Paul Mc

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.

Thanks @Andreas Scherer I knew about this feature but hadn't considered using it in this context. I've used it where there is a mainline of development with minor tweaks which may need to be removed It seemed to work OK but the final file didn't allow easy traversal and review of all the "final nodes" of the design without exhaustively cycling through all the decision points. For the moment I'm trying out the @walt.farrell method above and suffer the disk hit as I think that will be the most robust in the face of client request changes.

Thanks @walt.farrell I will take a look.

Thanks @LondonSquirrel I hadn't considered the use of something like bsdiff - until now. I've used a patch builder under Windows many years ago and can see that there are several offerings on github with equivalents so I might investigate that option. I'm Windows based so ATM I'm not sure how your discussion of the cp command could be applied. I've just acquired a new QNAP NAS so disk space isn't a problem and QTS is a close relative of Linux so maybe I could push that functionality across to that box. It's early days on that one and I need to do some more homework before I'd feel comfortable having my paid work rely on it. Thanks for the divergence - it's all interesting stuff.

Thanks @walt.farrell I might just give this a try. This is what I was thinking of doing when I posted the original message but was curious about how others might do this.

Thanks @Pšenda, there isn't a problem with using SVN - my point was coming from a software developer perspective where branches and merges are a clear benefit which appear impossible with current offerings. And, yes, to use for snapshots is really the only use I can see, which, of course, will make the database grow.

I've recently had the experience of a complex pathway of repeated refinements dealing with several stakeholders resulting in a set of final designs using AP &B AD. I've also been checking the forums and there appear to be a growing number of corrupt file saves being reported. Thankfully I've not had that happen. I'm just wondering if there is scope for a setting to keep a number of generations of backups of a design file, getting bumped on each save? I was doing this manually but every so often I'd accidentally save over the current version and this had me wondering if whatever is causing the corrupt saves hit me I'd be in a real pickle. Version control would be even better but all the systems out there wouldn't be able to detect changes other than checksum/size/datestamp which would make it a more tedious job (IMO) to maintain. Is anyone out there successfully using version control with Affinity products? Is there any other strategy to consider other than using a well defined folder/file naming scheme?

@Harnaak I think I may have misunderstood the problem here. The font made no difference to what I was seeing. Here's how I turned off the ligatures: The Typography panel can be found under the Character tab/studio. Toggling the fi button is all that was required.

The Calibri ligatures export fine for me. Here's a capture from Adobe Acrobat Reader: I don't have the GurbaniAkharHeavy font installed so I can't check if this has a side-effect.

Maybe if you have a solid white coloured background on which you place the images that you might not see the dashes? Perhaps that's how MS Pub works? While in the application it is possible that the dashes are not visible on screen because they are transparent but when they are printed the printer driver converts transparent areas to black? Just a guess.

If you try a rectangle over the whole area so that the edges of the rectangle align closely with the dashes and then use a clear/transparent fill but a white stroke colour and then on the stroke tab give the stroke a non-zero thickness. Maybe use a bright colour to start with and then switch to white once you can see where the edges are and it is in the correct place.

Further to my answer, if the dark spots are due to dark pixels then only cropping will apply (unless you want to paint them out using the brush or maybe a white rectangle stroke with a clear fill). In my case the dark dashes were due to transparent pixels and putting the white rectangle behind them made them match the white paper so were then invisible so the eye.

In one case I cropped it just as you say you did earlier, in all the other cases I placed a white rectangle behind it and then rasterised the result - this allowed me to enlarge the canvas a little which helped with my requirement.

I've had a similar problem with scanned images (via Photoshop). It happened because the images needed rotating for the lines of text to be horizontal as the scans were a little skewed. The rotation seemed to have added extra columns and rows of pixels around the border in PS. Because some of them were anti aliased they appeared as semi-transparent over the black background I had. The dashed effect was due to the skew correction. None of this was caused by Affinity apps but they allowed me to correct the problem.

The original PDF may have set the document colour settings to Grey so any imported images are converted to monochrome. If you go to File | Document Setup... and click on the Colour tab make sure that the Colour Format setting is RGB (or CMYK if this is for print) before inserting/placing the colour picture.

I have no idea, sorry. What card do you have? I would be surprised if the card itself is a problem. I think you would have noticed bigger problems before now if that was an issue. I considered reporting the issue when I experienced it but it proved impossible to reproduce while screen recording which made me wonder if OBS (screen recording software) might be interfering with it. Since then it has happened rarely so I've been able to live with it. Sorry, this isn't very helpful is it.

Hi @NAR, I have this need also. In my world these are called Title Blocks. For now I use a linked PDF file created separately. Of course this could be edited in AD but in my case I wrote an application for the job. Using a linked file means that the format can be setup once and the contents not accidentally edited while you are working on the design. Also, when I update the contents AD detects that (if the file is open, or the next time I open it) so the details are always up to date.

I've a suspicion that it could be display driver related. If it is on then maybe try turning off hardware acceleration in the Performance tab of Preferences and see if that helps.

I've also seen this effect. It's a little strange and as you say not easily repeatable. My guess is that when you update the design the underlying canvas gets "invalidated" which queues up a redraw to render the update. Sometimes the redraw isn't completely redrawing the canvas and some parts retain their old content. Eventually those parts are redrawn or the whole canvas is redrawn and the problem goes away. Are you seeing old bits of the design lying around after you move objects?

If I understand correctly it is a case of deleting the curve that represents the hole in each profile. If you double-click on a shape then it will select all the curves in it and also switch you into using the node tool. Then select one node on the hole curve; press Ctrl+A and then Delete.

Even though I've been using AD for quite some time now I've just encountered this issue for the first time. It had me confused. By accident I discovered that if you hold down the right-mouse button and then left-click (while still holding the right-mouse button down) on different regions they will add to the selection. I have to say that this is a strange way to do things. In addition, as has been pointed out above, the hints on the footer don't really explain how this should work. Given that there is already an established culture of using SHIFT to extend a selection I'm hoping that this is considered for a future update. In addition there is the ergonomics issue of pressing two mouse buttons at the same time which I've never come across in any other software. In Windows-land code to test for the right mouse button can be very similar to the code to test for the Shift key being pressed so I wonder if this is a typo in the source! Let's hope so 😉

I've not done this but would selectively applying lens distortion (correction) to the separate channels of R, G and B and then recombining them work? Here's a page I found which appears to describe a method that could be applied using AP. https://nightskypix.com/what-is-chromatic-aberration/

On Windows you can right-click a PDF file and select Open with > and then select the program that you wish to use in that instance. To set a default program select Open with again and then click Choose another app at the bottom of the menu; then select the program you wish to use (or locate it on your hard disk) and check the box marked Always use this app to open .pdf files.

Yes, you can create a circular crop of an image in Affinity Designer. The crop is really a mask and it is non-destructive in the sense that you can save the AD file and you could later remove the mask and it will reveal the whole of the original image. The image could be a bitmap (pixel image) or a vector design. The mask is a vector image. The whole image is stored in the AD file along with the circle (ellipse) profile for the mask. Depending on your downstream use of the cropped or masked image you may need to follow the same process of conversion to a PNG. It is hard to comment more on this without knowing more about how you use the cropped images. The performance issue is common with large bitmaps. This shouldn't be an issue within AD if you don't need to enlarge the images as you currently do. Why not download a trial version and see if it fits your workflow.

As an aside, what would be a lot better here is to add another "variable" - artboard. (Maybe filename as well?). Also, not having Page Information decided for me would also be useful. If another variable editor could be used to define what goes into the Page Information I think that would be a great addition to the Export Persona.