Stephen_H

I see this has and hasn't happened... Font size and leading still don't have up & down arrows, but amazingly enough, every single other font attribute does. Clearly, this must be a conscious decision to leave them off because it's obviously not a technical limitation. I can't think of any reason for this. Come now guys, what's up with this????

Some of the features – yes. My concern is checking the actual file that I'm sending to my printer. Unfortunately, the moment you open a PDF into AF Designer, it stops being a PDF document and becomes a .adesign document so you are not actually proofing the PDF any more. If changes need to be made, you can't just save and close, you have to export and therefor create a new PDF document. This will create a vicious circle as you now need to proof the new PDF, and by proofing the PDF, I just end up making a new one... .adesign –> PDF –> .adesign –> PDF –> .adesign –> PDF –> .adesign –> PDF –> etc (when can I confidently send my PDF to print?) Hmmm, alternatively, what if..... Publisher supports some kind of "Read Only" mode just for proofing files that guarantees that the file will be left unchanged by the app and saves directly back to the original PDF file without having to export a new one? (once you've had to pay for a print job that has gone wrong, you understand why proofing is so important – especially since we don't have the physical proofing methods of days long gone – litho positives and chromalins. This is why I view Acrobat as such a critical tool in my design studio).

+1 on the .CDR import I frequently get files supplied in CDR and I have to take them to my budget corner printer and ask him to convert them for me. Please protect me from standing around listening to his sarcastic comments about my choice in "superior" Mac platforms and Adobe software that can't do what his second-hand PC hooked up to a vinyl cutter can do. Actually, I think CDR support is going to protect him more than me because next time I go I might not be so restrained. Can I claim code-rage if I beat my printer senseless with his own pc tower or strangle him with his $4 logitec mouse that he also boasts about? (yes, that was a play upon road-rage... well spotted)

There are lots of reasons to add an awesome PDF viewer/editer application to the suite. Here are a few off the top of my head in under 5 minutes: Add interactivity like buttons and multimedia files Colour separation previews to check over print & spot colours and other pre-press proofing Minor text changes without re-creating the whole PDF, especially if it's a long document or it uses fonts you don't have loaded on your computer Define bleed, trim and type-safe areas for auto-processing applications that some newspaper publishers have for artwork submission Preview/add/remove colour profiles Optimise or recompress PDFs to make them smaller Add security to limit the use of the document. Eg: a print-disabled proof to a client for sign-off that hasn't paid their final invoice. Text & image extraction (copy and paste entire paragraphs rather than opening it into Designer where the words might be broken up into letters) Advanced printing features without converting the PDF (eg: auto pagenated booklet printing) Because the Affinity suite is catering to the print industry, PDFs should really be taken VERY seriously. Just opening PDFs and exporting PDFs is just not enough. Also, opening a PDF into Designer and to make changes, then exporting it again creates a whole new document. I don't know how many jobs have gone bad by printers opening my print-ready PDFs into Corel Draw and printing separations from it when they should be printing the separations straight from a PDF workflow application. Printers who would usually have used Corel Draw, might be tempted to move over to Affinity's PDF application for better quality integration. I'd put a standalone PDF tool way ahead of all the calls for a Lightroom/Aperture alternative. It would instantly stamp Affinity's authority on the print industry. It might even become a tool that Adobe users would add to their set of designer tools – a complimentary tool, not a competing tool. Think of all the new Apple Mac users who were convinced to change from Windows because they got an iPhone and fell in love with it. (There was no way Apple could convince Windows users to move based on iWork and expensive aluminium bodies because the competion was too stiff for a head-to-head fight). Perhaps a PDF tool could be Affinity's iPhone to sit alongside every copy of Illustrator, InDesign and Corel Draw out there?

That's interesting. Umm, How about calling it "Export paths for 3D" and not tell us what's really happening under the hood? (Just joking. I think you'd catch a lot of flack for doing that)

If your printer needs more than 5mm leeway, you need a better printer. ;) (But I get your point... Glossy paper is not the only material that can be die cut)

Most 3D applications require vectors to be imported as an Illustrator 8 file. There also seems to be a lot of Illustrator 8 support, both exporting and importing. I get that a CC version would be a proprietory format, but 8 seems to be public. If memory serves me, Illustrator 8 doesn't support images or transparency. It's practically postscript level 1 and hasn't been a master "working" file for over a decade. Are you guys sure version 8 hasn't been made public? It bears so little resemblance to any other Illustrator file format since.

+1 It really doesn't matter how much bleed you have if your crop marks are going to show. In my exports, the crop marks are only offset by 2,25mm. This means there's no point in having more than 2,25mm bleed and since all my printers demand either 3mm or 5mm bleed on every job, I have to open every exported PDF back into Designer and move the crop marks off the bleed just to make the rest of the bleed usable. We don't need to manually specify both. Wouldn't it make sense to just automatically offset all crop marks by the same amount as the bleed? At the very least, perhaps change the offset from a practically useless 2mm to a more generic 5mm. No printer will ever complain about 5mm offset.

Not just for photographers. I've just processed over a hundred product images sourced from the web of perfume bottles to be used in a product sample video. All had pure white backgrounds so I applied the following task order 100 times: Open Erase white paper Rotate 90º Export PNG Close I feel stupid having forced myself to do it in Affinity Photo when PhotoShop could've batch processed it all while I went on lunch, but hey, I'm trying to use Affinity products as much as possible to get completely comfortable with them so Adobe can stop being my "go to" apps. (difficult to do when the lasso selection tool's cursor obscures my view of what I'm doing. It's terrible)

Hmm, a preflight persona is a good idea to avoid errors, but we really need to check the final exported PDF. It's very easy to accidentally export a low resolution RGB PDF that won't print correctly, but since the whole document was designed using high resolution images and CMYK colours the Pre-flight persona wouldn't be psychic and know what silly PDF export setting you're going to use. No, we need some way to check PDFs AFTER export, not before. I'd buy a copy of that, in a heart beat.

Giving Publisher great PDF creation & editing features is not what Marco was asking for. He's looking for a pre-production proofing tool. I agree completely. Acrobat's pre-flight and proofing features are awesome, and as far as I can tell, totally unique. I have not been able to find a single PDF viewer/editor that allows me to preview colour separations that allows me to check overprint, knockout, spot colours and single black mixes (a sure sign of a potential RGB error). I started design when everything that went to print became litho positives with a chromalin colour proof to check that everything was correct. Now we export a PDF, email it and just pray the printer is using a genuine PDF-based workflow and not importing the file into Corel Draw. I think Affinity has an awesome opportunity to create a really stripped down PDF viewer that has the sole purpose of proofing PDFs for print. Honestly, I'd pay $100 for it because at this very moment, Acrobat is the ONLY Adobe application I can't fully replace with a decent alternative.

A list of features don't make a great workflow on their own. These features are very "architectural" rather than "designey". I have no doubt there are many floorplan/architecture/organogram apps that also have these features, but if you're looking for a general, multi-purpose, "go to" design app, iDraw is not it. As a specialist, technical drawing tool, it's very useful, but since Autodesk owns awesome architectural, technical and 3D apps, expect iDraw to continue in that direction rather than grow as a graphic designer's tool. Why Autodesk renamed it to Graphic fails me – it's not a drawing or a graphic designer's tool. iPlan, iFloorplan, iDraft or BluePrint would all be be more appropriate names. I know it's not a subscription tool (like I said, I own it), but all of Autocad's serious software is now subscription-based so don't expect it to stay this way for too long. ...and if you think Adobe is pricey with its subscription model, you'll vomit when you see AutoCad's pricing – I thought I was reading annual fees until I realised it was monthly for individu [ BARF ]

Nooooooooooooooo….. don't do it! You'll have 100 resignations on your hands. Plus, Autodesk is also moving towards the rental/subscription model like Adobe's. If you're wanting to drop Adobe for this reason, then an Autodesk product is just setting yourself up for a similar problem in the near future.

Late 2016? I'm certainly disappointed. First early 2015, then late 2015 not late 2016? Sounds like a serious re-write is in progress. I wonder what was so problematic when I imaging half of its code already exists in Designer. (I even saw a video of Publisher demonstrating its text wrapping feature that felt like a launch teaser more than a proof-of-concept because it seemed so refined)

Err… I don't have the option to "Groups lines of text". I have the latest "retail" version from the App Store. Is it a new feature only in the Beta?

You can open PDF files into Designer, but editing them is very limited – text is not kept as paragraphs so deleting a single sentence is not going to allow the re-flowing of text. Publisher is going to need a major upgrade over Designer's PDF reading function if that's going to be a viable solution. I raised this issue in another discussion and maintaining paragraphs is probably not ever going to be possible because of how PDFs are structured. If we want editable paragraphs with tabs and formatting, we're going to have to be aiming at opening native InDesign files.

Can anyone tell me if this issue has been dealt with in the latest Beta release?

"Kind of clunky"???????? ...It's EXTREMELY clunkly. I feel like I'm suddenly being forced to put my lead pencil down and use a wax crayon, but since my pencil doesn't come in different colours (yet), what's a guy to do but to resort to a wax crayon... "Resorting" is a good choice of word. Well done. ;)

I must be missing something here… I've doing this but my triangle "arrowhead" doesn't align with the direction of my path. It snaps into position, but I have to manually rotate the triangle to get it to point in the direction of the path. Is this right as per your work around? This is the made "point" of having arrowheads – change the path and the arrowheads automatically re-draw themselves to be correct. Have a look at this simple floorplan I had to draw up. All the measurement lines are saved as a style that dashes, colours, styles fonts, adds arrowheads and the line length as a dimension label. Try do this in under an hour with a guarantee of no mistakes using your method and we'll see if you still think we're being unreasonable in our requests for arrowheads. Floorplan Parkmeadows-Fittings.pdf

It might be inappropriate to give this advice in this forum, but if you just can't wait a few more months for Affinity Publisher… you should try iStudio Publisher. Coming from InDesign, I found it too simplistic and limiting and didn't bother buying it once the demo ran out, but if you're used to Pages, then this will actually feel like an upgrade. (it felt like a prettier version of Quark 3 – putting pro tools into the hands of receptionists). Attention moderators: Apologies if I have broken a forum rule by recommending a competitor product. Feel free to delet my post – I won't feel hard done by.

Funny, all the feature requests I'm seeing on this forum are requests of features taken from other applications. Clearly usable and existing ARE what users are wanting. They have "re-invented" the concept of the eye dropper tool, and all they have gotten is complaints and a request to just make it work like everyone else's. Umm… what do you think the forum "Feature Requests" is for? On top of this, I see nearly every question being responded to promptly. AF is listening to us. Now, back to my original post… I'm sure some opensource application implements tabs in a way that you feel are "usable". Please name it. If you don't have any working knowledge of opensource applications and cannot contribute, please stop posting because this discussion is clearly not for you.

We always want more! Give me more!!!!!!!! (but don't charge more, if you don't mind. Thank you.)

I think it might be to keep the tools relevant. A vector pencil tool and a raster pencil tool are very different and it would be a bit confusing to have 2 pencil tools in the tool box. By changing modes, we can be presented only with the tools that will function correctly. Just my take on their thinking – I might be wrong.

So, what you're saying is that we can't rely on opensource for great features? Who's tab stops do you think are implemented the best? (Adjectives merely give us the brief… not the solution)

That's quite original. I've never seen this before and can see why that would be useful.