Graphical Chris

Hi Lee D, I have figured out how to reproduce this "bug" as it just happened again to me. I therefore went and replicated the "bug" to confirm. I have since discovered it is not a bug, but would be nice to get this changed as others maybe having this issue. I will explain below what I did and what was happening for me to think this swatch was not appearing after adding it... After opening a new document I did the following: 1) Created a new Document Palette to insert my swatches in. 2) In the swatches panel from the dropdown list select the following "PANTONE Formula Guide Solid Uncoated V5" 3) I typed in the search window for the pantone colour I wanted, in this case I typed "red" and selected the colour, by clicking once from the Pantone book so that the selected colour is highlighted in the "set fill" section above. 4) I Chose the drop down list menu again and selected the "Document Palette". Currently empty of any swatches. 5) Then I clicked on the "Add current fill to Palette" button. the red pantone colour now is located in my "Document Palette" 6) I then double clicked the "Set Fill" to open the "Color Chooser" so I can select a CMYK colour. (I need pantone and CMYK colours mixed in my jobs for different machines to read the pantones for such things as laser cutting and printing of the CMYK colours. 7) Once I had my CMYK colour selected, I clicked on the "Add current fill to Palette" button. This colour does not appear. nor any other colour... BUT what I discovered was that in the swatches search window the word "red" is still present from my previous pantone search and this is only showing me the pantone red, no CMYK colours will appear. When I deleted the "red" search from this window all swatches appeared. I have had this issue for so long and only discovered now - wondering if there can be some way to remove a search after you click away or access anything else that is not inside the Swatches panel, as I can see what you would want it to stay showing you all available "red" swatches when selecting different colour books. But then I clicked on creating a new fill and opened the colour Chooser; this would be good if that search window would reset to nothing. Sorry to cause any issue, thankfully I have worked out what was happening. Not a bug.

Does anyone know if you can convert an RGB image within Publisher to a CMYk image? I quite often get PDF artwork from clients that I import into Publisher2, but the photos within these are usually RGB and I need them to be CMYK. Is there an easy way to convert these images all within Publisher2? I thought maybe I could maybe use the Photo persona, but I can only find how to convert the whole document to CMYK, and that doesn't work - the images all remain as RGB. Be good if you could select the image and somewhere select to change it to CMYK. Anyone know if this is possible or do I have to extract the image and convert them through Photo? This can be time consuming, so I am hoping there is an option to stay within Publisher2.

Hi Lee D, These are the exact steps I take (and remember, this happens randomly, not every time). 1) Add Document palette and called it "Document" 2) Opened colour chooser and selected colour and clicked "close" on Colour Chooser. 3) Clicked Add Current Fill to Palette. Usually I can add some fills, but repeating the steps from 2 onwards to add more colours I need, the colours do not appear after clicking "Add Current Fill to Palette". The colours have been added, but they just don't appear, it's like the palette window doesn't refresh to show the colours added. I know this, because when you close Publisher 2 down and reopen it, the swatches you added previously are there. But you have to close down Publisher 2 for this to refresh. In regard to hardware acceleration, I do not have this selected. In fact, it won't let me selected as it says my graphic cards will not support this function. (I am using an Nvidia Quadro P400 graphics card).

Hi NathanC, Thank you for your responses. In regard to BUG/ISSUE 1: I converted all of my images to CMYK before importing them. So I didn't needn't to tick that box, but I could try it anyway. This is overall probably a hard one to diagnose as it will look good in adobe reader, but the outputted PDF has underlying issues. I tried to do a quick fix and convert the PDF to CMYK using Adobe Pro preflight, but it caused some colours to go black an other colours to go wildly different from what they should be. I think these issues stem from the original source artwork which is from Canva. Let me explain my processes: 1) Customer supplies PDF artwork that was exported from Canva (Printers hate Canva). 2) I import this PDF into Publisher 2 and make necessary edits within Publisher 2. 3) File gets saved as a Puiblisher 2 file for later edits if required. 4) I export updated artwork out into a PDF which gets turned into 4 plates for the offset printer. I can't be certain, but I believe these issues with colours and overprint black only occurs when importing PDFs from Canva. So it would seem Canva PDFs bring in some issues of some type that cause these strange bugs. In regard to BUG/ISSUE 2: the overprint was working on one page, but not the second page, the same page where the RGB image was not converting to CMYK. And yet I did the same for both pages - in fact, I created a global overprint black swatch that was used on the 1st page and the 2nd page. But for some reason, this second page had issues with this. I can't send you the file just yet as it is a sensitive file that can't be released anywhere until after 4th March as it is related to elections and this informaion is not allowed out before a certain time. Once this date passes, I will pass this on. It has happened before, but I can't remember which one had the issues as I deal with thousands of artworks, so I can't send you a previous one.

I have found this really annoying bug in Publisher 2. Not sure if the same thing occurs in Designer. BUG When I create a new Document palette and go to add a new swatch to this palette, quite often the swatch will not appear in the palette. This bug seems to occur randomly. HOW I FIXED THIS BUG The only way to fix this is to close down Publisher 2 and reopen it. When you do this, you can see all of the swatches that you have added. I know this was a bug and not a user issue as I clicked on a swatch to add it and nothing added to the palette. So I clicked a few extra times and still nothing. But when I closed the application down, reopened it and opened my file, the colour I clicked numberous times appeared in the palette the same amount of times I clicked it - so for example, I had black1, black2, black3 and black4 now appearing in the document swatches. This was an easy task to delete the extra ones but very annoying having to close down and reopen when I work in a very busy printshop. This isn't a one-off, this occurs many times throughout my working week to cause me grief to have to close down and reopen numerous times. Please can someone find a fix to this bug as it has come across from version 1, as it too would do the same thing. When I first used palettes in Publisher 1, when I was new to the software, I thought I was doing something wrong in adding swatches, but as it turns out, it's a bug.

I have come across some major issues in regard to offset printing. Just to allow an understanding of these bugs/issues, I will go over some requirements need for offset printing - these requirements is where I had the issue. 1) Offset printing requires 4 plates to be made for each of the CMYK colours. Therefore, images/photos need to be CMYK format so each of these colours appear on each of the plates. Blacks are not appearing in the black plate. 2) Overset of certain blacks to allow neat printing of fine text on certain colour objects is also required (ie., black text on top of a light coloured box should use overset black so that the printer does not have to try and match it aginst the colour, leaving white strips on the edge of the text. Overprint black text is not working, even though selected to be overprint I am not sure if these issues stem from Publisher 2 itself or from imported artwork from another source and Publisher 2 is bringing in some sort of Meta data that is causing the issue. This particular one, I imported supplied PDF from someone that produced the artwork within Canva. After importing this PDF, I then proceeded to edit and adjust making the artwork ready for Offset Printing - but issues still arose, even though I went through all processes to make it offset print ready. ISSUE/BUG 1: CMYK Images are coming out as RGB (even when exporting and selecting the ICC to be a CMYK model). When creating all 4 plates, the black plate is missing any black in the images, making the image appear to be an RGB image. What have I done to fix this? 1) Converted all images to CMYK in a separate program (photoshop) and re-imported them into Publisher 2. 2) Made sure Design was using CMYK Model within Publisher 2. 3) Exported PDF out using all CMYK ICC models and requirements for CMYK Offset Printing WHAT HAPPENED: this was a 2 page document. Page 1 worked fine. Page 2 would not export the image on this page as CMYK. Not matter what I did, no CMYK Image would export as a CMYK. ISSUE/BUG 2: Overprint black was not working on page 2 of the document. What have I done to fix this? 1) I created a new 100% black (C0 M0 Y0 K100 and set this colour to overprint). Overprint of black would work on page 1, but not on page 2. OTHER STRANGE ISSUES: I noticed that when viewing in Adobe Pro, everything looked good, and said it was CMYK. But when I ran a Preflight to convert everything to CMYK, other colours behaved strangely. Colours that had no black in them, all of sudden became black etc. So the exported PDF file from Publisher 2 brought some strange issues with it and after preflighting it, they weren't usable. HOW I FIXED ALL OF THE ISSUES ABOVE: I fixed all of the issues above by exporting the PDF from Publisher 2 as I normally would, but I imported the PDFs into Adobe Illustrator and exported back out again. This fixed the CMYK colours and the black Overprint. The trouble with this is, it now means I have to keep Illustrator and I really need to be doing everything within Affinity and not using Adobe for anything due to the subscription. Otherwise, I might as well keep the subscription and not spend anymore on Affinity. Having a fix for this within Affinity for this issue would be good. I am not sure if this is because issues were brought in from the imported PDF from Canva (which all printers hate) or if these issues occur when created from scratch within Affinity Publisher 2. I don't know this, because I have had this issue occur randomly and can't remember which ones were imported and which ones were created from scratch.

Hi Myclay, It's not the function of copy a FX to another layer, that's fine. Its the ability to easily access the FX panels without having click so many times. Quite often you will apply an effect and realise it doesn't look good so you tweak it. This means having to click open the Sub FX panel again and again and again. You may also have different effect settings on differnt objects, even though you are using the same effect. My post is not about copy FX to other objects but rather keeping the effects panels open as they were in version 1. Thanks for your feedback, though.

Thanks Carl123, That solves selection issues.

All of the the Quick FX panel sub effects close after using. In version 1, they use to stay open, now, after selecting an effect they all close all of the time. This adds heaps more clicks, can we please just have them stay open. And if this was a request from number 1 to have them close after each use, can there be a setting that allows you to keep open or closed? To help understand my pain with this... I will be working on a job that might have 15 photos on the page and I might want to add a drop shadow to each photo. After selecting and adding a drop shadow on one photo, the panel closes and you have to click and expand the sub effects again to access. or you maybe adding an effect to one object and discover you want to make adjustments to it, so you have to click and expand once again. This added clicking is frustrating when you're accessing a heap of Quick FX sub menus.

I very rarely use guides in all Affinity apps, not because I don't need to, but because the guides are not user unfriendly. Instead I am always drawing shapes and lines and make them my guides instead for the following reasons: 1) You can't select guides off the canvas. If you have a lot of content on your canvas, selecting a guide is near impossible, you keep selecting other artwork components. Sure, you can open the guides panel to select and then type and move a guide, but if you want to drag a guide or select and align a guide to something else, you can't. It would be good to see the guide go off the canvas so you can easliy select it. 2) Guides don't highlight when selected. You can't tell if you have selected a guide, which also causes issues with tyhe above point 1. 3) Be good to select multiple guides at once to be able to drag them elsewhere on your canvas, but you can only select one guide at a time. Selecting more than one guide is very useful when you need to keep particular width or height. Instead, I draw a box and move this where ever I need it, but the guides would be better. 4) To be able to align guides the same as you do with objects on the canvas and maybe even treat guides as an object that will appear in the layers panel so you can lock or hide the guide. 5) Guide panel to be able to place this as a permanent panel to any of the side tool panels. At the moment it is a floating box.

Thank you very much, Walt.farrel. That fixed the problem. I have never even used the Text Frame panel in all the time I have used Publisher and I have used it since its release. In fact I never really knew it existed until you said to use it and I went looking for it.

I am using Affinity Publisher 2.1.1. I have placed an Artistic text and a text box on the page and you can see there is a light grey behind the text. Background colour is off. if you select a background colour, it actually protrudes past the confines of the boxes by a couple of mm's, unlike what this is currently doing, just staying within the confines of the boxes. In order to bring in a text box or artistic text box without this background colour, I have to open up a brand new document, add the text box to this new document, copy the text box and then go back to my original document and past the text box into it. After that the text box behaves properly, but I can't add text boxes or artistic text through the normal channels of adding these items.

I have this same problem, but the background colour is already crossed out. Only does it on one document. So I am wondering if a bug has crept in on the one saved file. I have to create a text box outside of this document and then copy the text box into this document. If I create a new text box or art text box it has a grey background.

Can someone please explain in great detail how to add a spot colour to your document in Affinity Publisher? Everytime I add a Pantone colour to my Document palette, there is no SPOT graphic in the corner of the swatch to show that it is a PANTONE colour. When I output any PDF it appears as CMYK. I have only managed to add a spot colour once before and for the life of me can't get it to work again - not sure if an update has changed it or stopped it from working. I have followed the instructions from the manual and it doesn't work. Sure, I can add a swatch from any of the palettes, but it will never appear as a spot colour. I have followed other people's instructions, but they never elaborate enough. It is so easy in other applications, you just go to the pantone palette and select the PMS colour and it just adds it as a spot colourm showing the spot graphic. But with Affinity Publisher, you do the same thing and it adds a CMYK equivalent of the colour. I am dealing with offset printers that require PMS in the artwork so I can produce PMS plates. I also deal with plotters that require a pantone colour to use as a guide for cutting. None of this is possible with the Affinity suite. Can someone please help, it is driving me crazy.