Customer Feedback

Optical Alignment was enabled.

Why do double quotes end outside the text frame, while other types of quotes are correctly placed inside? It only happens in this document. I think I've gone through all the settings and character/paragraph style attributes.

No harm done

Hijacking. This thread is about tables over several pages.

Is it correctly understood that Publisher does not support tables that flow over multiple pages yet, here close to four years after the first post in this thread? I agree that "anything" can happen in the future (but it hasn't happened in years though), but that also includes that no such support will come, or that it won't be satisfactory, so I'll just ask for facts about the here and now. /Eddie

Ah, sorry. My bad. I thought I had issues with it. Mistake. I just verified. It is indeed fixed. Thanks!

2019. That was years ago. It would be interesting to get a status on the time horizon for a fix. Or what stands in the way.

No, but I expect a company to learn from its mistakes or to learn from its competitors. Styles were part of DrawPlus I now see, and as I understand, also worked like styles in Designer. So after years and years of having it in DrawPlus, they implemented exactly the same feature the exact same way in Designer. That is 0 + 0. It's a ridiculous misconception that Adobe and others have a 30-year head start. Serif is an old company now with lots of experience. Of course Affinity needs to be built up over iterations, but mistakes and algorithms should not be brought from the old products. And I expect the company's algorithms are mature after so many years. The company is from 1987! But often they are not. Serif didn't start from scratch with design software when they designed Affinity. DrawPlus was released in 1993! It is of great concern if both algorithms and features do not improve over 30 years. Then the company is not accumulating skills and knowledge in this area. Occasionally, customers testing software provide feedback. It's not really for you, but for Serif. I report back with expectations similar to the level Serif markets their software at. That's how constructive approach is used in professional environments. Live up to the promise, sell the product. Otherwise, no deal. But it's really a trend that users here are apologists. Many have been lectured about the feedback cycle and software development by users who hardly have inside knowledge. I've seen that in many places on this forum. It's like being lectured on how to boil an egg. But enough about that, I've wasted enough time on this. Serif: presets are not styles. You have bypassed a golden feature and opportunity. That's a loss. You use the term "professional" a lot in your marketing. Set the bar accordingly, please. That's the level at which we evaluated your products. /Eddie

1) Road maps. Interesting. May I ask what type of client you work for? Do you work alone or in collaboration with others? Do you rely on time as a factor and will inefficient software mean you spend longer completing your tasks, thus increasing the total cost of the task? 2) Yes, you are probably happy with the styles used as PRESETS. I am talking about styles as common dynamic STYLES. If you work with text styles in Designer, they are stored in the document itself, and if you update a text style, all text marked with that style is automatically updated over the Designer document. That's what styles are for. In Affinity Designer, however, a graphic style is a static preset. If you apply this preset to 1,200 objects in gigantic design and you need to update the style, then you must apply this preset to these 1,200 objects manually. You can't even update this preset. You have to make a new one. And then styles are not stored in the document, but locally and globally. So a small style applicable to a couple of documents will lie with all other styles until you delete it. But styles are not stored in the only place they should be, in the document itself. So if you send the document to a colleague, this style will not be included. So here we have term styles that mean something quite different from text to graphics in the same application. It makes no sense. And it's a pity that there are no real styles in the program. But I'm starting to understand why I don't see any traces of professionals in here. Noted. /Eddie

Oh, I confused this thread with another one where customers have similar problem with FX too.

Doesn't work with FX. Not Scale with object alone or with blur or whatever.

Me too. Wasted half an hour. A glaring omission in Designer.

Thank you @Old Bruce and @anto Whow, @anto how could I not have thought of this myself. It is a workaround but a tolerable one for now. Thank you. /Eddie

How to remove all effects from a layer or a range of selected layers in the layers panel easily? I have really many different elements (layers) with effects that I just want to remove. Removing them with click click click from each one is out of the question. That would take the rest of the day. I'm looking for a non-workaround based quick method. You can do it like this in Illustrator from the appearance panel, but I'm looking for something easier so you can remove FX from a number of layers simultaneously. I'm thinking it's extra relevant in Affinity Designer, where you can easily apply FX to hundreds of layers. https://maschituts.com/how-to-remove-an-effect-in-illustrator/ If nothing else, it's an idea for a future feature. /Eddie

I just discovered in an evaluation test document that styles are not styles as we know it from other programs, but simple banal presets! Totally stunned. It borders on mildly misleading marketing. Beyond that, it's a pointless feature if it's supposed to streamline workflows and make them easier. Serif should start by renaming styles to presets. Don't lure more customers in with wrong labels. There is not even an 'Update "style" from selection' for Pete's sake! This disappointment alone is close to pulling Designer out of our evaluation process. Styles in Designer are completely unusable in their current banal form. With some quick research I can see that this feature is even carried over 1:1 from Serif's previous now retired products, so we dare not hope for an improvement in the future if Serif has not improved their products at this point in decades. /Eddie

You are Copy pasting the content to another product Using a story editor in that discontinued product - it was only available for Windows, as I understand Pasting the content back Calls the process easy? Are there any professionals other than us (my staff and I) in this forum? One recommended workaround is more incomprehensible than the other.

Do you have a source/reference? We almost only use M1 macs here, so that kind of problem would be a dealbreaker. /Eddie

We have also experienced this. There are three things about it that are very worrying from the point of view of a professional user: The functionality (the banner) is extremely poorly implemented. That in itself is worrying, but the fact that the developers themselves have not noticed it, or understood that it is unacceptable, is very worrying. It is very worrying that the poor implementation and faulty rendering of the page is not discovered by a quality assurance team or stakeholders (if any are involved internally) in the testing phase before release to customers. It does not bode well that such a small bug has not been fixed long ago. And remember to always consider major use scenarios when assessing (Serif) criticality. As for example @Petr Stanicek has discovered. A small bug becomes a big problem if it influences a workflow you repeat many, many times. It's very simple. And very destructive. /Eddie

@casterle I've never seen scale with object enabled in macOS for FX or Stroke, nor do I think I've seen it enabled in Windows. Ever. So the documentation and software doesn't help me at all. /Eddie

A text editor is sorely missed. It is an indispensable tool in large documents (often also small ones) and publications in a professional workflow. I can (unfortunately) see that there are many users in this forum who have no idea what a text editor is used for in DTP and especially when. That is entirely their problem. Serif's problem is that if Publisher never gets a focused and functionally competent text tool a'la story editor, then Publisher will not be a useful program in many professional contexts. That's why I expect it to come in version 2 or later. /Eddie

I discovered this feature way too late, and I can't believe it's not enabled by default. And what a chore to enable it on a lot of objects afterwards. Enable by default for crying out loud.

Very much, yes. It is incredibly annoying to deal with.

@HenrikF as shown above, the symbol is hidden when the setting in the toolbar is not activated. I really like that transform origin and other symbols are only visible when I need to use them. Are you aware that you can rotate about the opposite corner when you hold the pointer slightly out from the corner points and the rotation symbol appears? You hold down CTRL, and rotate. It really often eliminates the need for me to see the transform origin/anchor point at all. Just a little Sunday tip 🙂 /Eddie

You are You are lucky. I see this: I am not sure what kind of icon that is - but the contrast ratio is terribly inadequate. /Eddie

I posted this in the wrong forum: