MikeTO

Variable fonts are coming soon to the 2.5 beta: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/202284-variable-font-support-coming-soon-to-25-beta/

I decided to try real work in the beta and after an hour or so I got a save failure. I don't know if it's beta related or not but I haven't had a save failure in ages. I'd done nothing interesting since my last incremental save except for editing text and copying and pasting one inline image. I was saving to iCloud (which I always do) but saving to a local drive didn't make a difference, it just created a 0 byte file. Hopefully it's a one off but I'm mentioning it in case it's not an isolated incident. EDIT: I should add for others that doing real work in a beta is at our own risk. I choose to accept the risk so I can give it a good workout but I save and back up frequently in case I run into an issue like this.

Sidenotes are positioned vertically automatically which is a great thing and the baseline of a sidenote's first line of text is aligned to the baseline of its reference marker. This is great but I wish there was an option to align it to the top of the leading for when a sidenote is beside a tall inline image. For example, I wanted the first sidenote in this screenshot to be aligned near the top of the inline image because it's a tip for that image. If I were to position the marker to the right of the image as shown in the second sidenote, the tip would be in the wrong position. I usually avoid this by inserting the reference marker at the end of the previous paragraph. I did that in this example in the previous version of my manual but when I added more text before it today the image was pushed to the next page. And because there wasn't space on the previous page for the sidenote and flow control was option, Publisher pushed the last two lines of the previous paragraph to this page. Using the workaround created a gap when the text changed. There was no workable solution so I ended up removing the tip and adding it to the previous page as body text. But then that left me with the inline image at the top of the page which triggered the invisible note bug for the three other sidenotes on this page. I spent half an hour fiddling with this page trying to find a way to get the sidenotes to appear in the right place and to stay visible.

Oh I see it now. Thanks for pointing it out. But while trying to replicate the problem I found an unrelated issue that's in the retail version so it wasn't wasted time.

Two glitches with floating windows. 1 - Pressing Tab to toggle full screen has to change the offset of the page in the window so the page doesn't shift when the UI is hidden. But it does this unnecessarily in floating windows, too, so it does the reverse and shifts the page. 2 - Press Tab a few times with a floated window open and you will lose your left and right studios in the main window, never to come back unless you show them manually again. Screen Recording 2024-04-19 at 10.55.54 AM.mov

I'm not seeing the rulers on top of the tabs and I think we're both on macOS but I am seeing many decimal places in the rulers.

Wow, there are much more descriptive tooltips in the revised panels. For example, the Drop Caps > Distance to Text field previously had a tooltip of "Distance to Text" which didn't add anything but now it's a sentence. And Scale for Descenders previously lacked a tooltip and now it has a paragraph. Nice!

I'm not seeing any speed changes with my most complex Designer document. Do you have the same performance settings and the same panels open in both versions?

I'm sure this is on your to-do list, but just in case, Typography isn't listed in Settings > Shortcuts.

The white background of the Character panel is now visible at the top of the panel before Decorations when in light mode. It's a bit less attractive than it was before. 2.4 vs. 2.5

I've done that now:

If you change the value for any text field in the Notes panel (except for Start Number At), and without pressing Tab or Return or clicking in another text field, select any checkbox in the panel, the entered value will be lost. In other Affinity panels such as Transform, the change takes effect when the field with any focus change, not just with Tab and Return. Reported by @philipt18 in this thread:

Hi, could you share test documents for both of these issues, including the docx file for #2?

The improved panels look great and the more dynamic Section Manager is a welcome change. The top of the paragraph panel looks nice and tight now, I like the larger colour samples, and I like the move of Use Baseline Grid to Spacing. I also like the changes to the paragraph and character style lists. Selecting from the new style lists causes glitches as shown below - also note the icon drawn below Decorations. The inclusion of the Update icon for overrides styles is good. There's no tooltip and I wonder if somebody will update a style by mistake, I almost did, perhaps because the lists were previously combo boxes so I was used to aiming for the right edge where the new icon is. I always think this icon means Revert due to the left arrow. Not a big deal.

It's not fixed height on macOS. You have both platforms so which one were you referring to?