vlimm

Thank you so much for your help, Lee! This is exactly what I was looking for. Your suggestion worked perfectly!

I’ve got a lovely stippling pattern created from a simple stroke coupled with the dense stippling brush from the “patterns” brush set. I would like to expand my stroke so that I can apply a gradient fill to the various stipples. Does expanding strokes stop working whenever you apply a brush to a stroke? If so, does anyone have any advice on how I might be able to apply a gradient to my stippling? (Hopefully without a bunch of microscopic work…)

Yes, I saw that too. However, unless Affinity is willing to put in coding that will allow us to mathematically manipulate those numbers (e.g., K+1), this custom formatting is not terribly useful. I understand that following the Unicode standard is a good general principle, but if Affinity wants to avoid providing additional programming capability, a few tweaks are going to be needed to make this custom formatting meaningful.

In your "custom date formatting" section, I would suggest one modification: This number would make more sense if the output values were 1-12. (i.e., We would never say 0 AM. We would say 12 AM.)

Yes, thank you @lepr!

I'm sorry, because this outline was accidental, I have no idea what the original value was set to.

@thomaso, thanks for this. I will do some more testing, and submit a bug report if it's possible to replicate the problem. Thanks as well for your PS. I'm a pretty new user for Affinity, and don't really understand a lot of the color side of things. Can you tell me where I should go to change the text fill colour to 100 K only? Right now in Affinity, I've got it set to 0 on the "greyness" dropdown, but I guess that's not the way to do it...

@thomaso, actually I didn't do a find and replace as you'd mentioned there might be problems with it. I did a manual search, which was pretty easy because I have used text styles for everything. When I tried to do a find and replace on the original file, APub v2 crashed. I tried a few variations of the find/replace search term to see if I could get it to work, but it consistently crashed.

@thomaso, thank you so much! The information you provided was exactly what I needed. The screenshots really helped. I deeply appreciate all of your time and help. Spanish Captive Set Free v7 excerpt.pdf

@thomaso, thanks for finding this. I wonder if you can help me find where this is present in the Affinity file? I've never come across anything like this before. Is it something within the file? Something that happened on export/print? I'm inclined to think it's within the file as the white stroke appears to be somewhat selective (e.g., not touching the headers or attributions for the endorsements), but I have no idea where to look next.

(Sorry, @walt.farrell, please see above.)

Yes, of course. Here it is. Spanish Captive Set Free v7 excerpt.afpub

I've got a book file that's fully formatted, apart from a final pass-through, but when I go to export to a PDF, the font color comes through light and patchy. Please note that I've been using a level 0 on the greyscale, so I've no idea why this isn't on the darkest setting--or why it's patchy! I'd appreciate any help you can provide, and am including a sample file below. Please note that the copyright page, endorsement attributions, and the page headers seem to come through alright. I can't figure out what's different between them and the rest of the text! Spanish Captive Set Free v7 excerpt.pdf

GarryP, thanks for your question. Sorry for the delay in response. My notifications somehow got mucked up. Here's the visualization you requested. Here I've used the following configuration for my callout: Here, I've created a bubble-based callout, with bubbles that gradually decrease in size according to the decrease in the callout tail, assuming a 4-bubble setting. The space between the first bubble and the callout is equal to 2/3 the vertical size of the first bubble. All other inter-bubble spacing is the same as this. In this case, I've assumed the bubble size will be defined by the callout tail width. There is equal space between the bottom of the last bubble and the bottom of the tail as there is between all the other bubbles. When we take away the original callout box, the bubble version looks like this: It's first thing in the morning for me here, so I've just done a rough approximation based on vertical height for the bubble distance, but a case could be made that it would be more accurate to do a diagonally-based calculation. But I don't have the brainpower right now to get into that, and I think this version looks pretty good

Oh! I figured it out! Special characters were not toggled on, but your comment about editing frame text layers got me thinking. When I detached the frame from the master, I was able to move it out of the way and see that Affinity had somehow created another layer underneath the Master. At one point when dragging Masters onto certain pages, there was a strange advisory that Affinity was going to automatically flow text to frames not originally designated for that purpose, but I didn't really understand what was happening or why, especially since Affinity didn't tell me where it had put the text. I suppose this was the result. Thanks for your help! Without your comment, I never would have thought to try detaching layers.

I'm a brand new Affinity Publisher user, and am laying out my first interior book design. I've managed to get 80% through the process before running into something I can't figure out. There seems to be an odd character overlaying the text that should be there on one of my pages. I'm attaching a screenshot. Actually, I'm not even sure I should be calling the odd thing that's started showing up a "character". It doesn't seem editable or selectable. It doesn't show up on any of my Masters. I'd appreciate any help you might be able to provide!

Sorry, I actually had that all figured out, and then managed to omit it in my answer. I did some visual experimentation, and found that if each space were 2/3 the size of each bubble, this would be visually pleasing. From there, all the math would be based on the user-defined tail height and angle, and the number of bubbles.

Thanks for your thoughtful questions. Here's what I'd suggest. If the user specifies N bubbles, then you would have N-1 spaces between bubbles, plus an equally-sized space between the first bubble and the callout... so the total number of spaces ends up being N as well. Bubbles could be equal sizes and evenly spaced. The tail height, position, and angle would still be used to define bubble behaviour.

This suggestion is for: - callout rounded rectangle - callout ellipse I would love to see a context toolbar option that allows you to change the tail to be a number of circles (user specified), so that we could easily create thought bubbles as well as speech bubbles. The "tail height" option would then control how squished the defined number of circles are. (e.g., are they perfectly round, or are they oblongs?)

+1 Yes, please! Without this functionality, it's infeasible for me to use Affinity Publisher. As well as supporting natively-created endnotes, if you could also include functionality to import from Word, this would be wonderful. But even just a basic endnote construct in Affinity would be sufficient. I'd be willing to do the work to manually add them in Affinity, as long as each entry remained linked with its back matter content for easy navigation. I love your software, and was so sad to realize that it's infeasible to use it because of this gap in functionality.

@Old Bruce Yes, Affinity does not read the Devanagari font. This is a known problem. (see other posts in this discussion) You are correct, it is using a fallback font. But it's not because the font wasn't installed. EDIT: I made a mistake in terminology earlier. Apologies.

@Alfred @LibreTraining Sorry about the delay. Around Christmas work gets chaotic. One of the things that can be quite beautiful about Japanese calligraphy and fonts is their bold, sweeping nature. Taking a step back, I can see your point. I got so caught up in the boldness of Devanagari that I failed to see that apart from the stroke weight the fonts are close to identical. Up until now, the boldest Mincho font I'd found didn't get as bold as the Devanagari version. Kerning isn't as important as that line weight. Your Hiragino Mincho Pro looks the closest yet, when used in bold. I will use that as a substitute in Affinity. Thank you.

@LibreTraining @Old Bruce Sorry for the delay in responding. Swamped by Christmas. Here are two scrubbed files with only the ITF Devanagari font, for illustration. Note that as per other people's feedback in this discussion, Affinity is aware of the problem with the Devanagari font. So, I don't think we need to do any more on this. I can use other programs to work around this and still use the font. Not ideal, but necessary. Devanagari from Pages.pdf Devanagari from Affinity.pdf

Yes, the Mincho family does have nice serif scripts, but nowhere near as beautiful as Devangari. What you're seeing in the Hiragino / Mincho examples you provided is the difference between a serif and sans serif script, along with bold / normal. When I first came to Japan, I couldn't tell the difference between bold Mincho and Devangari, but now one makes me cringe at the thought of using it in a flyer. It's just too common as a font in documents and well...everything. Using Mincho would be like using Times New Roman in an English flyer: use sparingly, at your own risk. Hope this helps clarify the issues.

Definitely not a fallback, but it's possible I've attached the wrong files. It's the middle of the night here. I will check tomorrow when my computer's on again. Thanks! EDIT: Should have researched "fallback" before making this comment. I thought fallback meant something slightly different.