Bit Dissapointed

Hi folks!
I wanted to report a bug I encountered yesterday and found my fix for. Upon launching any of the three programs, they would get stuck with just the splash screen saying "Initializing..." until the following message appeared:
Naturally, this was confusing, as all Affinity programs were working just fine the day before when I'd updated them, and I've never touched my firewall settings!
My setup and required details:
Computer Specs OS:   Windows 11 Home, version 22H2, OS Build 22621.3007 Processor:   Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-9300H CPU @ 2.40GHz RAM:   16.0 GB System type:   64-bit operating system, x64-based processor Using all three programs, Photo, Designer, and Publisher Using the latest release versions (2.3.1) Yes, I reproduced it, and found the issue + workaround (see below) What I tried (without success):
Restarting my PC Uninstalling and re-installing all Affinity Products Once with the MSIX installer and "app" Once with the EXE installer and "programs" Adjusting and opening up my Firewall settings Today (as I post this) I have found the issue: Hidden Folders!
Many programs on my PC have created folders on my PC at C:\Users\[my username] that start with a dot; as I understand it, these are common with cross-platform programs and normally get hidden by Mac OSX and Linux machines, but not necessarily by Windows, and they were starting to clutter my User directory, so I marked them and the contents inside as hidden. Shortly after, my problem above began. As soon as I un-hid the folder C:\Users\[my username]\.affinity, lo and behold, the programs started right up, and when I hid the folder again, the issue returned. My other PC running a different AMD setup with Windows 11 had the exact same issue when I hid and unhid the .affinity folder.
Possible cause in the program:
According to a Stack Overflow page I found while looking up how to hide the folders in the first place (as well as another page with further details linked from there), it appears that if a Windows program calls CreateFile with the CREATE_ALWAYS flag but no definition for FILE_ATTRIBUTE_HIDDEN, operations will fail on hidden files. While I can't speak to what the Affinity programs are doing while initializing, I imagine the issue could be this, or something similar.
 
I hope this is helpful for others who have a similar problem, and for Affinity developers to hopefully fix the issue when it's possible to do so.

The placement of the paper color on top in the digital simulation, using the 'Multiply' blend mode, effectively mimics how light interacts with the ink and paper colors in real life. Although physically the paper is underneath, this digital method allows us to preview the visual impact of the paper's color on the ink, as if the light were passing through the ink to the paper and back to our eyes. It's a practical workaround for visual simulation, not a literal representation of the print stack.

It may be subtle, but it would mimic the interaction of the ink on a colored paper.
On the right, you can see the color appears a bit darker since it is "printed" on a cream colored "paper"

Technically, yes, but if you've ever printed on non-white paper, you can clearly see the interaction. Most inks have a translucence that makes the colors appear different depending on the color of the paper they are printed on. It can be subtle at times, but for descerning designers (like the OP who has obviously used the setting in InDesign) it's something to be aware of.

I haven't seen this in other programs, but it would be great to be able to search for what is NOT something specific.
For instance, search for what is NOT colour 0 0 0 100 CMYK so that I can make sure there is no lurking rich black.

Oh, for heaven's sake, this thread is infuriatingly nonsensical and shockingly unserious. And bloody annoying. You all evidently lack the experience of conversing with people outside the realms of the Internet. Please, just stop fueling this thread by engaging with someone you clearly know is beyond rational discussion, and allow Serif to handle the moderation.
It's impossible to ignore or block threads here, so you're subjecting everyone to the thoroughly miserable experience of seeing this thread resurface time and time again.

It's not that I'm overly fond of the formatting assistance for regular expressions in Publisher's find and replace, which slightly visually clutters the expression itself, but when you start entering regex in the same program in layer states, it behaves differently; regex appears completely unformatted, unsupported, unlike in find and replace.
Therefore, it should be standardised, as regex are complex enough in themselves. There should thus be some code reuse and clear traces of UI principles and shared user interface architecture. 🙂 

There's a variant of this on iPad that has been accepted as a bug. Using \1 in the Replace field to represent the result of a capture group gives a highlighted ("special") \1 character that does not even function as it is supposed to. So it's not just a matter of how it looks in the display; this treatment actually breaks reg-ex processing.
 

@NegativeGrain,
Further to what I and others have written here I have to say that I doubt the Develop Persona will offer you anything 'better' than what is available in the Photo Persona. If I were doing this sort of work I would save the output from the Minolta scanner to a 16 bit greyscale TIFF, if possible, and just use the Photo Persona for further processing.

Ah, please read what I wrote once more. I fully answered the question from the perspective that in every aspect, it is difficult, impractical, and virtually impossible, regardless of one's preferences. On that basis, Serif cannot accommodate the way customers work. Not with PDF.

What Miketo states is that it is neither technically feasible, practically sensible, nor at all meaningful from any perspective to use PDF as a native file format in Affinity. And he is absolutely right.

I thought as much. When scanner programs save scans in a format labelled as 'RAW', they typically store the data in an unprocessed and uncompressed form. However, this isn't quite the same as the RAW format known from digital cameras.
In the context of scanning, 'RAW' refers to a direct digital copy of the scanned content without any colour correction, contrast adjustments, or other forms of image processing. These files contain all the raw data captured by the scanner's sensors, which may include every shade of light and colour present in the original document or image.
It's important to distinguish this from the RAW format used in photography. In photography, a RAW image is a file containing unprocessed data directly from the camera's sensor. While both types of RAW files contain 'raw' data, the data structure and purpose are different. Scanner-RAW focuses on capturing an exact digital replica of a physical document or image, whereas camera-RAW is designed to give photographers maximum control over image processing by preserving all details and information captured by the camera's sensor.

There's nothing visibly or logically wrong. It was experience and intuition, plus a bit of luck. Glad I could help you.
Well, something is wrong; the Serif developed algorithm failed.

Unbelievable - thank you very much!
How did you identify this as the cause of the problem?

Remove this node (or convert it to a smooth or smart node), and it will work. Regards, a traumatized yet experienced Serif Software customer.

Hi @philipt18 
The easy and straightforward solution for everyone:

This does replace WORD even if if there is a comma, period, parenthesis, or quote before or after the word: "WORD" ,WORD. (WORD)
Regular expressions are something I have developers create for me, but slowly I've accumulated an arsenal of variations that I can adapt for my own use. They are complex, but can really be powerful when you truly need tricks.

To create a regular expression (regex) that matches the word "par" as a standalone word in a text, regardless of the surrounding punctuation or special characters, you can use the following regex expression. This regex will match "par" when it appears by itself, even if it's followed by a comma, period, parenthesis, or other non-letter characters.
\bpar\b It will look like this in the search replace dialog:

Regarding the bonus request for variant search (like finding plural, singular, adjective, and adverb forms), regular expressions are not inherently equipped to handle linguistic variations. To achieve this, you'd typically need a more advanced text processing tool or library that understands language context and morphology. However, a basic approach could be to list the variations explicitly in the regex, separated by a pipe | which acts as an "OR" operator. For example, if you want to find "par", "pars", and "pare" (imaginary variants for illustration), you could use:
\b(par|pars|pare)\b I hope this helps. 🙂

Thank you, that's helpful, although still a lot of work when doing things like indexing hundreds of words. It would be great if Serif could add this as a standard feature.

Hi @philipt18 
The easy and straightforward solution for everyone:

This does replace WORD even if if there is a comma, period, parenthesis, or quote before or after the word: "WORD" ,WORD. (WORD)
Regular expressions are something I have developers create for me, but slowly I've accumulated an arsenal of variations that I can adapt for my own use. They are complex, but can really be powerful when you truly need tricks.

To create a regular expression (regex) that matches the word "par" as a standalone word in a text, regardless of the surrounding punctuation or special characters, you can use the following regex expression. This regex will match "par" when it appears by itself, even if it's followed by a comma, period, parenthesis, or other non-letter characters.
\bpar\b It will look like this in the search replace dialog:

Regarding the bonus request for variant search (like finding plural, singular, adjective, and adverb forms), regular expressions are not inherently equipped to handle linguistic variations. To achieve this, you'd typically need a more advanced text processing tool or library that understands language context and morphology. However, a basic approach could be to list the variations explicitly in the regex, separated by a pipe | which acts as an "OR" operator. For example, if you want to find "par", "pars", and "pare" (imaginary variants for illustration), you could use:
\b(par|pars|pare)\b I hope this helps. 🙂

To receive a different answer may require a different question to be asked.
You made a suggestion and received fair minded explanations of why that suggestion may not be very sensible.
That is a bold and very probably inaccurate assumption. I am often very supportive of feature requests, but I cannot support this one.

Hi All,
Just wanted to say thanks for all your feedback regarding the alignment drop down. Obviously much of this is general feedback on that rather than specific to this new functionality, although certainly understand that this feature has put focus on some of the improvements to the drop down as a whole. We agree with a lot of what is being said, and will look to make some changes - but these will come in a future update...
Thanks,
Ash

Measure Tool is great. I hope in the near update, I can convert the "measurement outcome" to an object, then I can modify the style of the arrow,... Because in some works requirements, I have to make a lot of measurements notes.
 

Oh, for heaven's sake, this thread is infuriatingly nonsensical and shockingly unserious. And bloody annoying. You all evidently lack the experience of conversing with people outside the realms of the Internet. Please, just stop fueling this thread by engaging with someone you clearly know is beyond rational discussion, and allow Serif to handle the moderation.
It's impossible to ignore or block threads here, so you're subjecting everyone to the thoroughly miserable experience of seeing this thread resurface time and time again.

Oh, for heaven's sake, this thread is infuriatingly nonsensical and shockingly unserious. And bloody annoying. You all evidently lack the experience of conversing with people outside the realms of the Internet. Please, just stop fueling this thread by engaging with someone you clearly know is beyond rational discussion, and allow Serif to handle the moderation.
It's impossible to ignore or block threads here, so you're subjecting everyone to the thoroughly miserable experience of seeing this thread resurface time and time again.

Oh, for heaven's sake, this thread is infuriatingly nonsensical and shockingly unserious. And bloody annoying. You all evidently lack the experience of conversing with people outside the realms of the Internet. Please, just stop fueling this thread by engaging with someone you clearly know is beyond rational discussion, and allow Serif to handle the moderation.
It's impossible to ignore or block threads here, so you're subjecting everyone to the thoroughly miserable experience of seeing this thread resurface time and time again.

Oh, for heaven's sake, this thread is infuriatingly nonsensical and shockingly unserious. And bloody annoying. You all evidently lack the experience of conversing with people outside the realms of the Internet. Please, just stop fueling this thread by engaging with someone you clearly know is beyond rational discussion, and allow Serif to handle the moderation.
It's impossible to ignore or block threads here, so you're subjecting everyone to the thoroughly miserable experience of seeing this thread resurface time and time again.