Ken Hjulstrom

Patrick, I imagine most of us are arriving here by clicking the "Release Notes" link from the software update notice. It would certainly allay confusion/annoyance if that link went directly to https://affin.co/ReleaseNotesSuite2.

HI Walt,
That worked perfectly!  Thanks so much!  I actually tried to move all of the content to a new document, but I tried to do it by selecting the pages from the original document in the "Pages" sidebar and trying dragging and then right-clicking on the selection to look for a "Copy" command, but neither were supported.  I had seen the "Add Pages from File..." option, but I didn't explore it, thinking that it was intended only to import external non-Publisher content, such as Word or PDF documents, but using it to import an entire Publisher document into a new document worked file.  One minor glitch I encountered, though it didn't affect the spellcheck of the new version is that after adding all of the existing document's pages into the new document, for the new document to be an exact copy, I had to delete the initial blank page, which is what the new document contained before I added the existing document's pages.  Also, in my case, the new document started on the left side instead of the right, but this was easy to fix.  Perhaps this was caused by the extra blank page in the new document at the start.  As you suggested, I only used the new document for rerunning the spellcheck, which worked fine.
Thanks again,
Ken
 

Note: In the scenario i described just above, I would probably keep the original document as my "true" document, and just use the new one to make sure of the spelling. But in theory both should be usable.

Another suggestion. Create a new document.
Then use Document > Add pages from file... and add the complete old document to the new one. That new document won't have the Ignored words list (from a very brief experiment).

There's no "not" capability when searching for format info. 
I would make a copy of the document, and in the copy do a Find for all the text that has the right color format, and replace it. For example, Replace with a single space, or a single _, and then look for any text that still exists.

This feature will be included in the upcoming version 2.4.0:
 

Hi @Ken Hjulstrom,
Thanks for your feedback. It should work for almost all options including the "Raster DPI" field but there's a bug here that's preventing the value you insert in that field from being accepted despite displaying it in the field so the command "Create Preset" never becomes available. When you makes changes to the options of a preset, the name of the preset you started with should become blank and the Create Preset command available as @thomaso pointed out already, which should make clear that you are dealing with a new "custom" preset.

If you press Enter or click the Export button in that dialog to move on with the export, cancel the process in the following dialog where it asks for the name of the file, and then export again you will see that the value you inserted remains there in the Raster DPI filed but now the Create Preset button is available.
I'm logging this to be looked at.

Hi @Ken Hjulstrom,
If the current options of that preset match the options of an already existing preset then the Create Preset button will remain greyed out/unavailable (to avoid creating duplicates). Change one of the options of that preset and the command Create Preset will become available again.

As MEB said, you must make a change, then create the Preset.
Making a change does not change the existing Preset, only the Export you'll make if you continue on, so there's really nothing scary about it.

Hi,
In Publisher, is it possible to lock the size and position of text frames on a page while still having the text contained in that frame being editable?  I'm aware that I can use master pages to do this, but not all of the text frames that I use have a standard position on a page, and while I'm editing text, I sometimes accidentally move the frame slightly, and if I don't notice this right away when I can use "undo", it's a bit of a bother to resize/reposition the frame to its precise intended size/location.  If I lock the frame, this appears to prevent my ability to edit or view attributes of the contained text, which is something that I often need to do.
Thanks!
Ken
 

I see what's happening here.  You're probably correct regarding the 72 dpi threshold, but that's probably the default value.  Preflight allows you to create custom profiles (click on the three horizontal lines to the right of the profile name), and you can customize the settings.  I just noticed that I'm using a custom profile, and it appears that in the past, I've tweaked the DPI threshold for generating a Preflight error to be 300 DPI (see attached).
Ken

Hi stucor,
I can't yet comment on being able to see (and edit) the list of words that have been learned by the spell checker in Publisher V2, but I just finished laying out a 60-page magazine containing articles with many foreign names and words (which I told Publisher to "ignore"), and I had no problems at all with Publisher "forgetting" what I had previously told it to "ignore".  I don't use the "learn" option, since most of the names and foreign words that the spell checker flags change between magazine issues, so it's not really worth it for me to tell Publisher to "learn" these; I just tell it to "ignore" them.  It also seems that the spell checker is now better able to determine that words with differing capitalization are in fact the same word (when I first made this original post, if I told Publisher to "ignore" a word that was all lowercase, and it later appeared as the first word in a sentence, with an initial capital, I'd have to tell Publisher to "ignore" the version with an initial capital as well).
Hope this helps,
Ken

Hi stucor,
I can't yet comment on being able to see (and edit) the list of words that have been learned by the spell checker in Publisher V2, but I just finished laying out a 60-page magazine containing articles with many foreign names and words (which I told Publisher to "ignore"), and I had no problems at all with Publisher "forgetting" what I had previously told it to "ignore".  I don't use the "learn" option, since most of the names and foreign words that the spell checker flags change between magazine issues, so it's not really worth it for me to tell Publisher to "learn" these; I just tell it to "ignore" them.  It also seems that the spell checker is now better able to determine that words with differing capitalization are in fact the same word (when I first made this original post, if I told Publisher to "ignore" a word that was all lowercase, and it later appeared as the first word in a sentence, with an initial capital, I'd have to tell Publisher to "ignore" the version with an initial capital as well).
Hope this helps,
Ken

Thanks for letting me know.  I also have encountered what appear to be copy / paste problems in the "Find" input control, where sometimes I'd click in the control, do Cmd-A to select all, and then paste in the new search parameters, with the result that the previous content doesn't always get replaced by the "Paste" command.  I haven't been able to reliably repeat this, since I'm up against a deadline to get the current magazine file done, but I'll look into this issue a bit more when I have time.
Thanks again!

Hi,
I was using Affinity Photo, experimenting with filters to try to improve the appearance of a rather overexposed image, and quite by accident, I discovered that by duplicating the original photo layer, and applying the "Erase White Paper" filter to the duplicate layer, the result is a generally darker appearance, which is exactly what I was looking for.  Since the documentation for "Erase White Paper" states that all it does is "apply transparency to white areas of an image", I wasn't expecting any visible change to happen at all, since I would expect that the transparency that was just created in the top layer would just allow the white in the underlying area to show through.  Both layers are set to the "Normal" blend mode, and both have an Opacity value of 100%.  Could someone fill me in on what's actually happening here?
 
In the attached file, there are two layers, "Copy of Background" (which had the "Erase White Paper" filter applied), and "Background", which is the unaltered original image.  If you toggle the visibility of the "Copy of Background" layer, you can see that the original image is significantly brighter than when the visibility of both layers has been turned on.
Thanks,
Ken
 
 
EraseWhitePaperTest.afphoto

Yes.

You could create a grid by creating a rectangle with a stroke but no fill, after which, replicating the rectangle and snapping it to its neighbors would allow you to construct a grid quickly.  You could then select all of the rectangles at once and group them, which would give you a single, selectable grid object.  And by dragging the resize handles, you could adjust both the size and aspect ratio of the cells.

This works. It's counterintuitive, since the edit color dialog for palette color does not offer a transparency value. The reason for an exact numeric value is repeatability. I think Affinity should improve this.

One way would be to specify the colour with the numeric Opacity in the Colour Panel (you can use a throw-away shape when you are creating the colour), then add that colour to a Palette, then select the colour from the Palette when you want to use it.
I don’t know of any other way to choose a numeric value for the Opacity of a colour.
Is there a specific reason why you need to use an exact numerical Opacity value?

I’m surprised that your attempted prevention measures didn’t work, but any time you get an unwanted autocorrection you can undo it by immediately pressing Cmd+Z on Mac or Ctrl+Z on Windows.

Hi Old Bruce,
Thanks for the information.  The use of sections is interesting, but that approach wouldn't have worked very well in my case, as the document I was working with contained a number of forms and documents, most of which were greyscale, but I had added instructional text and colored outline boxes to highlight particular areas of the document, so the coloring was randomly scattered across the document, with 18 monochrome pages and 27 color pages.  I ended up using Acrobat to make two copies of the original document, as you suggested, and then removed the color pages from the "Greyscale" PDF and removed the greyscale pages from the "Color" PDF, which worked.  In hindsight, it might have been easier if I had used the PDF export of Publisher, and entered a comma-delimited list of page number in the "Pages" field, first entering the list of greyscale page numbers, exporting, and then doing the same with the list of color pages.  I might try this approach next time, although it doesn't scale very well as documents get much larger than the one I'm working with.
Thanks again,
Ken
 

A "zoom slider" for the page thumbnails would obviously be better.

I've got it in the beta:

Thanks, Walt and Bruce,
It was the "Edit Detatched" option that I had read about previously, but when I was checking for editing options, that name didn't register in my mind as the option that allowed me to make a local adjustment to a master page element.  I haven't tried it yet, as it turned out that after additional editing to my document, the text columns ended up balancing by default.
Thanks again,
Ken
 
 

At this point, I'm not sure exactly what I did, since I didn't realize that the black color had changed until some time had passed.  Generally, though, as a long-time user of software, I tend to expect that any software that has an "undo" capability should provide a way for me to "undo" my way out of mistakes, and if I'm about to make some sort of change that will result in an "non-undo-able" change, I would expect to see some sort of warning message notifying me of this, and giving me the option to cancel the operation if I don't approve of what the end result will be.