MikeTO

I'm surprised that it's a showstopper for you but I don't disagree it would be a valuable addition. But I hope that if and when Serif adds it they do it in a more thoughtful way than Adobe. Adobe gives examples in their help system for when optical kerning is important and they are spot on - for roman fonts that lack robust kerning pairs and when mixing two fonts, such as when the first character of a word is set in a different font. But I believe Adobe chose poor names for the kerning option because the average user doesn't understand the difference between them - I'm not implying that the people asking for optical kerning in this thread don't understand the difference. Optical just sounds better than Metrics and an inexperienced user will pick it over Metrics. If they're using a professional font at common text sizes, they are doing themselves a disservice by ignoring what the font designer intended. An app should help its users make the right choice so I think better options would be: - Auto: uses kerning pairs (metrics) if available. If not available or applicable, and when two characters from different fonts are used, optical kerning would be used automatically. - Optical override: ignore kerning pairs (metrics) even if available. Equivalent to Adobe's Optical option. I think a truly automatic setting combined with terms like these might help inexperienced users make better choices and still give experienced people the flexibility they want.

And it just happened to me again right now, too.

Using 1.9.3 1. Sometimes when you right click a misspelled word that is identified with red squiggle underline the context menu will not appear. If you leave it for a while and come back later it will work then. 2. Sometimes when you have a misspelled word it will not be found as misspelled even if you choose Check Spelling or use Preflight. But then hours later or when you next open the document you'll be surprised that there's an error with text that you created and checked earlier. Neither of these are terribly serious but since a second user (Bryce) reported #1 I thought I'd finally post about them.

Do you mean that when you right click the red squiggle text that the popup context menu which includes suggested spellings as well as the Ignore and Learn options won't appear? If so, that's a bug. I've never gotten around to reporting it but I've seen that many times. Just ignore it for an hour or two and if you open Preflight later you might see it and then you can right click it. There is a related bug in the spelling checker in 1.9.3 that I haven't reported either. Sometimes words that are misspelled aren't underlined at all. Even if you choose Check Spelling or use Preflight they're not found. But sometime hours later, or the next time you open the document, they will be underlined. Both of these bugs are intermittent. I'll file a bug report for them both now that I've taken time to think about how they work. [edit - reported here]

I know it's been only an hour and I can speak just to my own workflow requirements, but this beta feels really good to me as a candidate to replace 1.9.3. I won't do any real work in the beta of course but all of the issues that would have prevented me from using a previous beta to do work are resolved. Thanks!

I confirm this is fixed in 1.10.0.1109 - I went through hundreds of pages of inline images and all every page rendered identically in the latest beta, including the inline images that fell at the top of a column. I couldn't find a single composition difference between 1.9.3 and this beta which is wonderful. Thanks!

As the other posters pointed out, you wouldn't want the size of one name or whatever data is being imported to be smaller than the other names. If the data is all being formatted with a style, it should be easy to find any overflowing text with preflight and then just tweak the style for any offending frames. That would be very fast and ensure that all names are the exact same size.

I understand why you'd rather create slides in Affinity Publisher, I've been forced to use PPT for decades and loathe it, but I believe that Publisher is the wrong tool for the job and it would be frustrating when your hard work didn't look the same in PPT as it did in Publisher. There are so many Publisher features that PPT doesn't support which could change the appearance of the slide. If you look at the list of existing export formats for Publisher, every one of them supports all of Publisher's features, some of them only because the entire page is being rasterized. The apps have different text composition engines, different hyphenation algorithms, different orphan/widow control, etc. Line and paragraph breaks would wind up being different so you'd never know if your text was going to fit (or be scaled) until you opened it in PPT. On the other hand, I can understand how you'd accept this end product because you'd rather still start your work in Publisher and then finish it in PPT just because you're more productive in Publisher, but imagine the complaints from others who expect their work to appear perfectly in PPT.

Agreed. Adding basic RTL formatting is actually an easy feature to implement if baked in from the start, it's just a bunch of IF...THEN statements at the appropriate points as you write the code. If you add in later you have to go back and figure out where those points are. But that's the easy part. You have to consider kashidas, ligatures, diacritics, numbers, justification, hyphenation, font-specific justification, page and section numbering, and binding order. This is a ton of work. I'm not saying it's not worthwhile, but Serif has to prioritize it against everything else on their plate.

Even if it were possible, the OS-native text composition capabilities are insufficient for a high-end page layout app. You can write a basic page layout app using the OS-native capabilities but doing so limits you to the features supported by the OS. It will get you 80% of the way there but not 100%. It has always been this way. Back in the old days Macintosh had a great general engine but it wasn't sufficient so the early page layout apps built their own. Apple upgraded the OS with QuickDraw GX which was great for consumer apps but not for professional page layout apps. The OS-native capabilities keep improving but not to the level that we demand of apps like Affinity Publisher.

Another option is to drag the file onto the icon of the app you want to open it in. Just keep all three apps in your dock and drag the icon onto the one you want.

Could you share a full screenshot of the your Affinity Publisher setup? I'm have a difficult time envisioning the problem and I've experienced nothing like what you're reporting. I use Publisher with Separated Mode off and with the left and right studios shown. All of my studio windows are docked in the left or right studio panels. When I press Cmd+F to find something, it comes to the front of my left studio panel as I would expect. I never have a problem with a window not being in the front.

Your English was perfect for this request. 🙂

In the old days I shut down my computer when I wasn't using it but these days Macs can be treated like iPhones, leave them on all the time and let them restart themselves when the system needs to update itself. Regular users shouldn't have to worry about these things now. However, this can lead to large cache sizes so if you're tight on space it might not be a bad idea to restart every so often to clean them out. But if you're that tight on space you might want to look at offloading some of your files to external storage so you don't have to worry about it. I'm currently shutting down my MacBook Pro when I'm not using it due to a battery issue but otherwise wouldn't bother.

Nice work!

Is it only when opening these three specific documents? If you open just any one of the three documents is it okay? If you open the documents in a different order does the same crashing happen after opening the third document? Does it crash immediately after opening the documents? If you open a document and wait for a minute is it okay? Are you doing anything to the documents after opening them?

I doubt that the files are actually linked if you're finding the Publisher file is 50GB. Publisher files with linked images are tiny - my book has hundreds of high res photos and is still under 10MB.

You may already know this but there are three sizes of icons

Yes, those are .appinfo files. I just checked and private/var/folders is for system cache files. I haven't been running Affinity since I rebooted this morning hence I have no Affinity cache files. You may have been working a long time so you have big cache files. If you restart your computer the file should disappear. Here's one article on the subject but I can't vouch for its accuracy: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/mac-folders-never-touch/

FWIW the only com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner file I can find on my system is with the same files for publisher and photo in <username>/library/group containers/<gibberishtext>.com.seriflabs/appinfo and the files are less than 200 bytes.

I find the undo approach curious too but it's nothing I can't work around. It's functional. Non-destructive actions are part of undo for every app it's just that they're typically grouped with destructive ones in the undo stack. If you move a box in most programs and then deselect it, Undo Move will move it back and reselect it.

With regards to indices, you're asking for three separate things, two of which are possible now. 1. Definitions - the example of inserting a definition is easy with Affinity Publisher. When adding an index mark for "dandy", simply enter "dandy – wire roller that..." and the rest of the definition into the field. Don't worry, it will work even though the text field is small. Then edit the appropriate index style. Change Initial Words to Enabled, Max Word Count to however long you want (as long as your longest index term), End Characters to an en dash or whatever you're using, and then Style to a character style with italics defined. That will take care of the formatting perfectly. 2. Cross references, such as "See also em rule". This is possible with Publisher. After adding the index mark for "dash – here, rule whose length...", right click it in the Index panel and choose Add Cross Reference. Assuming you've already created an index mark for "em rule", then choose "em rule" from the list in the cross reference dialog. 3. Sub-topics: Publisher handles these well but with the vertical indented format. AFAIK, it doesn't offer the "run on" or paragraph style format as used in the example you gave.

No worries, this is very minor. It was just that for a second I thought it was part of the text styles studio panel given how it had lined up with a text style name. In dark mode, scrollbars with tiny knobs don't look like scrollbars, I thought it was something new in the UI that you'd added for manipulating the studio panel. FWIW, here's Microsoft's description and formula for the min knob/thumb size. Apple used to specify a min height in pixels but I couldn't find that right now.

Agreed, you and I are both old-timers and Apple appears to have forgotten why some of their standards were the way they were. Or that at one time there were standards. 🙂 But the minimum scroll knob size in standard macOS apps is significantly larger than in the Affinity apps. In this screenshot the Affinity knob is on the left while the macOS minimum from TextEdit and Notes is on the right.

I believe there's supposed to be a minimum knob size for scrollbars on macOS. With a very long document in Publisher, the knob shrinks to a small circle rather than to the standard minimum size you see in macOS. Would it be possible to implement the system standard minimum size to make the knob easier to grab? Thanks.