Dave Harris

We chose Arial as the default font because it is likely to be available on all platforms. You can change the default by setting it and then using Edit > Defaults > Save. (That will save all of the object defaults, not just font.)

Let us know how you get on. This is all new, and needs testing in the real world.

We support spot colours for solid fills and they will be output to PDF by name. Currently if you use them to recolour bitmaps, that just gets rasterised (Affinity's way of recolouring is not compatible with PDF, which we intend to fix). Using them in gradient fills gets rasterised by default as I described above.

Simple linear and radial fills can be exported as vector. Currently by default they are converted to bitmaps, but you can change this by using File > Export > PDF > More > Allow advanced features. If you do this and open the pdf in Illustrator, it will warn and then rasterise them anyway, but they can be imported as vector into other apps that support such.

One improvement I'd highlight is that embedded documents may now be exported as vectors. There are lots of caveats: they need to be the same colour space as the host document, not use blend modes etc in a way that might affect parts of the host document below them, and not have a white background. Also the host can't give them global opacity or a blend mode, use them for clipping etc. Newly embedded documents now default to a transparent background, so the simple case of, for example, embedding one SVG document inside another should just work. This applies to SVG, EPS and PDF export. There are more improvements we plan to make in due course, but this is a start.

I don't think so.

Thanks. I'll look into it next week.

The texture is part of a layer called "Background" that contains the fill and another layer. It's not just part of the history or overwritten; it's still part of the document. If you hide the fill layer you can see it's still there. If you erase part of it, you can see it effects how the document looks.

Thanks for the file. The export happens in a couple of seconds for me, but produces the same wrong output. I don't think this is Pantone-related because I get the same behaviour with any colour. It looks to be some internal mismatch between the RGB image and the CMYK output format (it doesn't happen with "PDF (for export)"). I think it is looking for alpha in the image, and the mismatch is causing it to use a colour channel instead of the alpha channel, and that's why you can see vestiges of the underlying image in the final output. I suspect it happened with the previous beta, too, although I've not checked yet.

Does exporting to other formats work? Was it a spot colour or a process colour? PDF is a bit special for Pantone spot colours because it outputs them by name. However, it only does that for CMYK files, and I expect what you are doing will be rasterised anyway, so I don't think this will be PDF-specific. The .afphoto file should be all we need, thank you. We always export the current state of the document, so history shouldn't be a factor.

Did the problematic outlines use strokes? If so, it's possible they used a feature (such as mitre joins) that PDF doesn't support, causing them to be expanded. Could you attach a sample file, so we can look into it?

The current beta supports LAB colours.

Also text and vector clips. Strokes include dash patterns. Shapes get converted to curves.

Hi, astateecreative. Welcome to the forums. Did you open it with File > Open, or did you Insert it as an image? If the latter, it will have become an embedded document. Using File > Open and then copying the contents to the document you want them in currently gives better results. If the former: we do support vector from EPS so it sounds like your EPS just contained a bitmap. In which case, to convert it into vector art you would need to trace it. We don't have any way to do that automatically.

pbass: Affinity apps now recognise the .ai file extension. For newer files we read the PDF stream. We don't currently support embedded fonts, or the more esoteric fills (eg mesh fills), and some Illustrator information isn't in the PDF at all such as all the layer names. If the .ai was saved without PDF then we can't open it. Very old versions of Illustrator use EPS rather than PDF. The current beta will also open them, with even more caveats. In particular, text will be converted to curves. In practice opening .ai files usually works pretty well. You could use the free Designer trial to check whether it handles the particular files you want to open.

This is still being worked on. The next beta will have an option as I mentioned above. This seems OK with Illustrator, and Corel Draw only sometimes. I've no idea what Corel Draw's problem is.

You can use Alt+CMD+SHIFT+> to get a smaller increment.

Text size isn't affected by the nudge distance, but you can use Shift+Alt+Cmd+> to increase by a smaller amount.

Nothing has changed in this area, nor is likely to for years.

I've added 5pt and 30pt to the standard text sizes, for the next beta.

If you are using a mouse with a middle scroll wheel, you can also use that on the Text Height. This works on most numeric fields.

These files are from very early versions of Illustrator that use EPS rather than PDF. You may not need to convert them. If you change their extension from. ".ai" to ".eps" then Affinity will open them as-is. In the current beta they will open directly without you needing to do even that. Our EPS importer currently imports text as curves, so converting may be better for you if you want to edit the text.

Have you tried CMD+SHIFT+> ?

Yes, this is one of the OpenType areas where we still have work to do.

You can also select the circle and use Layer > Convert to Text Path. This will place the red arrows so that you get two semi-circles, one for text above and one for text below, without having to move the arrows by hand. Use Return to split the text as A_B_C says. You will probably want to use centred alignment, and use the control in the context toolbar to adjust the vertical position of the text below so it matches.