Ian Tindale

Affinity Publisher‘s book feature is good but has lots of stupid bugs which should’ve been caught in testing On one MacBook, if I compose a book for my magazine from all the article files (which it wants to call ‘chapters’) which are in the Affinity Publisher folder in iCloud (and in turn inside a few subfolders), then save the book, then go to another MacBook and open the book from where it is in iCloud (at the same level as the article files), it stupidly can’t locate the articles again – this shouldn’t happen

I’ll give it a go, I’m busy with other aspects of the mag at the moment Essentially now I examine it further, I would say the disaster is occurring not at the book itself (but the book makes it happen) but really at the individual article’s own “pages” > “section manager” thing, where if you click “start page numbering at” and then put a number in, most times it’ll ignore you and occasionally it’ll work, when the articles are opened and their page numbering modified from within the book – and even then there’s a good chance it’ll dump it back to the 1-2 or whatever the article’s page number is (this is a point – there’s no clear distinction between the folio that I want to use, which is referred to as the page number, or the number of the page within the article, first, second, etc, which is also referred to as the page number – same term, two different uses, but it hardly matters because typing in a folio number to start from rarely works anyway) Here’s a very quick video I just screenshotted, I knocked the display res down to make a smaller vid, I opened up a book (which I spend a lot of time on yesterday to get the folios to be where they are on the flatplan – a lot of time because it kept ignoring me and resetting and infuriating me), having opened the book you see most of it has folios that start where they should be in the mag (except for the final couple, for some reason) – then I took my hands off and sat back for a few seconds and watched it just destroy all that work by resetting most of the articles to have folios like 1-2, 1-4, 1-6 etc which is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE What’s more, book menu’s ‘update numbers’ > ‘update page numbers automatically’ is turned OFF! Affinity Publisher destroying hours of work.mov

My book has “chapters” for each article in the magazine (they’re not chapters, they’re articles) The numbering was all perfect, exactly where they should be on the flatplan This morning I exported a test pdf to show someone something It entirely buggered up the numbering of most chapters, leaving them numbered 1-2, 1-4, etc which is thoroughly useless They were where I wanted them, now they’re not This is utterly useless

I could live with a simplistic blend/morph/tween/interpolate tool that relied on the user selecting two shapes that have exactly the same amount of points, the same kind of points, with nothing weird like doughnut holes or reliance on winding rules. Eg, tween a square into a house shape, one would ensure the square has seven points in suitable places so that it could easily be interpolated. Then when development time allows, do the bigger magical 'tween everything, works first time every time' feature later.

When will I be able to crop to selection in the normal way?

It’s on the way, then? That’s good news.

Precisely how do you all tolerate this? Why do you? You absolutely shouldn’t.

However, that doesn't solve anything. I still need to select similar, though.

When I can select similar, then of course I won't need to post in this thread.

This point is crucial. It has shifted me from liking Affinity and telling people to get the products, to the complete opposite now. They’re not only bad, but dangerous. What if someone were to actually buy this product on my recommendation? That would be terrible. I can’t associate myself with using Affinity products now. I still need to do select similar. It MUST be able to let me select similar. IT MUST.

I still need to do select similar. This inability is simply not acceptable.

I must have select similar. Now. This minute. End of today will be too late. I can tell you, this program is ABSOLUTELY F**king USELESS without the menu that allows me to select by similar (stroke width, colour, whatever). How can it be even marketed and how can you have the audacity to accept money for this? It CANNOT BE USED like this. Do you hear?

Is it the future yet? If, in a work, I've used a symbol in Designer a few times, and one of those got modified, I'd expect it would be easy to checksum and tell if it is tainted or not (in which case, doesn't export that particular one as SVG symbol whereas the untainted ones do). I'm having to do all the hard work myself re-hand-coding the SVG in large amounts and batches. I'm using a computer here, it'd be good if it could do some of the work!