Fixx

A Designer would be great technical illustration tool if a few enhancements were made. CAD it is not, but data exchange with CAD applications would help many of us.

I have no doubt that what they're saying is absolutely true, but can they do that on fine art paper? Giclée?
It's always a matter of context. If you look at gelatin silver prints at a museum, they're just stunning. (I'm assuming those are the same sort of thing.)
But inkjet prints can be equally stunning, just in different ways.
Also, my understanding is that the expensive pigment ink used in printers like mine (Canon Pro-1000) aren't going to fade anytime soon if you use the right paper and spray them with [whatever the protectant is called - I forget].
***
If you're going to use Gigapixel AI - as I do often - the time to use it is before bringing a picture into Affinity Photo to do a lot of manipulation - depending on what you're doing; if you plan to distort sections, etc., it's better to start with the higher-res picture.
That's my experience, anyway, not claiming that everyone has to obey me.

Not commercially.. more like testing environments or hobbies.

If you open a document, then open the History Panel, then do your export, you will see that an item has appeared in the History Panel, probably something like “Apply file export options preset”.
That tells you that the document in memory has been changed, even if you haven’t made any changes yourself.
You can also use the History Panel to check to see if you really have made any other changes.
Having said that, I can see why some people, like yourself, may want an option to close without saving – this isn’t the first request that I have seen regarding this.
However, I would suggest that such an option is accompanied by a (short?) on-screen advisory telling the user that using it could cause them problems if they use it without knowing what using it will really do.

For the above activites, it would be nice to be able to add the files already open in Affinity Photo to the Focus Merge menus etc rather than having to select them from the folder. (ie add the already selected open files to these menus).

I do quite a bit of stuff destined for screen printed T-shirts and have a few goto tools that I rely on for vector halftones: VectorRaster Image Vectorizer and VectorStyler. I always start and finish a job in Pub, my current fav way of creating shape and vignette halftones is to do these in VectorStyler and paste into Pub, all vector see  --- For me VectorStyler is an essential companion app for the Affinity suite that covers all the stuff that Designer currently cannot do (vector distortions, True vector brushes, vector pattern fills, blends etc.) demo vids:  
Screen Grab 2022-07-24 at 3.13.17 pm.mov Screen Grab 2022-07-24 at 3.25.36 pm.mov

People are very good at making things complicated. It is a simple two additional entries on an export panel. 1. Frame rate 2. Loop or no
Then you append frames to a stack and write a gif with the designated frame rate. 
People can figure out how to use the rest of the tool to make the gif they want. 
All you need to do is write a stack from the frames. I promise it is that easy.
 
sorry, but this thread does not give me hope for this project, or for humanity.

I think that that problem is that it is often nearly as tedious a task to prepare a document to adhere any strictly hierarchic structure as it is to have it tagged with some kind of styles (either real ones or tags). Hotkeys and scripts utilized already in text editor (or in the layout app when available) are often used to facilitate this job.
On the other hand, if the text is truly formal, regularly hierarchical, then "Apply <Style> then next styles" is an effective way to have complex formatting (styles forming a loop) applied in one go.

SuccessiveStyles.mp4  

Good morning, @hobbytobiz. If you're looking for a full-featured DAM, try out Photo Supreme. ( Link: https://www.idimager.com/home )It is available for Mac and Windows, in Single User and Server configurations. There is also a "Photo Supreme Lite" version, which is free (without any limitations other than a 5,000 photo limit) - an excellent way to evaluate the product.
Photo Supreme is a catalogue (not a photo browser) with probably the best keyword assignment process I've ever come across. It supports rating, geo-location, albums and portfolios (including "smart" albums), versions and stacks, full metadata editing with creation of custom metadata, and so forth. Searching is fairly easy, although it can be crazy complex if you need it to be. Speed is pretty snappy, too.
If you tell the application about Affinity Photo's extension (".afphoto"), it will be able to include AP's files in its catalogues, using the embedded JPG previews for its thumbnails. You can select any photo and (i) locate them on your disk; or (ii) open them in an application of your choosing. In other words, I can choose an Affinity Photo file inside of Photo Supreme, click on a button, and open that photo directly into Affinity for further editing.
It's not free (other than the size-limited "Lite" version) and it has no raw development or editing capabilities to speak of. It can occasionally be a little nerdy, but it is a database at heart so what would you expect? But it is a wonderful standalone catalogue and bears looking at.

I fear an additional feature in Publisher will not improve the sloppiness of so many publishers with their ebooks.
One of the reasons for so many badly conceived ebooks is maybe the reliance on an idea of instant single-sourcing from the same InDesign file they use for print. They export an EPUB, and that's all. It shouldn’t.
Paolo
 

I suspect that is not very politically correct feature... 

What?
I do know perfectly well what is DAM and what is discussed here.
It is good there is more and more sw that can access Affinity previews.

It feels strange that it would require a feature request and improvement, instead of a fix. Consider, the current behaviour demands to move + scale the app's main window every time you start the app, especially weird if you use Separated Mode for two monitors, where this mode appears to be made for. Since the custom, savable UI panel + bar presets it's less work but more odd that the main window appears to be forgotten or just ignored.
Perhaps, as with other apps, Separated Mode would again need one or more main frames combining panels and bars and make it work this way in macOS to be able to include document windows in the custom presets.
+1

Couldn't agree more. Window size in separated view: having to manually resize and zoom each doc every time I open them is the only weakness I've come across in this excellent software.

I think OP refers to vector operations. I would think those are in AD only.

Not a monochrome option in Photo? Pfff...

A few notes:
You have generous amount of white space at the top part. White space is good but I feel it is not distributed well, header text feels it's floating.
I would not put indent in the very first paragraph of the chapter. Only to the subsequent ones.
I might consider a little more leading in body text.
Is it a good choice to use sans serif in Introduction when other body text is serif? (It well may be but then there probably should happen some other change too – now they seem to fight each other somehow.)
I think I would put all tilted images to same direction – bottom to right.
I would use more offset in image text wraps (p 38).
Generally the document seems to be well designed and legible (y)

I think it is related to an image initially having more than 256 colors (like the test image provided by OP). APhoto uses at least 8 different colors for that blue area that when using flood select with non-antialising and 0 tolerance shows a clear shape in large areas. When I tested APhoto with a rainbow with 32 non-dithered colors done by PS and saved the same image in APhoto, it did not create any dither artifacts but basically produced an unaltered image.
It seems PS cannot save without meta data, so that explains the difference in these kinds of minimal images. But the difference with the OP's image that I got was 8,600 bytes (PS) vs. 54,835 bytes (APhoto).
EDIT: No, I was wrong, the number of initial colors does not seem to have effect on this. I now tested with OP's image that PS first had quantized into a 32-color non-dithered image. When this image was opened in APhoto and saved as 8-bit PNG, and specifying the number of colors (to 32, basically to trying to keep it same), APhoto still used 4 colors for that blue area, that now was completely clear. But I then re-exported leaving colors to default "256", and this time it did it correctly and produced a 9K image with no dithering artifacts, so basically the same image that was opened. So there is clearly a bug in color reduction method and obviously best results can be achieved simply by leaving the setting to 256 colors. ("Palette" option needs to be "Automatic").  That, however, does not work with an image that does have > 256 colors initially so 247 colors were actuallly used with "256" color settings, and as mentioned, at least 8 colors used to dither the clear blue shape without any cause. 

I also wished some considerable time ago that it would be nice to keep panorama images separate in layers.... autoalign but no merge.

I do not think there are bad artefacts in the image but it needs sharpening.

Yes, it is a word processor feature. In page layout apps it has not been available long.

There is valid reason why Photo should not merge image layers. After all, it merges image layers happily if you select "Merge Visible" or "Flatten".

Yes, it is a word processor feature. In page layout apps it has not been available long.

This sounds a bit weird; I would assume you to have a colour image > greyscale > halftoned bitmap.
Affinity cannot create 1-bit bitmaps truly, though it can export to 1-bit formats (but it always applies dithering). Also, it cannot really control the halftone lpi value in printing, though this may be addressed with printer driver. 
Users may recommend using halftone filter but that just produces halftone effect, not true 1-bit bitmap. Possibly that can be processed to useful printing file.
I hope practising silk screen printers can offer more specific advice.

I do want to support the request of the first post: I'm working with AFPub on a 27" monitor (and Mac), but every (hundred) times I open a document(s), they are shown as if I'm using a 13" PowerBook; and *every* time I have to go and draw the window to full size of the screen before I can start with work. This is very annoying and time consuming.

I admit, that it will be difficult to respect all different user wishes. BUT at least, the Affinity Apps should open any document with "full sized" windows within the borders of the studio palettes.
 
Thanks to the Affinity team for their great work,
Johannes