previously available in Affinity Photo. For those who used the States panel in Affinity Photo you will notice we have changed the name of what were previously called "Smart States" to "Queries". This reason for this is in the future we anticipate adding a new feature to this which would be better described as a Smart State (this will be something you can build from multiple queries). This will be something which we add in a future update. There is other new functionality we plan to bring to this in the future - namely ability to create presets and some level of integration with export options - but again that will be something for a future update.
 

I had to revert back to the terrible Illustrator just because of lack of variable fonts support in Designer. I almost forgot how outdated the Illustrator really is. Sure they have this 'awesome' text-to-vector 'AI' (huge selling point to some), but the UX and the user experience is awful. Adobe even messed up the variable fonts support in the newest InDesign 2024.
So yes, please, make the variable fonts possible across the Affinity Suite. Please!

Hi All,
Thanks for this suggestion. We have now added Space as a modifier for Lock Children which you can try now in the 2.4 beta which is available now. Hopefully it achieves what you were after! More info here:
 

No. One of many shortcuts that are missing. They are slowly being added. Very slowly.

If you go into the snapping settings and disable Show snapping candidates this should do what you are looking for

NO, you better give some example image or the like.

All those "AI assist tools" need to run on a remote server. All calculations are done on an insanely powerful workstation and sent back to you. It's not possible to make it running on a computer with a budget GPU with small memory. Serif would have to invest huge money to this service. And we would pay for it

In this case, neither do I. If it was a major and laborious intervention in the architecture and concept of the applications (something like RTL that requires a demanding intervention in the text engine of the applications), then maybe. But adding (optionally) two buttons to the Toolbar, which has already enabled this function (button management) for a long time, is a matter of a few minutes.
Applications for the iPad already have it, because someone there apparently understood that keyboard shortcuts don't exactly work with a pen - but a pen/tablet is apparently not expected for the desktop 😞

Unfortunately, Serif has not reflected on this request for years - more precisely, it reacts negatively, despite the fact that users with physical disabilities are asking for this option.
https://www.google.com/search?q=undo/redo+button+site:forum.affinity.serif.com
 
 

Just copy & paste the layers from one app (APh) over into the other one (ADe).

Hi @Stepaan as far as i'm aware it's not possible to re-sync a symbol once the properties of a symbol object has been changed whilst synchronisation is disabled, as at that point the symbol has become detached (Indicated by the dashed orange line in the layers panel) and will behave independently, even with sync re-enabled.

AfPhoto allows you to link objects to share certain attributes and unlink unwanted attributes via the Links panel, however in your example the objects would need to be linked based on 'Text Content', and this attribute covers the font settings and characters, including sharing the font colour without an option to unlink this.

It's weird. Although I bought the apps directly from Serif, the app is a native Windows app. The same as from the store. It means, it's installed in C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\ It also means, it's hidden from the user.
I suppose it's much easier to maintain 3 Win apps instead of 6. 
But another thing. Where are the new assets installed? I have red somewhere, they're common for all three applications. Where are they? Hidden too?

I haven't been totally idle! Bit different than I normally do.

I fancied doing something shiny, not too easy but not too complicated either, 2 weeks max, so decided to see if I could get this done. Shame it turned out to be such a horrible movie. There was too much background on the photo I used so I cropped it to something a bit more interesting.
Who needs fancy pants gradient meshes when there’s the pen tool
Sorry about the equally horrible compression.

Now you are just showing off.

Engines vector artwork in Affinity Designer.

Anything is better than silence as we know it.

available on Windows but not on Mac; reasons unknown but likely something technical under the hood add preset > type in the same name > confirm the "Studio Preset Exists" warning long known issue

1. So sad
2. Ok
3. So sad

Thanks for answer