tudor

Since you're doing a book, I presume you use Affinity Publisher. Make a master page with a black rectangle as a background. Apply it to that specific page. As for the text, make paragraph styles using white as the text color. Don't mess with the blend modes as suggested above. They're ugly hacks and will cause troubles if you ever going to print that book..

Let me rephrase that without the emoticon. You said you're mad because you bought AD and discovered that it doesn't open your 3D files and has no features of use for you. I get that. You could've figured that out before paying for it, simply by using the trial for a few minutes. Now you're free to choose from any number of other 2D apps with proper support for DWG and DXF. And that probably means you'll have to start paying again for Illustrator. That's why you're mad, not because a cheap 2D graphic design app like Designer doesn't support some file formats used by the 3D industry.

There is a trial version available. It only takes a few minutes of using it to figure out if it's the right app for you, before buying it. You're most likely irritated because you realized that 2D design software with DWG/DXF support cost a lot more money than what you paid for Designer.

Speaking of Vectorstyler... I've been trying to replicate a signage file I built in Designer for printing. In the AD file there are 13 artboards, 31.5"x79" each. On all artboards there is a big 300dpi bitmap file as a background. On top of it I have some text and other graphic elements. Two artboards contain 40 sponsor logos, other artboards have additional vector and bitmap graphics. Designer absolutely flies through it. It's a pleasure to work with it. Illustrator would've struggled on that file. I know, I've been using it for 20 years and its slowness is the reason I avoid using it, even though I've been an Adobe CC subscriber since the beginning and keep paying for it (and for the Astute plugins). Well Vectorstyler with only ONE artboard became totally unusable the second I imported a hi-res bitmap. Just trying to select/move/resize that bitmap made the application unresponsive. I guess it's made for pure vector operations, like illustrations and drawings, not for layout work.

Setting my trackpad issues aside, once you fill an artboard with objects and graphics, Vectorstyler seems slower in general than Affinity Designer. The UI looks like a mix of Illustrator and CorelDraw. It can be quite overwhelming sometimes. Also I don't like how they copied some of the worst designed features from Illustrator like the Layers palette. The Layers studio in AD is more useful to me.

I really tried to like Vectorstyler (I've been testing its latest versions for a while), but when working with it, it feels like I'm using a clunkier version of Illustrator. It's really unpleasant.

If they had so much money to spend, they would at least update their iPadOS apps to support features introduced a couple of years ago, like the new file access API.

Vectorstyler looks like a single app for Mac and Windows, priced at $99. The website says 2019-2022, so I presume they've been on the market since 2019. Affinity produces three apps, each of them for Mac, Windows and iOS. I paid $50 each for Affinity Designer and Photo in 2014. They haven't asked for more money ever since. That's $100 for two apps over the course of 8 years. Publisher was launched later, in 2019 I think. To be honest I can't believe how Affinity managed to survive all these years with this pricing model. Compare with this: during all this time I've been paying approx. $55 each month to Adobe because, well, you can't survive in this business without paying the "Adobe tax". That's $5280 over the course of 8 years.

Any text editor that can save in the file format you need will be okay. Word, TextEdit etc.

Can’t you just copy and paste the text into a text editor and then save as RTF? I did this recently when I had to redo a brochure in InDesign (client demand). To my surprise, the text copied from Publisher maintained all the styles when pasted in InDesign. Saved me a lot of time.

Not even the "big guns" InDesign and QuarkXpress have this feature.

TL;DR This can only be fixed by Adobe. Detailed information: The generic EPS file format does not contain information about a page/media/artboard size. Therefore, when opening an EPS created in a 3rd party application*, Illustrator will create an artboard the size of the last one used. However, EPS files do contain a "bounding box" property, which is equal to the page size you define in Affinity Designer. Adobe could update Illustrator to use that bounding box value when creating the artboard holding the EPS graphics. (btw, that's what Affinity Designer does when it opens an EPS). * Okay, but then why an EPS created in Illustrator will open with the correct artboard size? That's because all EPS files created in Illustrator have a full AI file embedded. So Illustrator is actually reading the AI part of the file, not the generic EPS one.

Most blending modes must be rasterized when you prepare the file for printing. That’s okay. The erase mode in particular will never work in print the way you see it on screen in RGB mode.

You posted your feedback. Wait for somebody from Affinity to react. Feel free to ignore our comments.

You really have no idea what you're talking about. Nowadays companies use dedicated online project management tools. All collaborative work happens there. Those tools already have good features for editing/reviewing PDFs, images and Office files. For example we use Wrike in our company. I share all my Affinity work there as PDFs, PNGs or JPGs. There is no point in Affinity reinventing the wheel. Adobe has its own "share for review" online system. I tried it several times but went back to Wrike because everybody else in our company is there.

The plain EPS file format does not support layers or groups. What you download from stock sites are actually "Illustrator EPS" files. They contain proprietary Adobe Illustrator data on top of a plain EPS. Affinity and all other apps cannot read or write proprietary AI data.

I agree, that Grayscale color palette confuses people doing print stuff. But you could always make your own CMYK color palette.

The user can either spend a few seconds to understand and acknowledge the way AP deals with placed graphics and what dpi and resampling is, or keep bitching about how AP is not Photoshop. It's their choice. That's the difference between a professional and an amateur. The fact that AP preserves the original image data of placed graphics is simply awesome. I do image compositing for print and it's such a relief that I can freely resize imported images while maintaining their full resolution. AP continuously shows me the effective resolution of an imported graphic, and as long as that's above 150, 200 or 300 dpi, I know that the final, flattened result will look good. For pixel-precision work, I really don't want the software to do any resampling for me. I do it manually and only if/when needed, because resampling always destroys pixels. The same with the merging. Merging is destructive. I only merge layers as a last resort, when I really can't do what I want with groups.

If you agree with the client that the deliverable is a print-ready PDF, then you don't even have to tell them what software you use. If they insist on a certain format, it's most likely because they want the source file too.

Your document is 300 dpi, the black square is also 300dpi (since I presume it was created inside that document), while that Notepad screenshot is 360 dpi. If you merge the two layers with different dpi, there will be a resampling, hence the slight pixel offset. If you want to avoid this, all you have to do is to rasterize the Notepad screenshot before merging with the black square.

Again, not seeing that here.

Indeed, the colors from the Grayscale palette are not CMYK and should not be used where K-only ink is required.

You could use a separate Affinity Designer file as a master. Place it as a linked resource into your other files. Then any change you make on the master will be applied to all files.

I'm not seeing that here. Could you post an example?

Quick test: PDF X-4: