Dave Harris
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Posts posted by Dave Harris
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Do you have File > Export > PDF > More > Allow Advanced Features checked? Vector gradients are considered an advanced feature because when importing, Illustrator will warn about them and then rasterise them anyway, and Corel Draw can't read them at all. If you use "PDF (for print)" you should get vector gradients and if you use "PDF (for export)" you should get raster.
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Thanks for the suggestions.
Our PDF export already has an option to convert text to curves during the export. It's File > Export > PDF > More > Embed Fonts > Text as Curves. This will convert all text, rather than specific fonts.
- Petar Petrenko, SrPx and KipV
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I'm afraid there isn't, currently.
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☐Default leading is the same as the font size - needs to be defined as a percentage, eg. 120% of font size. This is really important! I really hope this is just a hidden option that I haven't yet been able to find.
Just to expand on this: our default leading is taken from the font file (the LineGap value from the hhea table), so it will only be the same as the font size if that is what the font designer specified. From the Paragraph panel you can set it to a percentage of the font size, as Callum says, and you can also set it to an absolute points value, or several other options. Setting it on the paragraph should make it easier to get consistent vertical spacing across the paragraph. There is also a Leading Override on the Character panel, which is intended to fix special situations such as when you have different fonts in a line and their heights don't match visually, or you are setting an equation or something that needs extra vertical space.
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There will be a public beta which itself will probably take several months. So until that beta starts, Publisher will always be more than several months away. I would recommend not basing any future plans on Publisher at least until the beta starts. That will also be the first opportunity to see what features it has. As with our other products, we tend to release when it has enough to be useful to someone, and that someone may not be you. It's going to take years before it is anything like as full-featured as PagePlus or InDesign.
- Jens Krebs and Steps
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How can i test for free the beta releases of Affinity Designer before to pay for my own license?
You can't, I'm afraid. The Mac beta is for Mac customers only. You can try the 1.4 trial for free, and if you have a Windows machine you can use the Windows beta. If you can wait a few months, 1.5 will be released to the Mac App Store and we'll probably update the free trial to 1.5 soon after that.
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Every time Tony is asked this question, the answer seems to double. Last I heard it was in the millions (dollars, sterling; doesn't much matter). The problems are the variety of GUIs on Linux, and the need to support it for years after the initial work is done. We are already planning for three platforms, Mac OS, iOS, and Windows, and we don't want to be overstretched.
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To be honest: I thought the times are over where my data is stuck in our application
version - let's do it better as Microsoft did it in the past, can't we?
We did consider it, but it's hard to anticipate what future versions might need to do. In practice we would probably have to update the old program anyway - 1.4.2 wouldn't load 1.5 files, but we could have a 1.4.3 that did. However, that would usually be pointless given the upgrade from 1.4.2 to 1.5 is free, so you might as well just use 1.5 itself. We plan to release upgrades simultaneously across all supported platforms, so it should be fine.
As Jon P says, if you are using the 1.5 beta on Windows then you can use the 1.5 beta on Mac, too. The issue here is not Mac versus Windows, but beta versus released.
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ESC to me means: no, cancel, leave, stop. Not commit.
It doesn't mean "Commit" for Affinity, either. Editing text is simply not an action that needs to be committed for us. Indeed, one of the things I dislike about Adobe apps is how simple actions become all modal, and need to be either cancelled or committed before you can go back to doing normal things like saving the document. Having to do that interrupts my flow. I don't see the benefit. If you made an edit you regret, undo it. I don't see the point of this tentative state where you've made the edit but have the option to abandon it, when the Command History is right there and will let you wind back as far as you like.
ESC does in fact mean "Cancel", "Leave" or "Stop" for Affinity. With the Text tools, pressing it once ends the text editing mode so you can use shortcuts, and pressing it a second time clears the object selection. I think of both as steps in "backing out" or "stop editing this object", so ESC fits nicely.
I'm sorry if this messes with your muscle memory, but Affinity is not a clone of Adobe. We have our own vision which we think is better. I hope you persist, because you will get used to it over time.
- kaffeeundsalz, Tooma, Alfred and 2 others
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None of the vector formats we support, has conical gradients.
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I thought there was a way to get gradients to be purely vector, but I'm trying to export (as .pdf) a conical gradient and it's telling me that some areas will be rasterised, which unfortunately is not possible for my project.
The PDF specification does not support conical gradients directly, I'm afraid.
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Yes, we know CD cannot open AD PDFs unless they are resaved from Acrobat regardless of any feature in an AD PDF--a simple PDF with only a rectangle will not open in CD (nor even a blank page. There's something amiss in the AD PDFs). It opens nearly every other PDF generated from anything just fine otherwise.
As for AI, I find that if it supports the gradient types in a PDF, it brings them in just fine.
I do not believe that it is the responsibility of a particular software to, in this instance, rasterize gradients in the off chance that they may not be supported in whatever may open them. It is the responsibility of a particular software to write the PDFs in such a manner that complies with the fullest standard for the PDF type being exported.
As for AD rasterizing gradients. Try this. Create two simple shapes, like rectangles. On the first one, do a gradient from one end to the other. Do not add additional stops. On the second one, add a single additional stop (or two). Now walk through each PDF/X profile as shipped by Serif. You'll find that the shape with an additional stop or two has been converted into an image. This is not right. No other software I use does so.
Mike
Our PDFs are opened and rendered correctly by Acrobat, and Acrobat Pro pre-flights them as conforming to PDF/X-1a (or whatever), so they are standard PDFs. If Corel Draw doesn't open them there must be an issue with Corel Draw not accepting the PDF standard. Illustrator also opens them and renders them correctly. It chooses to rasterise them, but it couldn't rasterise them if it didn't understand what they should look like, so the gradients must be conforming. We generate correct PDFs; our ability to deal with the vagaries of third party software is limited.
The issue with gradients with more than two colours is our problem. It's due to a limitation of PDFLib, which is the library we use to generate PDFs. We'll have a look at fixing it in due course.
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This should be fixed in the next beta.
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Thanks for the font. [Edit] I can reproduce this now.
- CartoonMike and MattP
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I would like to improve the typography options in the Character panel, but I doubt I'll be able to for 1.5.
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Revert defaults did not work well if you used it with a text object selected in 1.4.2. It would ignore text formatting, and apply the shape defaults so you'd get grey text. In 1.5 it resets all of the text formatting to the default object defaults.
You can change the default object defaults by changing the document defaults and then using Edit > Defaults > Save. For example, pick the Art text tool, change the pointsize to 24pt, then use Edit > Defaults > Save. This will make 24pt the default for Art text in new documents, and also for the Revert Defaults button in the toolbar and for Edit > Defaults > Revert.
This change also affects new Object Styles. It should make Object Styles more useful with text. And of course we now have Text Styles, which are another way of (re)setting text attributes.
Synchronise default from selection updates the document's defaults for new objects, but not the default object defaults. If you use it on text, it will mean the next text you create will get the same attributes as the text you synchronised from, but it won't affect the defaults for new documents unless you also use Edit > Defaults > Save.
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BTW, I meant to include this in my post above and forgot. If you export as a PDFX-4, the vectors remain vectors, the export is fast and doesn't create an ~14 meg PDF.
I didn't try other PDF types and so didn't try the Rasterize Nothing setting. However, I do run into this frequently. AD will create bitmaps all too easily even when there shouldn't be any in the PDF, and so I have had to try multiple settings in exporting PDFs. Silly.
Mike
I had a look at this file. The issue seems to be the large area gradient fills. If you use "for export", we rasterise gradients because we find a lot of other apps don't import them properly. For example, Illustrator will issue a warning and then rasterise the gradient itself, and Corel Draw doesn't cope at all. Rasterising at least makes the PDF look right and avoids the warnings. If you export with one of the printing presets, such as PDF/X-4, then we expect the printer can handle the gradients so then we output them as vector.
It is silly that we need to do this, but we can't help what PDF features other apps support. You can get finer control over it by using File > Export > PDF > More > Allow advanced features.
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The Typography toolbar in the Character panel only goes from Standard Ligatures to Small Caps, no matter how wide I make the panel. Is there a separate Text toolbar somewhere else?
By the "Text toolbar" I mean the row along the top of the main view, not the thing in the Character panel. I though we had a Typography button there, alongside the Character and Paragraph ones, but now I'm at work I can see we haven't. Sorry for the confusion.
While playing with this just now, I found that the Discretionary Ligatures option only shows up for frame text, not artistic text, even with 'Show all font features' checked.
That would surprise me. I just tried a few fonts, and for those it was both Art and Frame text or neither. Was there a specific font this happened with?
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Thanks for the files. It seems to be involved with the font's default leading, so setting it to Exactly 9pt might be a workaround. I've not been able to reproduce the crash here, though, and I suspect it depends on having the right font. Could you send it to me? I don't like to download free fonts from the web, partly because they may not match the version you are using. It will only be used to help fix this problem.
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I'm not able to test it on Mac, but it works on Windows. I see this thread mentions it not working on Sierra.
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Escape, then V, should work. Escape takes you out of text editing mode while leaving the object selected, and then V switches to the Move tool.
Export problem
in [ARCHIVE] Designer beta on macOS threads
Posted
Ah; I'd been looking at our internal bug report, not the file attached here. Yes, that file does use gradients with multiple stops and that's not something we can export as vector currently. It's a limitation of the library we use for export - PDFLib. We will improve it one day.
I'm sorry, but there will always be things that are vector in Designer but can't be exported as vector to PDF. Either because PDF doesn't support them, or as in this case because of limitations of our program. PDF has a huge and complex specification. It will take time to take advantage of it all.