bbrother
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Posts posted by bbrother
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@Dazmondo77 I hope that the phase of identifying the problem and its huge negative impact on the user's work is now behind them.
And that what they are doing now in their super hiper modern technical center is actively, in the sweat of your brow and with great commitment working on a new page and spread management system. And the only reason why we did not yet received the "Move page" command along with dedicted panel is beacuse this brave work is ongoing.
(top secret hi-tec Affinity LAB↓, new spread/page managment system for APub — work in progress) 😄
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On 5/8/2024 at 12:14 PM, Return said:
I think it's just tiny and as reported in the wrong place as it shouldn't be in the dropdown itself but to the right of the dropdown like the ones on the context toolbar.
Exactly.
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@markzzz you should try Force Pixel Alignment option.
Force Pixel Alignment will snap objects, nodes and handles, and pixel selection areas to full pixels when created, moved or modified.
If this option is switched off, objects and selections can occupy partial pixels.The button that is turning on this feature can be found on the toolbar nearby to snapping button.
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If Canva is serious about expanding into the professional design market, they have certainly identified the problem the OP mentions.
There is no mercy for players of this size who have plans to go public.They certainly know that they have more to lose if they don't seriously start fixing bugs than to gain by introducing half-baked features and sticking to the same development strategy that Serif has used so far.
This in itself does not mean that now there is only success ahead of us.
There is definitely a lot to improve and do. We'll see how Canva plays it and how it ends.-----------------
10 hours ago, Bit Disappointed said:You aren't changing Affinity's form or features either, other than having a marginal influence, and now Serif has indeed been bought by a huge company that isn't specialized in graphic excellence, and you are now even more ineffective in affecting the course of events.
I think you're passing judgment a little prematurely. Less than 7 weeks have passed since the acquisition.
Just because the acquisition was made by a company that doesn't specialize in graphic perfection doesn't mean it can't succeed in the field of professional design.
If it has the resources and wants to develop, it is absolutely possible — so making an accusation of it is a mistake.I don't want to play the role of Canva's defender, but you are showing really bad will here, because it's really hard not to notice that if they didn't take user opinions into account, it would be impossible to achieve the number of 175 million users. Give them time and judge by the fruits, not based on a hunch tainted with pessimism.
I also think that your level of pessimism, or as you call it, realism, has long exceeded common sense.
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3 hours ago, DarkClown said:
Well I guess export option are not worth mentioning in terms of file size increase.
What if someone wanted to add other presets to the list, e.g. ones for the grid, or styles?
3 hours ago, DarkClown said:Elsewise - as for me now - I'm stuck on one computer or forced to re-add mutiple export option on the other system. Each time I change or add settings I manually have to make sure to change them on the other system as well. This can't be the soloution.
Have you tried copying the develop.propcol file to another device to see if it transfers the presets?
Maybe it's worth trying, of course being careful and making a backup to undo the changes. -
23 minutes ago, DarkClown said:
But from my point of view it is an essential part of the document (of course you may argue that it should remain available for new documents as well - but I don't think it is acceptable that you loose it on a different computer!)
For me, not necessarily. If all presets important to the user were to be saved together with the file, and each user may have different priorities than you, the result would be an unnecessarily large file size and chaos when you open it on another device.
A good example would be conflict of imported presets with those existing on a given device in the case of the same names.
Some things, e.g. export presets, should only be saved in the application and copied from application to application and not transferred via file. -
1 hour ago, DarkClown said:
Now I wanted to work with the document on my laptop and all custom export options are gone. Apparently they don't get saved with the document
I can't confirm that (ADe 2.4.2 Win). For me when i save the file and reopen it, every custom change in Export Options panel for [Selection] mode as well assignments in Slice panel are maintained.
1 hour ago, DarkClown said:Is there a way to export these export options and at least re-import them on another AD installation?
As far as I know, the only option is to determine where these presets are saved (location + filename) on your system and then copy them to the same place on another installation on other device. There is no posibility to export/import presets in the Export Options panel in the Export persona.
I may be wrong, but I think one of the moderators once mentioned that these presets are saved in Develop.propcol.
As I'm using windows i can find it under: AppData\Roaming\Affinity\Common\2.0\user i don't know what's the path for Mac.I haven't tested whether it works because I haven't had the need so far.
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5 hours ago, DanielPPeters said:
Is it possible to move pages within the pages panel without dragging and dropping?
No, unfortunately this is not currently possible. And as such there is no "Move Page" dialogue.
There is already a request for improvements in this matter, so if you care about this feature, you can share your thoughs and vote for it in in the post from the link below.https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201931-move-and-delete-pages/
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1 hour ago, awakenedbyowls said:
Maybe something that only afflicts large complex files but isn't that what RAM is for ?
If only it were so simple that adding RAM would solve the problems. Unfortunately this is much more complicated, and dependant not only just on resources like RAM but also on other factors such as CPU, SATA/NVMe SSD, RAM, drivers, system, but mainly how well the application was written to fully and otimal use these resources.
1 hour ago, awakenedbyowls said:Maybe I need to tune my PC for design software rather than games but since I use it for both I have it set to optimise gaming.
I doubt it will significantly improve performance, especially if a lot depends on the application itself.
Besides, you mention that everything else works smoothly except Affinity Designer V2.1 hour ago, awakenedbyowls said:I don't think there is much that I use in V2 that wasn't already in V1 anyway so all I feel I'm getting for V2 is a slightly better interface design and just as many if not more bugs
You're not alone with that opinion.
But to be fair, such an application is a very complex project and they are developing three applications for different systems and devices.
I'm sure the developers are doing their best to fix bugs. It's nothing if there are competences, but there is not enough time for testing and fixing bugs because the team is small. Let's hope this will change for the better after the acquisition by Canva. If not, the reality in the software development industry is quite brutal and they will end up without success as creators of buggy mid-range applications, and that's probably not what they plan to do. At least that's what the buzzy announcements suggest.
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30 minutes ago, Sean P said:
I would suggest you set that value to be Default and then use Edit > Defaults > Save to ensure every new document from that point on will maintain a default leading value.
Or alternatively reset defaults to factory settings using Edit → Defaults → Factory Reset.
Sometimes you can get lost with what you changed and saved as document defaults.@Sean P, handling defaults for objects should be better though, as it's confusing now: sync, save, revert synced to saved, reset to factory, it is simply too much.
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As walt.farrel pointed out try a different option for Auto-select. In your case I would try [Objects] option
Bear in mind, that Auto-select dropdown shows up on the context toolbar when no objects are selected.
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7 hours ago, Little Trove said:
I have done most of these things but thought there must be an easier way!
If you find any, let me know, I'll be happy to try it out.
In the meantime, your post should give the creators of Affinity something to think about. Color management, especially color conversion, is poor and appropriate, modern, user-friendly solutions and tools need to be introduced to sort it out.7 hours ago, Little Trove said:The client provided Pantone colours to work with so my plan was to work with those, however, Affinity Pantone selection doesn't include the current/new Pantone colours.
After Adobe 🤮 and Pantone 🤮 gang up and believe they can own colors and charge users to use them, I wouldn't expect that these color palletes get an update in Affinity.
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Normaly to select multiple object on the canvas you need to drag the cursor and draw a marquee arround the objects.
However, there is an option in Settings → Tools → [Select object when intersects with selection marquee] that makes it easier to select multiple objects. Namely, if it is turned on, all you need to do is for the selection marquee to intersect with the objects and and they will be selected. No need to be careful and draw a marquee around the objects so that they are completely inside the selection.
Check it out, maybe this is the way you want to select objects. (see video below how it works)
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15 minutes ago, firstdefence said:
only other way is to take a screenshot and paste it into the publisher document
That's not quite the case. There is also another solution @firstdefence
If you have Excel 2007 or later place the chart on separate sheet and save that sheet as PDF using Save As command.
Keep in mind tht If a chart is selected, Excel will produce a PDF with only this chart on the page. The chart will be rather large. If you have nothing (or rather, just a single cell on the spreadsheet) selected, Excel will produce a PDF of the entire spreadsheet, and the size of the chart will be preserved.
Once you have the PDF file, you can open it and edit it in Affinity Designer. You can select the chart and export it to any raster file from that PDF in Affinity Designer or simply copy and paste it as a vector into Affinity Publisher.
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As an alternative to @firstdefence, from what i know you can use Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) + click to expand / collapse all in the Layers panel.
What's important you need to click on the expand chevron in the Layers panel.The procedure is as follow:
- Hold Alt / Option and click on the expand chevron of a parent group in the layers panel. All groups, layers and other nested items within the parent will expand.
- Hold Alt / Option and click on the same parent group. All groups, layers and other nested items within the parent will collapse.
You can use this function on any group to collapse/expand all nested items within it.
(The attached screenshot shows on how layers are collapsed, click the picture to enlarge)
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1 hour ago, LostInTranslation said:
What am I doing wrong here?
@LostInTranslation To exclude the most trivial thing — be sure to click the "Find" button and then "Replace all".
Antoher problem could be that, that the scope that is used by "Find and Replace" is lost, and that's why you don't get any matches.
I found that this can happen from time to time, especially if you use the [selection] as the scope type, don't ask why.Deselect the table and make the selection again, and try the Search And Replace.
If that wouldn't help i have no idea why this doesn't work for you, as i have no problems (APub 2.4.2) with search and replace text in table basing on similar example as yours.
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Hi @Little Trove, welcome in the forum.
Conversion from RGB to CMYK color format is not a major problem in Affinity Designer, it takes just a few clicks. But when it comes to CMYK ↔ PANTONE conversions, it is much worse. All because Affinity does not have any function or tool to perform such conversion in an automated way as it can be done in Adobe illustrator, with the help of the e.g. "Recolor" tool. Basically, you are left with the problem alone.
If you have no other choice or want to do it in Affinity Designer, there is no other way that I know of than:
- Find the best Pantone replacments for all the CMYK colors in your design using the conversion tool. I have always used https://cmyktool.com/ for this purpose.
- Use the Select → Select same → Fill Color or Stroke Color or Fill & Stroke Color, to speed up selecting colors on the canvas
- Use the color codes from the conversion tool when picking up replacement color in the Pantone color palettes included in Affinity Designer and apply it to the selection.
- Repeat the proces from Point 2 & 3 for all colors in the artwork.
- After this tedious work, you can export to PDF using the U.S. Web Coated (SWOP)2 profile or other if a specific one is required, and JPG to meet some of the requirements.
There is no direct way to save as AI using Affinity Designer, but there is a very simple workaround, you can save the PDF file and then change the file extension from .pdf to .ai. Although I wouldn't use this method for important work, I thought it was worth knowing about this possibility. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if the color profile and color format will be recognized correctly if you open such a file in AI. Since I got Affinity, I stopped subscribing to Adobe. You can find more details at the link below↓
https://logosbynick.com/save-as-ai-with-affinity-designer/
You should also realize that there are requirements on your list that cannot be meet using Affinity Designer, e.g. point 4d - Swatch for patterns.
Also a general rule should be using Pantone colors from scratch if you know before that they would be required to save yourself complications.18 hours ago, Little Trove said:Are there any online converters that are reliable for colour codes etc?
I would say this way.
A good rule of thumb is to not trust any conversion tools available on the Internet, as you never can be sure exactly what profiles they use, if any.-----------------
I hope I helped at least a little and shed some light on the problem you were facing. Good luck
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Dear God, I didn't though there would come a time that I would agree to refrain implement new functionalities for some time, because I am still waiting for so many things. But I agree with the OP. Please hire more developers with extensive experience and start dealing in serious with the bugs.
Too often you release half-baked features with lots of bugs and weak algorithms. It's not about everything being tip-top from the first implementation, but the quality during the development process must be significantly improved.
+ 4,000,000
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1 hour ago, GRAFKOM said:
It's been a year since I started this post. Maybe it's time to fix this annoying problem.
You're right, it shouldn't take that long.
1 hour ago, GRAFKOM said:Does any of your entire crew work on your Affinity software?
I think so. Some time ago, there was an article on affinityspotlight.com in which Andy Capstick described how the Publisher Workbook was created using Affinity Publisher. There was also a video in that article, if you need a proof.
https://affinityspotlight.com/article/creating-the-affinity-publisher-workbook/
Also in one of the posts describing the new feature introduced in ADe and APub version 2.4, specifically "Layer states", you can find the following statement by Ash:
On 1/3/2024 at 2:27 PM, Ash said:As an example, one of the social ad campaigns for our recent Black Friday promotion was created in Affinity Designer across multiple artboards.
He probably wasn't lying. Plus, it would be very strange to me if they didn't use on a daily basis the application they created themselves.
How to advertise and persuade others to buy in such case? -
If this is on Windows, this is not a surprise , probably this is a part or a continuation of bigger issue with incorrectly incrementing values app- wide in entry boxes using click n drag gesture, scroll wheel, [↑↓] keys with Shift and Ctrl modifiers — AF-2941. Which was found in 2.4.2 retail version.
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Again, I'm not sure if this is exclusive to the 2.5 beta, but if you've already gotten around to refactoring your panels, it would be nice if this was corrected to get the UI nice and tidy.
As you can see in the screenshot below (Windows) text baseline is shifted up when "Style name:" entry box gets into focus state.
It hapens so in the Create Paragraph Style and Edit Text Style dialog. The text baseline shoudn't be lifted up when entry box state changes. She should remain in place.
It would be also worth to add some little padding on the entry box so the text would not touch the left edge.
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P.S In itself it is nothing serious, but if there are more such glitches, it does not leave a very good impression on the user.
The beta cycle is a good opportunity to pay attention to this and improve it. -
33 minutes ago, revpub said:
I'm clicking inside the frame then edit, but the "copy" is grayed out.
This is because you have probably entered text editing mode. The copy command is grayed out because there is no text selected.
If you want to copy the text frame follow the steps:- Select the move tool [V shortcut key].
- To be sure click outside the text frame. Then click once on the text frame it self to select it. Be carefull, do not click twice on the text frame.
- Now when the text frame is selected you can copy it using the Edit → Copy command.
But from the photos you posted, it looks like there are some more serious problems with yours TOC. Namely:
- The order is strange and doesn't seem to be correct. Chapter one is before the Introduction.
- There are two chapter fives. One with a title, one without.
- Page numbers are moved to the second line even for entries where they should easily fit in the first title line.
All those suggest some layout and formatting issues at the document level.
Without the source document it's hard to guess what exactly the problems are and guide you with some hints how to correct them. -
Thank you very much @Lee D
The click+drag gesture or [↑↓] keys or Scroll wheel along with Shift or Ctrl as increment modifiers are such a great functionality, but this bug makes them unreliable and useless. Please, prioritize a fix for this bug🙏
Please note that the incorrect increment problem occurs probably in almost every value input field when you use [↑↓] keys or scroll wheel and increment modifier keys. From what i tested so far this bug applies to:
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Font_size input in context toolbar
When Shift key used the value changes as follow:
15,5pt | 20pt | 30pt | 40pt |... or 24pt | 30pt | 40pt | 50pt |60pt |...
and it should:
15,5pt | 25,5pt | 35,5pt | 45,5pt |... or 24pt | 34pt | 44pt | 64,5pt | ... -
Paragraph leading input in context toolbar or in Paragraph panel behaves realy very weird
When Shift key used the value changes as follow:
15,5pt | 40pt | 60pt | 80pt |... or 24pt | 40pt | 60pt | 80pt |100pt |...
and it should:
15,5pt | 25,5pt | 35,5pt | 45,5pt |... or 24pt | 34pt | 44pt | 64,5pt | ... - Left Indent input in Paragraph panel = same incorrect increment logic as in font-size input
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Justification value field in Paragraph panel
When Shift key used: 24% | 30% | 40% | 50% | ... and it should 24% | 34% | 44% | 50% | ... - Opacity input field in color panel
- Zoom input field in Navigator panel
To sum up. As you can see, the logic of incrementing the value using either:
- click+drag gesture when supported
- [↑↓] keys
- scroll wheel
along with modifier keys is completely broken at the application-wide level and concerns the whole Affinity suite. This is a major issue.
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Font_size input in context toolbar
Designer: how can I use only integer on Transform box?
in Affinity on Desktop Questions (macOS and Windows)
Posted
If your intention is to work with pixel precision then it is best to use the "Force Pixel Alignment" option and enable the pixel grid which, as @R C-R mentioned, has a default size of 1 x 1px. You already know how to turn on "Force Pixel Alignment". To turn on pixel grid go to View → Show Pixel Grid, or use Ctrl+Alt+' shortcut.
These settings work much better than a regular grid with 1-pixel divisions and "Snap to Grid" enabled.
Trust me, as a full stack web-dev ive done a lot of pixel perfect assets for the projects im worked on.
We always work this way in our studio, and so do our graphic design specialists. Actually, I know all this from them.
But if for whatever reason you still want to work with the regular grid, than you can customize it's size in te "Grid and Snapping Axis" panel.
My advice is, to set it up like this for pixel work (see also screenshot below) :
Of course you can use other settings, whatever works best for you.
I also encourage you to experiment with more advanced settings to familiarize yourself with grids and the panel.
Tip: If you are using a regular user-defined grid, you can turn off "Force Pixel Alignment" and turn on "Snap to Grid" or you can leave it on and not turn on "Snap to Grid" that way you can still create, move, modify objects with snapping to full pixels but the grid will only act as a visual guide. There will be no snapping to the grid itself, which is irritating when working with pixel perfect in mind.
I hope I haven't overwhelmed you with information @markzzz.
Good luck with your work.