Paul Mc

It all depends on the client and the requirement. For anything where there is no pre-specified font and there is a need to share the designs without reducing text to curves then I will tend to start with Google Fonts. https://fonts.google.com/ This is a really good collection of curated fonts that satisfy a lot of client needs in my work. Then there is a big ravine to cross to get to my more prestigious clients where the font is more precious and is specified in a style sheet or design rules document. In that case I have no choice but to go and invest in it (rarely do these companies use free fonts). One big problem is clients who are moving old work to me for rework and they've previously used a designer or agency that uses Adobe products. Adobe Fonts are wrapped up in their eco system and a lot of them have no equivalents outside of it that you can buy or download. Negotiations around that issue can be challenging. If a lot of your work is of this type then maybe and Adobe sub is the way forward - but I suspect that flies in the face of your not to expensive requirement. At that point I always try to find the original source of the typeface, buy directly and roll the cost into the client fee.

I've also found that snapping and it's settings can also make a big difference to how smooth the dragging motion can be. Maybe turn it off as a test and see if that is playing a part in this. If you find that things are smoother with it off then maybe try turning it back on and then toggling options within the snapping settings.

@walt.farrell maybe, but then we start the speculative guessing game. It needs insight from someone familiar with the inner workings of the code. Sadly, because there is no saved file (that I'm aware of) then there is probably no evidence of what exactly happened. I checked the folder referenced in the error message and it exists but is empty - hence my interpretation.

Hi @R C-R I didn't save the file before trying to switch applications. This might be the issue. I think that given the pathname quoted in the error message there is likely to be a permissions issue with that location. My guess is that AP wrote a file to that location - but failed, and the error wasn't trapped and handled and no file was saved to disk. Then AD is launched and expected the file to be there but it wasn't and so produces the above error but that's downstream of the original error (IMHO 😊).

Sorry, I should have mentioned that this is on Windows 10. The release is the recent v2.03 update. I've done this step many times (100s) without any issue as it is part of a recurrent workflow I use. This error is new. Yes, Saving is clearly the missing step here 😂 I've now redone the work by saving the AP file and then opening it in AD i.e. not using the Edit in... method. This is not an issue for now as I will not use that feature in the short-term. I am wondering if anyone from Serif can comment on the error message. Is this something peculiar to my setup or a known issue?

I started work on a photo in AP (v2.0.3) and then needed to work on a vector overlay so selected Edit in Designer... which launched Designer and then displayed this error message. Any idea how to interpret it? Neither application shows any of the file I was working on so is my previous work now lost?

Did changing that setting solve the problem?

Do you have Controlled Folder Access turned on? This might be a false positive for your Affinity apps that prevents them from writing to files. Type "Controlled Folder Access" into the search box and you should be able to see the setting. I have mine off and everything works fine.

I've been doing some more experimentation and I'm seeing a similar result.

That is interesting. I feel that can't be expected behaviour. It is as if the selection boundary is bound to the wrong layer. My expectation would be that it would follow the paste and only appear as a selection boundary without any impact on it. I can see how this relates to other operations that I use as expected though so it is not a big leap but still surprising. In any case I'm through it now with a work around noted. Thanks for looking at this.

I agree, that's my understanding too. Not sure if this is by design. In any case I'm on with my work now, just not the sort of thing you need with a deadline looming!! 😉

Hi @NotMyFault, there's not much to add. Here's the history. I don't think you saw the issue. If you watch the video again you can see that the pasted section is now the topmost layer in the layers panel yet when moved it appears to go behind the top part of the image which in the layers terms should be "below" it and thus not obscure it. Visually it looks like there are three layers. The result I'm trying to achieve is to see a strip along the top of the image which is a mirror of the bottom region. Is it suitable? I can't think of a more direct method to achieve this. I'm sure that there are other ways that this might be accomplished. I might be wrong but this isn't how I expected it to work. BTW version 1 behaves in the same manner however it shows that the copy flattened also copied the full image, or at least it's extent, and it displays the boundary of that region as a blue line. This appears to function as a mask and probably explains why it is behaving the way it does. Deselecting the pasted section before moving it appears to solve the problem although this isn't what I would have expected.

As the subject says I'm trying to copy a rectangular section of a pixel layer and it creates the impression of there being an extra layer which I didn't create and doesn't appear in the layers panel. For some reason OBS didn't record the popup menus but hopefully the sequence of steps involved can be understood. The source file is a 2048x208px webp image which loads as a locked pixel layer. Can anyone reproduce this? 2022-11-22 17-17-13.mp4

In this day and age it is expected. I know of very few "creatives" in my network that don't use a slew of different packages depending on the specific requirement and a lot of those applications are able to interoperate. I'm sure in time this (bat files and link names etc) will be well known and work more transparently but for now it requires some arcane knowledge and IT skills beyond that of the normal use of the app to get your workflow back to where it was in the previous version. I'm content because it looks like I'm up and running again. Thanks again for your help.

Hey @myclay thanks. I would never have guessed that something like that would work. It is interesting that the filename is Photo.exe but this (symbolic?) link gets there too.

Thanks @Dangerous that did work. Even so, this is not what I expected to have to do and makes me question the real benefit of this decision to go down the MSIX route.

I would imagine so. I will give it a try. Thanks for the suggestion.

OK, so I've now just hit this issue. I use Blender for all of my 3D work and Photo has been my image editor for several years. V1 worked great. V2 seems to be a mystery as to how to get it to work. Maybe someone can comment on this. In Blender / Settings you are asked to browse to the EXE file to set up the path. Because of the MS App walled garden this is now not possible using the old method of following the icon properties etc. as Windows is effectively "hiding" the actual location. So I launch the program and use task manager to locate the program which then appears to work but Blender complains about it being unable to launch the application. I'm guessing that this is a permissions issue more than anything. Copying this path to the Run Command also fails: I can see as a stand-alone application that the MS App model will work fine. If you need to integrate it with other applications which use a regular Shell Execute call then you are going to run into this problem. This is really disappointing and disrupts what was previously a nice workflow. Maybe there is a solution that I'm not aware of.

But he's bought into the crazy sensational face that YouTubers seems to need these days. It looks like he's just stood on a piece of Lego. 😂

Hi @drstreit Here's clip from the project page (https://waxy.org/2022/08/exploring-12-million-of-the-images-used-to-train-stable-diffusions-image-generator/) for that dataset: Also, I didn't see where you can go to have your images excluded do you have a link for that. The copyright issue is discussed briefly on the comments on that page but there are no answers.

I'd figured that out but thanks for letting me know I'm sure it will be useful to anyone else who goes down the same pathway. I now realise that I was "blinded" by the fact that I was in the Move Tool [V] mode all the time so this possibility never appears in the UI and is therefore not discoverable.

Hi @lacerto that's perfect, thank you. You learn something every day!

Hi everyone, I've just hit a snag with a project I'm working on where I appear to be unable to snap guides to nodes on the curves of holes. My (original) workaround was to create a rectangle that snapped to the hole geometry and then snap the guide to the rectangle but now I've a bigger job with non-rectangular holes and this is getting a little tedious. The blue guide will snap to the left edge of the pink rectangle but not to the edge of the rectangular hole (in a yellow circle). The edge shows in purple indicating that it is a candidate for snapping. Turning off bounding box snapping results in the ruler not snapping to anything. Indicating that previously the ruler was only snapping to the bounding box and not the geometry. The pink rectangle will snap to the hole nodes/vertices and curves/edges though! I'm guessing that guides use a subset of snapping and align differently compared to when you are moving other types of objects around. The online help is a little fuzzy on this and uses the terms objects, curves and vertices in the description but doesn't elaborate on any differences with guides as far as I could see. This isn't a showstopper as I can use other objects/shapes for alignment. However, using guides would have reduced the risk of unexpected shapes ending up in the final print-ready artwork. So, am I doing something wrong or is this just the way it works?

I would be interested in seeing some AI features too. I would much prefer an API to allow me build my own plugins though as this feels to me like a better use of the development resource. In addition to Affinity products I also use Blender extensively and I've recently been using DALL-E to to perform more creative in (and out) painting to textures and material images. Source and reference images occasionally arrive with too severe a crop or with noisy objects spoiling the composition. This feature of DALL-E is very helpful in extending sets/scenery and removing objects. Although the AP inpainting feature is very useful for large areas it can often get stuck in a rut with high contrast changes and clone copies appearing which means you have to use other approaches like cloning or painting. I also have a frequent need for seamless textures which often require lots of fiddle and faff in AP. Creating these in DALL-E (after some pre-processing in AP) nearly always gives me the best results. As a separate issue, I think that the industry is changing. AI is not going to go away. I'm already seeing marketing departments getting excited at (the potential of) not having to hire me to do some of the work they need. I, personally, feel that excitement is a little premature and that my skillset is still going to be required to complete the pipeline. Currently, the diffusion method that is popular isn't doing much to help with vector designs. My opinion is that these tools will help with inspiration and create a new kind of idea sketching that will be upstream of what designers and artists will receive as part of a brief and may even be part of their toolkits. It has already helped me with the blank canvas block syndrome for getting started after receiving intangible wording for an idea from the client. AI is part of the designer/artist future and we need to embrace it and understand it. That's not to say that it is good - a lot of what I've seen is rubbish, but it is getting better at some things. It is early days and things are developing quickly, plus there are still lots of problems. There are huge legal and ethical issues surrounding the sourcing and curating of the source training data. The web might be public access but that doesn't make all the images visible on it CC0!

Yes! It has not happened to me recently but I think it's only a matter of time. Separate to this is that a recent project had me managing a complex tree of design alternatives and tweaks across several product briefs which were unique but had some elements of consistency. It was really hard work when each change request came through. Reviewing it and working backwards it was easy to see what I should have done 😊. I have a good backup system running here but even that felt too infrequent to save me should there have been a failure - or a mistake.