dhemery

Thanks, Dave. Do you mean that I neglected to tick some layers, or that AP somehow somehow left them unticked? I'm confident that at some point I made sure to tick them all, and did not see a change in the results. But sometimes I'm confident about stuff that I have no business being confident about ;-) Looking forward to the fixes. I'm quite enjoying AP for book covers.

Yeah, I did that before my original post, and it worked. Not sure why, but I'd rather not have to do that.

No live filters. One Outer Glow effect on the book title. One Brightness/Contrast adjustment above the art and below the text. One layer mask. A couple of fills, one with transparency and blending. Everything else is boxes. The original file is (temporarily) here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yb31m6me69cte60/donation-cover-paperback.afphoto?dl=0

No layers selected. Only the one slice (the default "page" slice) appears in the Slices panel.

I have created a paperback book cover in Affinity Photo, and now I want to export it as PDF to send it to the printer. I cannot figure out how to export a PDF that looks anything like what I see in Affinity Photo. (Nor can I export anything that looks right in any other format, for that matter.) Here is a screenshot of what the cover looks like in the Export Persona: Here is what the PDF (for print) preset produces (I made no adjustments to the preset): donation-cover-paperback.pdf This export appears to include the one pixel layer from the document, with at least some of the adjustments applied to turn the bills from dollar-bill color to blue. I cannot explain the grainy waviness. I have some fill layers, which either do not appear in the PDF or appear as white. My document has a layer mask that fades the edges of the pixel layer into the background fill layer, but it does not appear to fade here. The text (in layers above the fills and pixel layers) does not appear at all. The original image is dollar-bill colored dollar bills, with a certain amount of focus blur, but otherwise no fuzziness. Here is what the TIFF RGB 8-bit preset produces (I made no adjustments to the preset): donation-cover-paperback.tiff This appears to be the adjusted image, but without the text, and without the layer mask that fades the edges of the image. Again the text is completely missing. JPEG export looks similar to TIFF. I get these results from the "page" predefined slice in the Export Persona, and from the File -> Export command. The only thing I've been able to do that seemed to work is to merge the document into a single layer, then export that as PDF. I'm not sure I want to rasterize the text (I have never sent the printer rasterized text before, and am unsure whether the results will be what I want). Any clues about where I'm going wrong?

Never mind. A couple of nested rectangle layers gives me what I need. It's easy to move the whole "front cover" group to widen or narrow the spine, and snapping makes it easy to move the two or three guides.

I want to use Affinity Photo to design paperback book covers. Because many elements of my book covers use standard fonts and positioning. The standard elements are simple text and boxes (author name, publisher and price info, box for back cover text, white box for bar code) and some guides for spine, margins, and bleed. I would like to create a template with these standard elements. The challenge is that the page count differs for each book. The page count affects the spine width, which in turn affects the x positions of the front cover elements. I could move the text and guides manually, but anything I do manually is a nuisance and prone to error. Until now I have used InDesign for book covers. My InDesign book cover template uses a spread with three pages: back, spine, and front. The front cover page is positioned relative to the spine’s right edge. The front cover elements are positioned relative to the front cover page. So if I adjust the spine width, the front cover moves over to make room, and all of the front cover elements and guides move with the page. Is there a way to do something similar in Affinity Photo? Or is Affinity Designer a better choice? Or a combination?