Roqoco

Presumably this is the "not responding" message that Windows generates when an app is involved in a lenghy process. If the process does eventually finish the app will regain control, but if the process locks up entirely and never returns (give it a few minutes) then you need to go into task manager (ctrl alt del) and terminate the process. If this is happening very frequently for short periods when performing simple tasks, it can be caused by your processor or memory being overloaded, so you should check what services and apps are also running and what the CPU and memory usage is. 8gb of RAM may be enough to run photo, but it isn't a lot for running several programs at once. Maybe the problem would be resolved if you gave your system a good clean up with something like ccleaner, also defrag hard disk, check for spyware, Check your startup file for unecessary garbage etc.

The main function of a gpu is to accelerate the rendering of the frames in the frame buffer (vram) so as well as VRAM anything that helps games in that respect (cuda cores...) is likely to accelerate AP too when it needs to rapidly redraw. I suspect you can't go far wrong with any decent gaming card with at least 4gb vram, more if you are running 1440p or 4k. That said, you are hardly going to benefit much from a very high end gaming card, because much of the functionality in Affinity is likely CPU bound any way and so can't be handed off to the GPU. I have a nvidia GTX 1080 with 8gb of VRAM, two generations old but still a decently fast card. I can't say that it has made a very noticeable difference having acceleration in 1.9, but then I have been using designer almost exclusively and that is less likely to benefit than photo, because manipulating vectors is more of a CPU intensive thing. Maybe someone who uses photo more could comment on any benefits they have seen?

"I can open a page" Have you tried creating a new file with file -> New... Does that work? And can you then create a rectangle?

Could you explain a bit more, for those who haven't used Illustrator? On the face of it a cookie cutter would behave how the Affinity "subtract" operation does, i.e. "cut one object out of another". And you can also do that non destructively using Layer -> Create Compound, then selecting subtract on the first object, in the layer panel.

Low end GPUs <100 will likely have only 1-2gb of vram, probably not enough, when running at higher resolutions (over say 720p), to get a significant performance boost. So likely you would need to spend a bit more than that to get a noticeable difference, assuming those functions you mentioned would actually be helped by a GPU, which I don't know.

There is a setting in edit -> preferences -> user interface "auto-scroll to show selection in layers panel" which when unclicked will stop AD from opening the branch containing current selection in the layers panel.

Hmm - both Ctrl+Alt+0 and double clicking on the thumbnail do appear to work in designer in 1.9 at least. Have you checked this recently?

It is quite convenient to be able to work on elements in a locked layer, that holds backgrounds or something like that, because it means that when you return to a higher level you don't accidentally start moving your backgrounds around, because you didn't remember to relock them. Something that was constanty happening to me, before I noticed this feature to edit in locked layers. Maybe, to get the best of both worlds, a solution might be to allow layers to be double locked. Then when single locked you can edit only when you directly click on an object in a layer, in the panel and when double locked you can't edit at all in those layers. But, maybe people will think that is too conceptually complicated?

Double clicking was the first thing that occurred to me. But, it did nothing cos I was clicking in the wrong place... I see now that you have to double click on the description text "Ellipse", "Curve" etc. for this to work. That is really useful to know! Appreciate it. "right click menu entry" Yeah... in the meantime I found a keyboard shortcut summary https://resources.serif.com/spotlight/learning/shortcuts/Affinity-Designer-Shortcuts-Windows.pdf which I will scour with a tooth comb.

Thanks. Have been looking for that for weeks, and finally concluded it was not implemented. Still probably a good idea to make it a right click option, I would think, to make it easy to find. Otherwise it is a bit like learning Wordstar (where everything was done by esoteric key combinations). Also, it would be preferable if there was an option not to change the current zoom level.

Nice to see the new "select same" option in 1.9. I was hoping though that it would also give you the option to replace the objects selected with the current selection. That would be particularly useful for updating objects used many times in your work - e.g. Select Same, name "tree 1" replace with <current selection> could update your trees to a new version in one go.

If you select a shape in the layer panel and it is small and/or offscreen, it can be very hard to locate where it is on your canvas/artboard. A straight forward solution would be to put a "centre on selection" option into the right click menu that appears when you right click on the shape in the layer panel. This would center the canvas on the object This would be the complementary functionality to the "find in layers panel" option that you get when you directly right click on a shape in the canvas/artboard and would be equally useful.

Make sure your graphics drivers are up to date. And check this manually if you are using the auto updater tool to confirm that it worked. Likely this will be the most common problem, given that 1.9 now implements hardware acceleration for the graphics card. Last nvidia update was on 21 Jan if I remember correctly. In any case generally severe problems are likely to be something due to your configuration, because otherwise everyone would have them. Windows has always been hard to test on, because there are so many different possible configurations.

Well this was certainly functionality that I didn't expect!? As to your jigsaw puzzle splitting, was playing around with that recently and found that you can do it if, after drawing the lines through the shape, you go "Expand stroke" on each of them to get rid of the fills.Then set line to a minimal stroke size and press divide. Mostly that works fine when I do it. And it does look in your example result that the fill is what is interfering with the operation.

Thanks! That wasn't quite it, but reading it immediately lead me to notice that the shape was marked "curves" plural. I then pressed "divide" on the toolbar and everything magically (!?) split apart as I wanted. Really handy.

Thanks Garry. Actually, I think now that the slow down problem is to do with the sheer number of nodes in my shapes rather than having other shapes on the screen, which don't seem to make much difference. Maybe what is happening is that when I make changes to a single node or attempt to drag it, the program is recalculating the position of all the other nodes in the shape which would be quite compute intensive. So whilst this is a bit irritating when editing the nodes, I don't think it is going to stop me creating a large map - after all even the thousands of nodes in my shapes is a small amount of data compared to a raster image and the maps redraw quickly enough, when not in node mode. Am also thinking I could quite easily split the large shapes and fit them together a bit like a jigsaw puzzle and maybe that will have other advantages in making my project more modular.

I have no idea what Serif's plans are, or what their release schedule is. But, most software companies who release stand alone, rather than charge a subscription, will need to make a charge for major version updates, because, otherwise they would not have a viable business model. But, this way of doing things is still far better for users than a subscription, especially given the stand alone cost of the affinity suite is an order of magnitude (more at current discounted price) more affordable than a years subscription to the common alternative.

I'm creating a quite large world map (12inx12in LP size) with quite a few different landmasses (continents, islands...). These shapes are highly fractalised to give the detail required at higher zoom levels. I have only added a couple of continents so far, but things slow down noticeably when I select the node tool and zoom in to manipulate the nodes. Am just wondering whether what I am trying to do is practical or whether everything is likely to grind to a halt when I add more of the landmasses to the drawing? I would like to reduce/simplify the node count somewhat, because it is rather uneven, but don't see a way to do that, other than to delete nodes manually, which is hardly practical. I did try exporting to SVG and using Inkscape's "simplify" function, but that is much too destructive (when it works at all). Perhaps it might be an idea to break up the larger continent shapes (into countries), but I haven't worked out how to do that in a simple way.

When I use the boolean add operation to add to a closed curve it can create areas inside that are themselves closed curves or at least they appear to be. That is the functionality that I want (I am creating a map and have made a shape that is intended to add "lakes" cut into the landscape by glacial action). But, what is confusing me is that these enclosed curves are not treated as separate objects, but seem to be bundled up with the original curve, so that when I select them, both the original curve and the enclosed curve are selected. I'd like to get to a structure where the enclosed "lake" curves are separate and nested under the original curve in the layer hierarchy. Incidentally, this curve nesting also seems to cause problems when importing or exporting shapes in SVG format.