Dave Harris

So you have two symbol fonts, one called "Zaph Dingbats" and the other called "Zaps dingbats", and the former works but the latter doesn't? Again, what happens with it? Is it that the font won't render at all, or is it that the characters aren't where you expect them on the keyboard? (I suggested copying from Font Book to help diagnose the problem, not necessarily as a solution.) To use a rectangle as a path for text, select it and use Layer > Convert to Text Path. You can also click on its edge, but only with the Art Text tool. I suspect you were trying with the Frame Text tool instead. Clicking on a vector shape with the Frame Text tool turns it into a text frame, which isn't very useful with rectangles but may be with other shapes.

We hope to do a glyphs panel at some point. I doubt it will include that kind of sorting, though, as the information needed isn't readily available in the font. If you want to find an alternate glyph for a given character, then we do support the 'aalt' OpenType feature which provides that.

I suspect the problem is not with the discretionary ligatures but what the font is doing with them to draw charts. We don't currently support ligatures between characters of different colour - it's not possible to have the "fi" fi ligature as a single glyph with the 'f' part one colour and the 'i' part a different colour. Beyond that, I'd need the font to see what is going on.

Was the text even text, rather than just curves? If so, then you could try using Favour editable text over fidelity as well as Group lines of text into text frames, in the PDF Options panel when you open the file. The problem is that PDF stores text in short chunks, so Affinity has to try to recombine them into text frames, and those options affect how aggressively it tries that. If AI didn't export the text as text at all, then there's nothing we can do.

We already support discretionary ligatures (with the 'dlig' tag). Isn't it working for you? You will need to select text that supports the feature to see the option in the Typography panel. I don't have the Chartwell font to test with, but it should work.

Have you tried importing .ai files? We can read the PDF stream, if there is one, or the EPS stream if older documents have that. We can't read Illustrator's native data because it is a closed private format.

If you select the text, the Typography panel should show the alternate glyphs that apply to that text. It depends on the font defining 'aalt' for the text's language. If nothing is showing, either the text's language isn't set, or the selected characters don't have any alternates, or the font just doesn't bother at all.

The default value for Maximum Word Spacing is 133%. That's what you get if you deselect everything and use Edit > Defaults > Factory Reset. I'm not sure where 342% came from; was the document imported from somewhere else? A_B_C points out that the letter spacing was also not at its default values. I'm glad your problem has been sorted out.

Gumbo23, are you trying to edit text that is inside a group? If so, try holding down the Alt key when you click with the Art text tool.

Thanks for reporting those. On the second one, I find I can get justified text to break at soft hyphens if I play around with the frame size. I suspect they are not breaking in your example because justified text has more latitude to change word spacing than aligned text. If you look at the Paragraph Studio panel, Justification settings, the Min/Max Word Spacing and Letter Spacing only apply to justified text. So for left-aligned text, the word spacing will always be what is set as the Desired Word Spacing here, but for justified text, Affinity may choose to reduce the word spacing rather than hyphenate the word. If you want justified text line ends to match aligned text ones, then you can set the Minimum and Maximum Word Spacing to 100%. The default is 80%/133% because most people want to avoid hyphens in justified text.

Clayton, those are some interesting ideas. I don't think disabling Save is viable, because in order to fully test the program you need to use it as you would normally, and that includes working on big projects over many days, stopping them and coming back to them etc, which needs Save. Changing the file extension might be feasible, though. One point I don't think Matt mentioned is that files saved by 1.5 beta will not load into 1.4.x. This means that if you did use the beta, saved over your original file, then hit a serious bug, you wouldn't be able to just go back to the production app and continue. You'd be stuffed until we could release a fix. It's those two things - the amount of effort our testers put into test projects, and the possibility of that effort being lost - that makes us wary of releasing 1.5 beta prematurely. I do think we've got ourselves into a bad place with the current schedule. I find it frustrating that work I did to fix bugs back in February still hasn't seen the light of day. Previously we've been able to have a new beta just a few weeks after the Mac App Store was updated, and as a result it had relatively few changes and was relatively trust-worthy, and then we could continue keeping it up to date frequently so it never got too bad. This time, however, It is taking us ages to get 1.4.x final, and in that period 1.5 has progressed so much that we can't be sure it is better than 1.4.2. I am hoping that this is temporary, and that once the 1.5 beta is released we can revert to a more frequent cadence.

You can write text along a curve or a shape by selecting the shape, selecting the Art text tool, and clicking on the edge of the shape. You can also use Layer > Convert to Text Path. We don't properly support vertical text because we've been focussed on other areas. We don't use Core Text so it is not something we get for free. We don't support right-to-left text either. We will probably do these eventually, but not for several years.

This is partly fixed in the current beta. It doesn't work if you change the colour before creating the text, but does work if you select a text tool, create some text, change colour, then type. The next text you create with the same text tool will have the same colour. It will be fixed properly in the 1.5 beta. Meanwhile the current beta is available from here or here.

On the first point, are you aware you can enter hex values into the Studio Colour page already? Use the top-right hamburger menu to switch to the Sliders view, then select RGB Hex from the combo box.

This is another symptom of a known bug which gets the size of the PNG wrong. It'll be fixed in 1.5.

I can't reproduce this. I don't lose any image in the "Violet Greaves" file, nor do I get any extra pink lines. I hadn't realised this is how you are flattening the document. I was using File > Export > PDF > PDF (flatten). This has the same effect as Rasterise: Everything. Using Document: Flatten I can reproduce the problem, so I'll see about fixing the program in a future release. Using Rasterise: Everything does seem to avoid the problem that Document > Flatten causes. If you are content with the text getting rasterised, then this should print OK.

Yes, I think that you could have a gradient between two spots by cloning the shape and giving each a solid spot with a transparency gradient.

There is a known bug with the size of text that gets put onto the clipboard. It'll be fixed in the 1.5 beta.

The filename was "Violet Greaves - 12.150.16 Papaver.afphoto".

The SVG id is derived from the name you assign the object in the Layers panel, so you can control it from there. I had another look at the rounded rectangle. The issue here is that the stroke is being expanded to curves. That happens because of its Mitre Join type. Affinity draws mitres differently to everyone else, and that causes problems with export. In this case it's also clearly wrong, because the shape was imported. I see also the mitre limit is 1.414 and for SVG it should default to 4. Anyway, if you change the shape to use a bevel join, the result looks the same and exports to SVG in a similar way to Inkscape: <path id="Test" d="M122,10C122,5.585 118.415,2 114,2L10,2C5.585,2 2,5.585 2,10L2,34C2,38.415 5.585,42 10,42L114,42C118.415,42 122,38.415 122,34L122,10Z" style="fill:rgb(0,170,255);stroke-width:4px;stroke:rgb(0,68,136);"/> (That was with a rounded rectangle renamed to "Test" in the Layers panel.)

Yes, currently we export rounded rectangles as curves rather than as their native SVG shape, so they will get bigger.

We have two of those three already. File > Export > SVG > More > Add line breaks and Use hex colours. The option to control decimal places has been mentioned before, and will be easy to add when one of us gets time. The harder optimisations are noticing when different objects have similar formats or paths, and coalescing them. The Stars and Stripes, for example, draws a star once and then duplicates it many times. That makes it very compact. I think the best way to support that will involve using Symbols to preserve the original structure, rather than trying to recreate it.

Have you tried the current Designer beta, available from here? It lets you get out of Art text tool by clicking on empty canvas. Single lines of text imported from Illustrator because Art text because it is less likely to wrap wrongly if the frame is slightly too small.

I can reproduce this in 1.4, but not in our 1.5 beta branch, so I think it will be fixed when we release that.

Hi Fioled, sorry for the problems you've been having. I have taken a look at this and it's nothing to do with guides or textboxes. If I open the PDF in Affinity, I see that the entire document has been rasterised, and then used as a bitmap fill for a rectangle. This fill uses a wrapping mode, and the grey line down the left-hand edge is actually a repeat of the right-hand edge. I'm guessing the pink one was because the right-hand edge of the image happened to be pink. If you open the PDF in Affinity, select the single object, and switch to the Fill tool, you can see what is going on. However, I can't get the .afphoto file on DropBox to export like this from Affinity 1.41. When I export that with Print, I get a mixture of text and images rather than the whole thing being rasterised. If I use Flatten to force it all to be rasterised, it comes in as a simple image rather than bitmap-filled curve. Without being able to replicate the export it's difficult for me to investigate further. Could you check that the 164.8 MB file on DropBox is the actual one you used to create the PDF?