Dave Harris

Unfortunately that doesn't work for font etc in 1.4.2. It will work for 1.5, though, and works in the current beta. (1.5 also has text styles, which are another way of sharing text attributes.)

That's to be expected, though. The intended behaviour for justify is that every line of a paragraph is justified except the last, which is aligned left/centre/right. Because Art text lines don't wrap, each paragraph has only one line, so there are no lines to justify.

The afdesign file has a raster mask. Unfortunately we can only read the PDF stream of .ai files, not the native Illustrator data (because it is a closed proprietary format), and it seems Illustrator uses raster clipping rather than vector clipping when it writes PDFs from your source document. File > Export should indeed warn when it rasterises an area, and I do get a warning from the afdesign file on Mac. I'll log this as a Windows bug.

For a shape that already has handles that can be changed with the Node tool, like a Donut or a Rounded Rectangle , it would be bad to convert it to curves automatically because you'd lose the ability to reshape it parametrically. I also don't think it's worth adding another menu option just as a short-cut for two existing menu items, for a combination I really don't think is that common.

The syntax is this way because it is based on our standard expression evaluation. I didn't add any new syntax, I just added some new variables. So what you type is determined by algebra. The "/" means division. "x" means ratio of the x-height to the font height, which is the x-height when the font has a height of 1 unit. The value we're entering into the control is the height, so that's what we need an expression to calculate. For an x-height of 12pt, we have 12pt = height * x, and so height = 12pt / x. It may not be ideal, but I figured no syntax would really be easy and most people would just learn what to type. If they find it at all. It's not very discoverable, but I don't think any other syntax would be either, until we get some kind of pop-up help for it.

This sounds like the problem listed under "known issues" at the bottom of the download post. We're aware and will fix it in the next beta.

"Beta" is what we call the newest version of our software while we are still working on it. It'll generally contain more features than a final release, but also more bugs and more half-finished features. We make betas available to customers so they can help with testing and also to get their feedback, both of which can help make our products better. Use the beta if you want to be part of that process and can put up with the bugs. Don't use the betas for critical work or where there you have a deadline, because a bad bug might lose it all.

Can I ask what it is you are drawing that needs this? Designer is intended for illustration and user-interface design, and Publisher is intended for posters, leaflets and books. I appreciate Publisher isn't available yet, so people are using Designer for things which Publisher would be better for. As it happens, you can achieve the effect you want in Designer, by creating a text frame that is a rectangle with a bite taken out of it, but it's a bit clumsy.

Currently we support soft hyphens (also known as discretionary hyphens). In other words, you can add hyphenation points manually and they'll be used where appropriate. Support for auto hyphenation will be added in due course (Publisher will certainly need it).

Thanks. This will be fixed in next week's beta. It was loading all the bitmaps before it needed to. I think it's interpreting the PDF that is slow, not the rendering. More feedback while loading would be good. Our own documents tend to be fast enough not to need it, but it will matter more for multi-page Publisher documents. Unfortunately these pages use JBig2 compression, which we don't currently support.

We certainly do use the curves from the font. As Alfred says we need to convert them from quadratic to cubic Béziers, but I think that only changes the number of off-curve handles, not the number of on-curve nodes. We're planning to add native support for quadratic Béziers in due course, and we'll probably change the text conversion then. Can we confirm what you are seeing? I get the same number of nodes as Illustrator. Attached is screenshot of Arial, with Illustrator on the left. This was taken on Mac, but Windows should be the same. Do you get the same result with Arial? Are you seeing twice the expected number of nodes, or is it more like thousands, as if it had been converted to a polygon? If only some fonts are affected, which fonts?

Affinity Publisher is aimed at posters, leaflets, books and similar. Affinity Designer is aimed at illustration and user interface design.

Hi, Dandiccf, welcome to the forums. You can exclude metadata by unchecking File > Export > PNG > More > Embed metadata.

Text boxes don't have colour at the moment, I'm afraid. You will need to create a rectangle of the same size and shape behind it, and give that a colour and stroke.

Actually it is possible to set a filter area bigger than 10% of the object's size, and we'll look into doing this.

Thanks Mike. I'll look into this when I have some time.

Mike, could you attach an example of an EPS with gradient that Illustrator imports as vector, for us to look at? I agree, there should be nothing special about gradients. It's clear that Illustrator understands our gradients correctly, because it is able to rasterise them correctly and the result looks right. I've never understood why it chose to rasterise. If there's a straightforward way to stop that happening, I'd gladly adopt it.

Yes, you'll be able to move easily between the apps.

The status bar at the bottom of the screen says how many objects are selected. Does that help? It treats groups as 1 item, unless you select the contents of the group.

It will be a feature of Affinity Publisher. It probably won't be in Designer or Photo.

We have * and / for multiplication and division. We're not currently planning to add × and ÷ as synonyms. Feel free to make a feature request, if you think there is a good case for adding them.

If the default units are inches, then you can type 3 + 9/16. Otherwise 3in + 9/16in.

I've moved this to Feature Requests. The bleed area exists to ensure that there is no white paper visible at the edges after cropping. To have crop marks overlap the bleed area would give black marks instead, so crop marks should go outside the bleed. However, we could certainly provide more control over where crop marks are placed.

You can do this now with symbols. Create the left half, add it to the Symbols panel, drag it back onto the page, and flip it. Now edits to the original are reflected in the flipped copy, live.

Yes, there's a reason. The embedded document becomes a PDF transparency group. This allows it to have colour format and profile that differs from the host document. It also allows it to render in isolation, so that eg blend modes do not interact with whatever lies below them in the host document.