MikeTO

From Help: Compact Group Rows—when selected (default) and thumbnails are set to medium or large size, group layers will be displayed at the small size. I think the bug listed by the OP isn't a bug, it's the way it's supposed to work if you have Compact Group Rows selected. Why this feature isn't in the Windows version may be a bug. I can't think of any reason why something like this would be platform specific. Perhaps just an oversight. But why this feature needs to exist I don't know. People who want big layer thumbnails choose it so they can recognize the layer in the panel. Presumably this is intended to save a tiny bit of space but it seems pointless, you would likely have a lot more layers than groups. And even on my small laptop screen I couldn't use this, my OCD tendencies wouldn't allow me to have unequal row heights in the same panel. To each their own.

It's not illegal to reverse engineer a file format. It used to be challenging because cryptic binary formats were used due to limited disk space so you had to spend months staring at a hex editor while saving thousands of slightly different documents to see how the file changed. It's easier these days because many apps use readable XML-based formats. I have no idea what today's XPress format looks like but it was very cryptic in the nineties. This feature would have a very limited audience so Serif may be choosing to invest their time on features that have broader appeal. If there really was a market to convert files between Quark, InDesign, and AfPub, there would be competing converters on the market. It's just not a very fun project and the rewards are minimal.

This feature request is an example of where making the app scriptable would be useful. It would be easy for some of us to write a script to do this if only it was possible to write something like document.articles(1).text.

Hi Kris, I can't duplicate the problem with either the current production version 1.9.3 or beta of 1.10.0. I created a blank document and tried to assign the Cmd+Shift+B shortcut to Heading 2 and it worked fine. I was then able to use the shortcut to apply the style. Could you try doing this with a blank document? Is there a particular shortcut that you're trying? BTW, I only tried to duplicate your problem because I hadn't noticed the feature to assign a shortcut to a style before. 🙂

I have no inside knowledge of how the Affinity apps are coded, but building a cross-platform layer means you get to choose which OS-specific features to use and which to ignore. Serif may or may not be relying on the OS for font handling. In the nineties every OS had poor font handling so almost all page layout apps used their own font handling code. But now the OS's do a credible job in this area so it's possible that a clean sheet app, even one with an OS-abstraction layer to support multiple platforms, might leverage the OS for this stuff. My point was only that it's hard to compare the design choices of a legacy app like XPress or InDesign to a brand new app.

It's hard to compare legacy apps like InDesign and XPress to clean-sheet apps like APub. Often times developers have to choose between using a built-in feature of the OS or "rolling their own" version of the feature to gain the flexibility to offer a bell or whistle. If APub is using the OS to handle its text it may not be easy to add custom underlines. I'm speaking only in general terms, I haven't worked on an app in years. Back in the day, there was a lot of custom coding going on because the various operating systems were so limited. But things have improved a lot so developers of clean-sheet apps try to use use out-of-the-box features rather than writing custom code. Sometimes these decisions mean you can't add all of the bells and whistles that you want but the tradeoff is performance, stability, and future proofing your app. Developers of legacy apps face a different dilemma - you have to decide if the OS version of a feature you custom coded a decade ago is good enough to abandon your own code. That might mean upsetting some users if you have to lose a particular bell or whistle.

I think you're on Windows so this may not work but as a temporary workaround try turning off Window > Separated mode. That will force all of the panels into a single layer and they shouldn't be able to float about the windows of your other apps.

I described this bug in a thread that is in the fixed area because it was introduced when fixing another bug that was fixed in a 1.9.4 beta, but I thought that this bug deserved its own thread since it's not fixed in the first 1.10 beta. This bug can be worked around but if it's in the final 1.10 version I'll have to turn Next Style off in all of my style definitions. Steps to reproduce: 1. Create a new document, any template or size 2. Draw a text frame 3. No Style will be selected for both para and char styles. Select Heading 1. 4. Type some text - works as expected. 5. Press return - Body style will now be selected automatically due to the Next Style definition for Heading 1. 6. Type some text - this paragraph will have the paragraph attributes of Body but the character attributes of Heading 1 as shown in the screenshot below. Applying Body manually will solve it.

It's time consuming, but the best way to do this is to make a test copy of your document and slowly strip out features. For example, delete all of the images out of the test document and then try to work with it for a while and see if you have any crashes. If not, then perhaps your issue is with the images. If you're still having crashes, then you make a fresh test copy and try removing something else, such as hyperlinks and then working with that test copy for a while. Whatever is causing you to have frequent crashes is unlikely to be a core feature such as text styles or basic jpegs and tiffs because otherwise everybody would be having this problem. What you're trying to do is create a repeatable test with the most minimal document you can. Hopefully you'll discover it's a single feature and one that you can avoid for now. If not, at least you've isolated the problem to make it easier for support to nail down.

I'll reply in your new thread

You're right, that could work, it's how CSS works.

Supporting multiple character styles is complex for both the developer and user. I understand why you'd want it, it would be useful to me, too, but it muddies up the user experience so much that it's not a great idea. It's easy if the styles are mutually exclusive, if they have no overlapping text attributes. But what should the app do if the first character style applied makes the text 12pt and the second makes the text 10pt? The only solution would be for the app to apply the style which occurs first but it would be confusing to the user to apply a 10pt style and have it not change the text size because there's already another character style applied to some or all of that text.

I'm on a 2015 MacBook Pro running Big Sur, 16GB of memory, and I do not have this problem. I can work in Publisher for hours without any issues. I have had crashes but mainly when I leave Publisher and let my MBP go to sleep it might crash on wake up. I workaround that by quitting the app when I'm not going to use it for a while. With this approach I can go weeks without crashing and I'm working on an extremely complex file. I suggest trying to isolate which feature is causing your crashes and then try to avoid that feature. I know that might not be possible depending on your workflow.

I think you should re-apply your master pages

If you're asking for something like the Creative Cloud app which always sits in the background running and from which you can install and uninstall software, I really hope Affinity never does that. I hate that CC app, it feels like marketing to me.

I can't answer that question but if you turn off Window > Separated Mode, I find my documents always open full size.

I completely agree, I give my master pages meaningful names, too. I was just pointing out that the developers of APub may have intended to have automatic duplicate name incrementing but forgot to extend that capability when they built the feature to rename master pages.

If you don't name the master pages and just keep the default Master A, Master B, Master C naming convention, APub increments the letters automatically. If you name your master page anything else, e.g., Test or even Test A, it will not increment the letters.

The panels shouldn't close when you choose File > Place, they should remain where they are but the Place file dialog box should be on top. Do you mean that the Place files dialog box is opening behind some of the panels and they're in the way? If so, I think I saw somebody else complaining in another thread about a z-order bug. Z-order refers to the third dimension, the stacking order of user interface elements. Somebody else said various user interface elements were appearing in the wrong order for them.

Implementing endnotes in a page layout app is fairly easy, it's the same basic code as an index. Implementing footnotes that appear at the end of a series of linked frames are slightly more difficult. Implementing footnotes that appear at the bottom of the current page are a pain to code. Very doable given what Affinity has already pulled off, but they're not as easy to implement as you might think. Footnotes also require a span columns feature when used in a 2+ column layout and we don't have span columns yet.

I know my OCD wouldn't let me do this, but if it's a single page just delete the auto page number and manually type "3". 🙂 But if you want to fix it, I recommend checking the Section Manager. I assume that pages 1-3 are in section 1 and pages 4+ are in section 2. Page 3 would need to be in section 1. I apologize if this is obvious and you've already done this. It should look like this:

IMO it's more important to deliver a rock solid app that addresses a limited set of use cases rather than trying to do everything at once at the cost of application stability and performance. Having been on the other side of the fence, I commend Affinity for what they're doing and the way they're doing it. That being said, I really would like support for cross references. 🙂 But I expect it will be in a paid upgrade before too long.

This is where making an app scriptable is useful to fill gaps. Export Text is a niche feature. It's not hard to implement in a page layout app but it's not something most users will need so it's naturally low on a priority list. However, if the app was scriptable, it would be trivial for somebody to create and share a script to do this.

Oh and assuming the music is black and why, look for an option to export as grayscale 8 bit or convert them all with Affinity Photo - this will improve printing and reduce file size further. You don't need 16 bit for music illustrations nor do you need CMYK and you don't want RGB.

Voting on ideas and feature requests can distort a product roadmap, leading a company to focus only on vocal customers' needs while ignoring the base. Don't get me wrong, I hope that by requesting features we might influence the direction (insert shameless plug for cross references, better control of hyphenation and spelling, and span columns), but that doesn't mean the product roadmap should be based on what we ask for.