Dave Harris

This is by design. The character is called permille and means "per thousand". It's used because tracking and kerning are expressed in thousandths of an em. Illustrator uses the same units; it just doesn't use the symbol for it.

We do have rulers (from View > Show Rulers), you just can't move their origin. You can scale objects with the mouse using their handles, or with the Transform tab if you prefer entering numbers. The Transform tab can do simple maths, like *=0.5 to halve the old value.

Hi. You need to use the Fill tool, which is the one that looks like a rainbow CD on the left hand side. We don't currently have a vector pattern fills, but we do have a bitmap fill option which is in the Fill type menu now in the context toolbar. Dragging with the fill tool will orient and scale the fill. I hope this helps.

Hallo, Die Maus braucht, um über den Umriss der Form ist; Ich vermute, dein ist über der Mitte der Form. Alternativ Verwendung Schicht > Convert to Pfadtext. (Via Google Translate.)

Both betas have expired. For now I suggest you use the Mac App Store versions until new betas get released.

Have you tried using the Transform tab? View > Studio > Transform?

That beta has expired, so yes, everyone is locked out of it. Every beta has an expiry date. Usually you don't notice because we make a new beta available before the previous one expires. On this occasion we've not done that because the Mac App Store version was updated instead. I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

Currently we use Apple's Core Graphics for PDF export. It should make the colour profiles available, a CMYK document should become a CMYK PDF, and transparency is output too. In future we will be moving to PDFLib, and then we'll add more options, including PDF/X1a, PDF/X-3, PDF/X-4, specific versions of the PDF standard, control over font embedding, bleeds and printers marks, etc.

Ah, got you: placing rather than opening, so you end up with an embedded document. At the moment our handling of embedded documents is not great - for example they always get rasterised on export. I'll mention this to my colleague who handles that area. As a workaround, if you use File > Open to open the PDF instead, then select all and copy it, then paste it into the document you wanted it in, that should give better results.

Have you tried using Designer's View > View Mode > Outline? That draws all lines as 1 pixel, regardless of how thin they are.

Ah, that's a bug. Thanks for reporting it. We'll get it fixed soon.

I'm afraid that's less clear. Do you mean you are opening a file in Designer, making an opacity change there, and then exporting it as EPS? If so, then the same issue arises. EPS doesn't support opacity or blend modes, regardless of which app is generating it.

You can switch off the white background from File > Document Setup > Colour and check Transparent background. You will then get a chequerboard pattern. In neither case is the background part of the proper content of the document. If you open the PDF in Acrobat, surely the background is white there? I don't think defaulting to white is wrong, as such. It's at most a user preference. Personally I generally prefer white, to match Acrobat and the printed page, and also because it's a bit less distracting. We'll consider adding it as an option on the Open > PDF Options panel.

The EPS file format does not support blend modes or transparency, so AI will have rasterised them before we even got to the image. (AI will also have embedded an AI document as a comment, and when it opens the file itself it ignores the EPS portion and just reads the document in the comment. That's why it seems to preserve attributes in EPS. We can't read that comment because AI documents are a closed, undocumented format.)

There's no newer version of the beta yet. The Mac App Store versions are now the most up to date versions available. This probably won't last long; there will probably be new betas in a week or two.

Not really. You can open it and then flatten it, but that won't improve how elements are represented because that is already as good as we can currently make it. If the problem is text, unchecking the Favour editable text over fidelity box may help. Otherwise, it may be a part of the PDF specification that we don't currently support (eg, mesh fills), or it may be a bug that we could fix if we had more detail.

The confusion is mostly me trying to figure out what you are doing with your font. You said your Stylistic Alternates were implemented in a similar way to Stylistic Sets. Stylistic Sets are a group of features in the form 'ss01', 'ss02' etc, so it sounded like you were using 'sa01', 'sa02' etc. If you're not, and are just using the single feature 'salt' with a selection parameter, that's fine. We're in the process of revamping character formatting, and this is one of the areas we're going to improve. If you would like to send us an example font to test with, that'll help make sure we're on the same page. Photo and Designer are built on the same code base, and in a case like this where both have the same features, they'll work in the same way.

Ah; there's a further confusion. There are two families of Stylistic Alternatives. One uses a single tag, 'salt', with a parameter. That's the one we currently provide, and we don't have any UI to set the parameter. The other uses a range of tags, 'sa01', 'sa02' and so forth, and we don't provide that one at all. In either case the back-end code that would implement them is in place, so it's just UI work. Also, we don't have the popup window that lists the glyphs that would result for a given text selection. For Stylistic Sets, which we do support, we just provide a checkbox for each tag the font supports with no preview.

Currently we don't have any UI to access all the alternates. To be honest, I think it got overlooked because it really needs to be a bit special, done on a per-glyph basis where the rest can reasonable work on a per-font basis. I'll add it to the list of things to do. It's probably our one big weakness in OpenType support.

Go to the Export persona, select the standard "whole document" slice at the top of the Slices tab, set the format and other options you want, and use Export selected to export to a folder. Then check Continuous. in the Slices tab. Go back to one of the other personas, and you should find the folder is updated after every edit you make.

Not as such, no. However, the changes you make should become the default for the next text you create in this document, and you can save them to become the defaults for new documents with Edit > Defaults > Save. This is an area we will be improving over the next 6 months or so. It will be truly important for Publisher.

We do support PDF/.ai Pantone and spot colours normally, by converting them to their underlying colour space, which is usually CMYK. In this case the underlying colour space is LAB, which we don't currently support on import whether or not it's used as a spot colour. I'll have a look to see if this can be added. I'm sorry for the inconvenience meanwhile.

It'll be Mac App Store only, and at the same basic price as Affinity Designer. (Designer is currently on a discount to celebrate winning the Apple Design Award. I don't know what we're doing about discounts.)

Hopefully just a few weeks now.

It looks like the leading is smaller than the pointsize. You can adjust it from the Paragraph panel, or the control about 3/4 of the way along the text context toolbar, or by using Alt-Up and Alt-Down.