deeds

Jolly good, old chap.

I recently tried Amadine, a tiny drawing app. It blew me away that this little app had a better workflow for this kind of creative reutilisation of a "style".  I made a complex set of effects upon a box, fiddling with shadows and bevel looks etc. Then drew another box. It had all the same effects of that just created and last used "style", even though I'd not yet saved it as a Style, and didn't yet even know if Amadine has such a preset saving system for effects. 
 
But what was utterly amazing is how this immediately sent me into a creativity frenzy. I had fun doing stuff in a 2D vector app for the first time in a long while.
 
It was joyous.
IOW: I agree... workflow and bugs need to be worked on by Affinity, in equal measure with their new UI and features and version count increments.

I think this is taking accessibility and cultural concerns to an extreme that's past the point of usefulness and will, instead, simply create a new version of the same problem.
English is the language for this, already. Just do away with the limited translations, as that's sure to offend someone. Just offend everyone for whom English isn't a language they understand, as this is the least number of people you can offend with a single language choice.

And the easiest solutions already exist: visual text translation tools on all phones.  Point your camera at any sign, any treatise even, and the whole thing is instantly translated to any language of your choosing, and can even be read out loud.
 
Or you could use Chinese, as it's the most high density pictographic, iconographic and symbolic language going, and understood by more than all but the global language... and using it would offend the second least number of people possible when picking a single language.
 
Most of this is written with a mirthful smile on my face, and a knowing wink
 
 

Affinity estimated $500k to port Designer back when it was only a Mac app, and their only app.
 
Multiply that by all the features added since, and Publisher and Photo and then multiply that by the wage inflation of programmers and the complexities of their new optimisations and building blocks for their future.

Now add the research time to figure out what they should be making it for (targeting) in the Linux world, and how that's going to impact their holistic approach to running all three apps forward at the same time.
 
Now deduct the opportunity cost of tasking programmers with this, and the restrictions it brings to the overall future design and development of the software...
 
Somewhere well north of 2 million pounds... and who knows how much revenue lost due to the inevitable, unavoidable slowing of the development of their trinity of software and whatever else they had planned.
 
Linux users willing to start a kitty?
I didn't think so.
 

AllanP
Apple still creates User Guides for its iWorks suite and certain hardware, also there are Teacher Creativity guides. All available in their Books App.
But it is very much a "used-to" thing. A real shame. Nobody feels they have to give a stuff so it's sunk to the lowest common denominator.

You are lucky you got that screenshot.
Who except nerds like me constantly documents their searches on the off chance that someone will ask for "more in formation" 😊
Yes it is possible in that instance I got V1 Help despite my search, I took a snap so I'd have the topics list for when I created my own manual to try and sort out how Publisher works. Something which as I've said, would be better if Serif did it. I'd put my hand up for the job, but can't fix everyone's shortcomings, I've got work of my own to do.

Those of us with long memories of using Serif's "Plus" range of software will recall the manuals that came with that range. I still have the impressive bundle of manuals that came with my PagePlus 3.0 suite - 0ver 700 pages of information both in using the software together with DTP guidelines.
I van appreciate why Serif don't produce printed manuals these days, but I am sure a PDF Manual/handbook would be useful and give more room for ecamples.

It is a pity I did not have a time machine to go into the future.
And that was an odd but tartly incorrect correction of my grammar.

You're most welcome. Keep an eye out for the next version when 2.3 is released. It's going to cover a lot more. It also covers a lot of the options that aren't explained in depth in the help system.
FYI, the help files should be identical. I've compared the help files before and found no differences, except in the beta of course. Perhaps you were looking at the v1 help files online? You can find all versions here: https://affinity.help

I agree with all the sentiments expressed above and a huge thank you to Mike for creating the Publisher 2 pdf manual, something Serif should have done.
My only regret is that I discovered this after I spent an entire day saving The Publisher Help pages to pdf with the intention of creating a manual myself.
btw In doing this I found Serif has two sets of Help files. One reached through the Help menu in Publisher 2 and the other via the Support pages on this website, and they do not match.

100% Agreed!
There's another (implicit) benefit of PDF Manuals... providing one forces the software maker to think about and articulate their product's features in a linear and complete manner. This, quite surely, benefits everyone; including the software maker, as it will more easily reveal workflow problems and excess user interactions for any and all operations.

My comment was not specific to Serif, nor to Affinity help files, but to the challenges in assembling non-linear help files. A technical book is a major undertaking, but easier to manage than help files. Easier, at least, to assess coverage. There are good, common sense approaches to attempting to manage coverage in help, but those I have seen are simply disciplines, and depend on the use of separate tools, usually search tools, for their success.
I will continue to assert that the quality of documentation has deteriorated in the industry at large, since printed manuals ceased to be produced. Most help files are designed for reference use, not for learning. To that degree, Affinity help is better than many I have seen.

My 2 cents:
 
Create your own font containing wheat grains in required orientations and variants. Then use text on curve to add your prepared glyphs. Create symbols of what grains, use power-duplicate with the transform origin moved to the center of the circle Create a PNG form one grain, create an intensity brush and/or image brush. Create left and right curve, assign your brushes. This will allow easiest scaling by just using move tool / transform panel, but exports will be rasterized. You can paste images into path texts, at least on Desktop versions (not on iPad).  Create a linear section of grains using power-duplicate, then use warp group and bend it to half circle. Duplicate and mirror, try using symbols. 

Welcome @Geronimo52/
There is absolutely no evidence to indicate that Serif has any plans to modify the UI to make it less dysfunctional, nor that they even recognize the existence of a problem other than that some users are grumpy just because they don't have the vision of 25-year-olds.
In fact the release of APhoto 2 made the interface worse as a plethora of posts have documented. With Affinity, what you see is what you should expect to get in the future since that has been the case for more than 8 years during which time all requests for improvement have been ignored. 
It is never a good idea to scale the entire Windows interface. Windows Accessibility options let you scale the size of APhoto text elements that use the system font, but most text elements seem to be hard coded into the software.
My post at
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/189371-high-dpi-settings-on-windows-increase-tools-font-size/&do=findComment&comment=1107381
will lead you to other discussions if that really matters. It matters to me, of course, because I have to regularly remind myself why I put up with the Serif Minuscule font and the tiny icons.
There are helpful links in my post at
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/171054-accessibility-customising-the-ui-font-size/&do=findComment&comment=1075020
In that post I link to another post where I gave my personal reasons for upgrading to Affinity 2 products.
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/177444-upgrade-i-still-can-not-decide/&do=findComment&comment=1021782
Best of luck in finding a photo editor that meets your needs for power and usability.
 

I find incredibly annoying having to continually displace windows to alternate between showing tools and showing the documents behind the foreground one. A really odd way of working.
Paolo
 

For me, this is a limitation. It looks like you've never worked in Indesign, otherwise I can't explain your reluctance to have a much more flexible interface.

2023-09-25 05-58-04.mp4   Publisher's interface reminds me of the clunky interface of Quark Xpress when I was still working with it in 2007. Scribus has the same clunky and inflexible interface.

It is a sad reality, too, that the non-linear composition of help files all but guarantees skimpy exposition and poor coverage. 

100% Agreed!
There's another (implicit) benefit of PDF Manuals... providing one forces the software maker to think about and articulate their product's features in a linear and complete manner. This, quite surely, benefits everyone; including the software maker, as it will more easily reveal workflow problems and excess user interactions for any and all operations.

I do, best are programs which have a UI scaling slider.
Sometimes the UI designs are vastly different and a catch all be all just can´t do justice on homogenizing the UI size throughout a multi program pipeline.
 

Hello,  I love Affinity tools... otherwise I would not spend the time making these suggestions.

Adobe defined most of the graphic program UI/UX paradigms in the 90's.  Adobe is outdated.
- Below we have two examples and I could provide 100 examples (almost all point back to Adobe Paradigms).

I would like to beg on my knees that the Affinity team considers changes.
If Affinity is open to the idea, I would make a thread of suggestions like these.. that I can add to as I encounter considerations.

I believe Affinity is close to being able to take certain markets and I believe simple changes like these will help sweep the people over here.
Because in the long run, we want less click-drilling and less visual filtering.
--
EDIT: The images below don't cover reference to PPI/etc. as I tried to keep this simple for now.. however it is nice that the thread mentioned this as it allowed me to keep this post less cluttered.  Thx  @v_kyr
 
EXAMPLE ONE
This becomes tiring in medium to long work sessions. It's outdated Adobe-think.

EXAMPLE TWO (792px x 788px)
(This was rushed.. forgive me for it being imperfect.)
AKA: 4k Res is common in the 27-32"(or ultrawide) screens.. hence the comparison section on right side, top half.
 

 
 
 
 

Unfortunately I didn’t get the memo. I can only assume this magical event might be on the 3rd Monday of July (if it’s not raining and all the appropriate paperwork has been filed), as it not only did not release any memory, but continued to allocate itself more memory to the point of eventually impacting app and system performance.
 

Hi, @Callum and @deeds. I need to add my voice to this choir. I have had ongoing issues with lagging in Affinity Photo, and it seems to be worse in version 2. I am shooting with a Nikon Z7ii, so I am creating 45 MP images. I normally develop the raw files in Capture One, and use Affinity Photo to finish up using TIFF's exported from Capture One. Response time from AP suffers (sometimes greatly) if (i) there is more than 1 document open at the same time, even as few as 2 or 3 will slow things down quite a bit; (ii) virtually ANY use of live filter layers slows responses down to a crawl, even if only 1 or 2 are used in a document; (iii) longer editing sessions, on the order of 30 minutes or more, show degradation of the response time as the session gets longer.
I just recently purchased a Mac Studio with an M2 Max, 2 TB SSD, 64 GB of RAM, and am currently using macOS Ventura 13.4. I am running version 2.1.1 of Affinity Photo, which is the most recent available retail version. I am including a screenshot of my Performance settings, as you requested of @deeds above.

Please note that I have turned Metal compute acceleration OFF, and have turned the Display to OpenGL (instead of the Metal option). These settings are definitely better, as using Metal in ANY capacity slows things down to a crawl and makes me want to tear my hair out. But, still, the lag seems to get worse and worse over time, and is really annoying with any documents that introduce any real degree of complexity.
I am not tech-savvy enough to even guess what to do next. Do I turn off system stuff that runs in the background (things like Dropbox, Little Snitch, etc)? I'm not at a point where I want to toss Affinity Photo and try to find something else; I am way too invested in AP and way too happy with everything about it other than its speed. I eagerly look for suggestions.

If those don't have any impact on every other app too, then the problem shouldn't be related to those third-party apps at all here. - For example I use Little Snitch too, though on an Intel based Mac and older OSX, and there are no conflicting problems at all with the Affinity or other apps here.
I think there is little you can do from your side here, instead Serif has to adapt and optimize it's apps in a much more better manner to the latest silicon based Apple eco-systems (hardware + OS versions) here. The later said includes flawless Metal support and optimized (bug free) memory management too.
All in all V2 apps have sadly decreased in their stability and instead introduced a bunch of more additional new bugs. Serif overall has to do some better software quality management here.

Yes both are essientiell here.
Serif isn't exactly covering itself in glory here, the way they're currently handling hardware-accelerated graphics frameworks (OpenCL and Metal). There are still far too many problems in the way they are using these APIs.
Good memory management is the be-all and end-all of any complex application, which in turn affects its performance and stability. Undetected memory leaks are a common evil here, which in turn has often a huge impact on the latter (performance and stability).

If I need space for tools, I will reduce the zoom and make as much space as I need. The free space is not the meaning of "Zoom to Fit", which is the maximum possible display of the working area of the document to preview the work. So unnecessary space around the document only worsens the overview and control of the work.