_Th

Then see my prior reply, or the Help. Right-click, press a number.

hi Jhon - sorry, just noticed this and realised I didn't reply. That's a good shout - though it's not completely trivial I don't think in terms of the best way for us to achieve / expose that without our layer structure. We'll give it some thought for a future update.

There are several reports of keyboard shortcuts (such as Ctrl+Z) not working unless you click in the document first. This is probably just another example, not something specific to Text Styles.
Here are two:
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/search/&tags=PD-390
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/search/&tags=PD-379

Hey Walt, I have raised a bunch of shortcut issues with the developers and it does seem focus related. For example interacting with some panels in the Develop Persona will prevent zoom shortcuts working until, like you say, click the workspace.

There's been a longstanding request in the Publisher v1 forum to add GREP into Text styles. I was excited to see the announcement about v2 but saddened to see this didn't make it in. Since the feature isn't there (yet? ) and since those v1 forums are being archived, I'm bringing the request into this new forum to keep it alive.
For a specific kind of technical document I work with, there are dozens of types of replacements that need to happen on the text in new docs, within one text style. Having the GREP expressions in the style definition makes all of these replacements happen in one click of applying a style, rather than a laborious effort to do them individually.
I understand that this isn't a mainstream feature, but it's so, so helpful to those that need it. Since the engine is already in the software, it seems like it shouldn't be a huge deal to be able to attach GREP search/replace expressions into a text style. I could be wrong, of course, as I'm not a developer. But I (and many others) would very much appreciate this coming in a new update.
 

Yeah, I know this subject has been addressed a few times... I just did a search.
First, let me say, I've been using AD for a few months now and I think it;s a great piece of software. I come from the Sign industry, and have been using Corel, Illustrator, CAD, and SignLab for over 20 years. I have both a like and dislike for all of them. Every time you think you're going to be set for a bit, your OS updates and you have to shell out thousands for updated software. While AD and AP lack a couple of features here and there, I've found work-arounds, For example, layer warps with blends and transparencies can create some nice mesh gradients.
One feature that I find super important is true vector brushes that can be expanded. I have been using expanded strokes to create backfills, 3d effects, tons of text effects for many years. Expanding strokes, breaking them apart, welding them all save countless hours of hand drawing vectors. The work I do is primarily commercial, such as logos and lettering, so I'm not sure how important this feature would be to the artistic community, but thought I would drop my 2cents. 
(I'm embarrassed to say that I've bought way more brush packs than I should have before figuring this out.)
Other than that, keep up the work, this is a great tool you all are putting together.   

We are pleased to make available the next update to the 2.1 beta. This is 2.1.0.1713 on macOS and iPad, and 2.1.0.1714 on Windows. This should now be available for you on auto-update.
Below are some of the main changes:
Cross references added to Affinity Publisher
This much requested feature is now available to test in Affinity Publisher. More details are here.
Style picker added to all iPad apps
The new style picker feature which was added to desktop apps in 2.0 has now been made available in the iPad versions. More details are here.
Auto-select options added to Designer and Publisher (+ iPad)
The auto-select options allowing you to turn auto select off when in move tool have now been made available in Designer and Publisher (it was previously only available in Affinity Photo). We have also added these options to all iPad versions. More details are here.
Crop Tool
Remembering previous setting has been disabled for an unconstrained crop. You can now resize crop by dragging anywhere on edge of the crop bounding box, rather than needing to specifically drag on a handle. Guides
Double clicking on a guide will now open the guides manager, as well as giving focus to that guide in the dialog. Assets
Added Expand / Collapse all to the burger menu of panel to quick expand / collapse all sub categories Search bar available in your add-on listing
A new quick way to filter or search any of your add on content - more info here.
 
Plus various bug fixes as listed in the fix list thread.
 

Blend tool (object blending) has been requested since 2015. It's a crucial part of doing parametric / creative work. Any chance to put in onto priority / pipe?
Thanks

Thanks for your update, I can confirm that this issue, and a similar issue I've recently logged are unfortunately still with our development team to be resolved.
I will be sure to 'bump' these reports with your post now to bring this to our devs attention once again.
I hope this helps

Oh, thank you so much. Generous and eloquent. I did as you suggested and now have a shortcut that works.
Cheers to you, _Th, from Australia.
Brad

I'm on Windows, but would assume it's the same: Preferences > Shortcuts > (Photo) View > Show Pixel Selection.
Then just click in the empty(?) box beside Show Pixel Selection and type the shortcut you want. Since I've used Photoshop for a very long time, CTRL-H is a habit that's hard to break, so that's what I used. (Which means I had to change the Layers > Hide Others shortcut to something else as CTRL-H is the default for that one.) And it toggles the marching ants.
One less thing I to re-train muscle memory on in order to be productive. Happy me.

No, this should be a toggle. If anything is selected, the command isolates the selection (this can go multiple isolate actions deep). Deselect and toggle to show all (this is a single step to show others for all isolation levels).
The advantage? It consumes only one hotkey and the command should work irrespective of any show/ hide operations, that way you have full control over object visibility.

Apps: All
Platforms: Windows, macOS and iPad
A number of suggestions have been taken on with guides...

1. When you move a guide by dragging it on a document you will now see both the position of the guide relative to the ruler origin (as before) as well as the distance from the guide's previous position. So this means if, for example, you just want to move a guide 10mm you can achieve that easily without having to change the ruler origin.


2.When dragging a guide, holding Shift will now snap the guide to ruler marks. As this is based on ruler marks this also means the further you are zoomed the granularity of the Shift-constrained snap increases. Shift will snap based on the distance from origin, Shift-Alt will snap to the delta distance.
3. If you hold Alt or Command (Ctrl on windows) before dragging a guide that will now create a copy of the guide.
4. If you drag a new guide from rulers then guide visibility will automatically be toggled on (if it was set to off).
5. Alt-clicking on any guide will delete the guide.
6. Double clicking on an existing guide will now open the guide manager dialog (with the guide you had double clicked having focus in that dialog.
 
Please note: on iPad you will need to use an attached keyboard or use the command controller (if not visible you can toggle it on from the document menu) to access the modifiers. Also worth bearing in mind that Alt is the global modifier for ignore snapping, so if you create a copy of a guide using Alt while you still hold Alt snapping will be disabled.
Please let us know what you think or if you spot any problems with this new functionality.

I have tried this in Designer 2 on both Windows 11 and macOS Ventura with either minimal performance settings and acceleration enabled. It doesn't seem to be related to drivers or accelleration.
In both very simple documents with 10 simple layers and in rather complex documents this results in the exact same behavior:
Select topmost layer Select hide others (works as expected) Select show others immediately Selected layer is still visible Others are still invisible Resize the entire application window or zoom in/out Incorrectly invisible layers are now redrawn but slowly in chunks And the pattern is:
Select layer number two Select hide others (works as expected, two layers are displayed others are hidden) Select show others immediately Topmost layer and second layer is visible Others are still invisible Resize the entire application window or zoom in/out Incorrectly invisible layers are now redrawn but slowly in chunks etc. etc.

First off, I'm loving Affinity Designer 2! Thank you Serif

I've recently been working quite a bit with gradients and have some thoughts on improving the feature. As it is right now you have to click on the Fill colour in the context toolbar or Appearance tab to get a more detailed gradient view.

There are two issues.

1). The gradient view closes if you click outside of the view.
2). The gradient view is very small (especially the colour range) and it's impossible picking a specific node in the range if you have many.
A solution to this would be to have a seperate Gradient tab (just like Colour/Swatches/Strokes/etc). This would allow for a clearer and larger view of all the gradient settings. It would even be great if each node could be selected from a list allowing for more control over how the gradient looks.
Just my thoughts
 

Oh, is it? Am I caught in a time loop, after all?! (Just last month I wrote lyrics about time travel for a song by one of the bands I play with… Has my dream come true?)
 
You're aware of Ukelele and Karabiner? 
As for [ & ], Karabiner was of no help due to the method how Affinity "reads" keyboard input. Hence Ukelele to the rescue, "hacking" the F-keys I hardly use the hard way.

There is a menu option to hide the 'marching ants' selection (View > Show Pixel Selection), and you can add a keyboard shortcut. I made mine CTRL-H (Yes, same as that other Photo software 'cause, muscle memory.) So I changed the shortcut for Layers > Hide Others from CTRL-H to CTRL-ALT-H.

Sadly, I didn't realize this was available. Really should be the default IMHO.

There is no need to move the centres of rotation.
Select only the hexagon that is to be moved. Press F to activate Point Transform Tool. Ensure the second snap option ("Snap to geometry...") in context toolbar is enabled. On a Mac, hold down ctrl key and drag a node of the selected hexagon until it snaps to a vertex of the other hexagon. Regarding step 4: you use Windows, so look at the status bar at bottom of the app window to discover the modifier for "to translate" when the pointer is over a node of the selected hexagon.
Also, steps 1 and 2 can be transposed.

There is a menu option to hide the 'marching ants' selection (View > Show Pixel Selection), and you can add a keyboard shortcut. I made mine CTRL-H (Yes, same as that other Photo software 'cause, muscle memory.) So I changed the shortcut for Layers > Hide Others from CTRL-H to CTRL-ALT-H.

Sadly, I didn't realize this was available. Really should be the default IMHO.

There currently is a hide others function, which works well to isolate a group of objects. However, in a large document with a complex layer structure, I am unable to easily 'undo' this view state. Basically I want to be able to isolate objects, then make modifications and have it do one of two things:
With a new selection, activating the hotkey should isolate the newly selected objects With no selection, it should show all objects prior to starting the isolation — effectively undoing the hiding operation(s) You can use the alt+click on thumbnails for isolation, but I want to map this as a keyboard shortcut to reduce mouse travel.

I use Affinity Tools on three PCs.
I am using multiple paper size presets and need to set them synchronization at all PCs.
I would like to be able to sync with my account.

Couldn't find this elsewhere; hoping this is the right/best place. First, there are so many positive changes that have been made for 2.1, and thank you for listening and being quite responsive. (Keyboard shortcuts for blend modes!!!!!)
In Photo, every primary menu item is accessible via the keyboard, except Filter. That is, ALT-V to active the View menu, etc. This is how I utilize these keyboard equivalents(?) to streamline my workflow: If I want to do an unsharp mask, I'd type ALT-t (Filter menu), s (Sharpen sub-menu), u (Unsharp Mask).

Three keys (technically four) and I have a dialog box ready for action. And, since the settings are the ones I used previously, there's a good chance all I need to do is hit Enter. There are a ton of these that I use constantly in Photoshop and many other programs because they are huge time savers. (I'm a keyboard shortcut, um, fanatic for this very reason.)
My hope is that Affinity will add keyboard equivalents, across the suite, to every menu item and sub-menu item possible.

If the majority of people don't use them, so be it. But for those of us keystroke aficionados, this would be an enormous help, and ... one less tether to the 800 pound rent-your-software gorilla in the room.

Thank you for taking all of the feedback from the forums and making strides to be more accessible during development. (I haven't seen any other threads on the topic, so I had to make one)
The "new" Beta forums work better than the "old" forums, imo. This is a winning formula. It is more organized. The context provided regarding each feature add/decision makes it much easier for me to see where to prioritize feedback. I've appreciated the peek into the development process, but more importantly, that we can participate in the process.
I can only speak for myself, but thank you for this. For taking the time to open up the process and more importantly, being awesome. I'm genuinely excited to see where things are heading and I think that V2 will be more awesome than V1 given some time.

This is a good suggestion and something we are working on already, thank you.

Please, add the ability to import preferences and/ or shortcuts that were assigned in the commercial versions. That makes it a lot easier for us users to get up and running quickly to do a few tests of the new features.