deeds

Firstly, thanks for responding, Dave.
 
Secondly, it's not just about me.
 
Most (I think) using vector design software, make artistic text first (CorelDraw term!) for all the little bits they need, and to try fonts out for each thing they're attempting to make, and then, at some point, they'll need to write paragraph text, so they just convert one to paragraph text and off they go.
 
But it's often little instance of text from this to that. And back again, if and when it doesn't work.
 
Whilst it took Adobe forever to include this functionality in Illustrator, much of the rest of the world had this ability to go between "lay out text" and "logo text" since at or near their inception.

You got this right. Then built.a straw man, anyway.

The whole point of purchasing AD/AP was to negate the need for Photoshop. I don't have that option, nor do I feel that should be the 'solution'. 

If the software is used for digital asset creation (AD in particular, I know AP is mostly an editing/retouching suite) - it would be nice... no, it is a requirement that the software be able to export those digital assets to a useable file. For non-vector assets, PNG and JPG are by far the most widely supported formats online (and webP isn't even an export option in AD yet).
Just to be clear, I have no problem optimising the images after export, but I need to be able to create a high quality "original" ready for optimisation.

I would hope that this issue (including introducing the export preview panel) is at the very top of the development priority list!

For any moderators or Serif developers, please take my tone as 'persuasive' not 'aggressive'. I really love the software Serif have created and I am growing in confidence in using it all the time ( having come from a near 20 year history working with Photoshop ). Keep up the great work and please keep engaging with the growing community of users. 

Thanks, Sam.

Yes, this feature needed. Miss this most from Illustrator and CorelDraw. It is the heart of geometric repetition and evolvement. 

Just wondering ... it's 2020 now ... any news on this one?

Pretty sure it is on one of the future feature lists ;-) ... very, very future ... ;-)

I always said this - Affinity Designer is an advanced paint tool and will probably never evolve into much more.
Just monitor Affinity Spotlight articles... and uninspiring, light updates like 1.7 and 1.8.

I'm afraid these are all indicative of the exact opposite of your desires. 
The "rush" on arrowheads was over multiple years. Yet it feels tacky, wacky and hacky. And is just that. So are dashes. And these are the most simplistic of line endings and line features. To me, these are yet another indication that the product design constraints and compromises favoured illustration, not design. As a result, it's years between requests for primitive design features and their implementation, for things (like blends) that are integral to iterative, creative and exploratory digital design, but of almost no use to illustrators.
The features you're talking about in Adobe Blends, that are useful for iterative and explorative design, came about as a byproduct of the desire to provide complex gradient creation and editing - via blends - something blend shapes are only tangentially suitable for. It was Adobe's way of saving time by repurposing focus on heavy blends gradients rather than creating a good set of gradient tools. I remember when this was first brokered to the world of designers. Adobe already owned the design media, so got them to parrot their beliefs, despite how clunky it was/is.
 
So I completely agree, looking at Adobe blends for inspiration should only be done from the perspective of their integration... for blend mechanics of operation, other means and methods are far superior. And there are big issues to solve, like unwinding direction and origin, interpolation when vertex counts are different, rate of change curves, etc. But to do that kind of discernment requires a designers eye and experience, just as knowing integration well requires utilising it, and learning to lean on that integration for creative empowerment, deadline targeting, deliverables and differentiation. I don't think anyone at Affinity does this kind of product feature testing and consideration, let alone being capable of separation wheat from chaff.
When Adobe Illustrator is viewed through the prism of vector based illustrative endeavour, an improved version looks like Affinity Designer. 
When Adobe Illustrator is viewed through the tunnel of programmer art creation requirements and thinking, you get Sketch, from Bohemian Coding.
When viewing Adobe Illustrator through the prism of creative design requirements, it looks abhorrent. Because it is. Freehand, Xara and CorelDraw were better for general design, Fireworks was in a class of its own for UI design, and Flash was an innovative set of odd ideas that sort of worked.
We are now at an odd spot. 3D design programs have superior 2D design features than those apps pretending to appeal to 2D designers, yet those 3D design apps have the 2D features as a byproduct of providing ways to prep for 3D.
 
Affinity Designer has somewhat gotten the effects right, but the rendering is bad, particularly in things like gradients and glows, shadows and blendings between them. And the lack of ability to reorder and add extras is beginning to look as it is: antiquated. Then there's the two different ways of interacting with them, neither of which is good. A fair indication that the features were checkpoints rather than considered and internally desired.
 
Affinity Designer vector node editing remains its strongest point (please excuse the pun), as a byproduct of the fascination with illustration, not as an end and goal in and of itself. This is borne out by the fact that the points aren't anything like capable of the elastic adjustment possible in CorelDraw or soft selection in 3D apps both of which date back to the early days of digital creation wherein vertices are considered parts of meshes that make up shapes.
I'm using less than 10% of Affinity Designer because I don't have a Wacom device, is how I view this. For anything complex in design, I turn to a PC and Corel and 3ds Max.

R C-R,
 
No. As far back as 2014 Serif indicated they were looking at implementing JavaScript ability. It's been reiterated since. What Serif does maintain is not opening up the file format. Two different things.
 

Twenty years is ancient history in technology, and yes, a LOT has changed since then. They built their system on Java, which, from a user experience perspective, is absolutely hideous. It is extensible and hackable, sure, but an awful pile of bolts to use. "Modern" alternatives like Chromium and Atom are following the same path, and it sucks. These platforms give dev teams the ability to quickly produce fancy systems with lots of bells and whistles, but just under the skin is a rat's nest of spaghetti code that nobody knows how they work. I use a major software built upon Chromium, and despite the devs best efforts to tweak it and fix bugs, is so bad that I cringe every time I open it. 

First, it's easy to write the VBA (and there are free VBA macros that are available) to do it in one go, both directions. Second, if the goal is simply to convert artistic text to paragraph text and vice versa, then it is one keystroke combination (the same keystroke combination is context sensitive).
 
It is possible in other applications. It is a nice to have facility. It is not on my personal list of the top ten work-flow things I would like to see in AD, but it is on a larger list of things I am likely to never see in AD.
 
Sometimes I think you just like being a naysayer.
 
One thing about AD that I would like to see that makes a lot of requests doable from the end-users perspective is scripting with complete access to the DOM. It would free up Serif from some of these additions.

R C-R,
 
In CorelDraw, that's not what happens. There are line breaks inserted at the wrap positions. And if the desire is for the artistic text to be in individual lines, there's a command for that, too. The process can be reversed.

Firstly, thanks for responding, Dave.
 
Secondly, it's not just about me.
 
Most (I think) using vector design software, make artistic text first (CorelDraw term!) for all the little bits they need, and to try fonts out for each thing they're attempting to make, and then, at some point, they'll need to write paragraph text, so they just convert one to paragraph text and off they go.
 
But it's often little instance of text from this to that. And back again, if and when it doesn't work.
 
Whilst it took Adobe forever to include this functionality in Illustrator, much of the rest of the world had this ability to go between "lay out text" and "logo text" since at or near their inception.

@deedsNails it.
In an effort to refresh both design and software skills (dormant since art school over a decade ago), I purchased the suite. I've been fiddling, running through tutorials on Skillshare, seeing what still works in my artistic brain. Sadly, AD is technologically incapable of allowing users to complete a frustrating majority of elementary design projects. I think this is generally where @deedsfinds the pillar of his argument that AD is much more for illustration than design. There's too much that it cannot do that anyone who expects to work seriously will need it to do.
AD is a 20th century solution to 21st century design problems. Until it grows up, the only aspect of all-things Adobe where an argument can be made for it is through the pricing model, which seems wonderful, until tripping over the inability to execute a specific, relatively fundamental design technique leads to the asphyxiation and stymieing of the creative mind.
The "roadmap" that a prospective buyer might peruse before deciding to make a purchase is a well-manicured cul-de-sac.
 

I'm afraid these are all indicative of the exact opposite of your desires. 
The "rush" on arrowheads was over multiple years. Yet it feels tacky, wacky and hacky. And is just that. So are dashes. And these are the most simplistic of line endings and line features. To me, these are yet another indication that the product design constraints and compromises favoured illustration, not design. As a result, it's years between requests for primitive design features and their implementation, for things (like blends) that are integral to iterative, creative and exploratory digital design, but of almost no use to illustrators.
The features you're talking about in Adobe Blends, that are useful for iterative and explorative design, came about as a byproduct of the desire to provide complex gradient creation and editing - via blends - something blend shapes are only tangentially suitable for. It was Adobe's way of saving time by repurposing focus on heavy blends gradients rather than creating a good set of gradient tools. I remember when this was first brokered to the world of designers. Adobe already owned the design media, so got them to parrot their beliefs, despite how clunky it was/is.
 
So I completely agree, looking at Adobe blends for inspiration should only be done from the perspective of their integration... for blend mechanics of operation, other means and methods are far superior. And there are big issues to solve, like unwinding direction and origin, interpolation when vertex counts are different, rate of change curves, etc. But to do that kind of discernment requires a designers eye and experience, just as knowing integration well requires utilising it, and learning to lean on that integration for creative empowerment, deadline targeting, deliverables and differentiation. I don't think anyone at Affinity does this kind of product feature testing and consideration, let alone being capable of separation wheat from chaff.
When Adobe Illustrator is viewed through the prism of vector based illustrative endeavour, an improved version looks like Affinity Designer. 
When Adobe Illustrator is viewed through the tunnel of programmer art creation requirements and thinking, you get Sketch, from Bohemian Coding.
When viewing Adobe Illustrator through the prism of creative design requirements, it looks abhorrent. Because it is. Freehand, Xara and CorelDraw were better for general design, Fireworks was in a class of its own for UI design, and Flash was an innovative set of odd ideas that sort of worked.
We are now at an odd spot. 3D design programs have superior 2D design features than those apps pretending to appeal to 2D designers, yet those 3D design apps have the 2D features as a byproduct of providing ways to prep for 3D.
 
Affinity Designer has somewhat gotten the effects right, but the rendering is bad, particularly in things like gradients and glows, shadows and blendings between them. And the lack of ability to reorder and add extras is beginning to look as it is: antiquated. Then there's the two different ways of interacting with them, neither of which is good. A fair indication that the features were checkpoints rather than considered and internally desired.
 
Affinity Designer vector node editing remains its strongest point (please excuse the pun), as a byproduct of the fascination with illustration, not as an end and goal in and of itself. This is borne out by the fact that the points aren't anything like capable of the elastic adjustment possible in CorelDraw or soft selection in 3D apps both of which date back to the early days of digital creation wherein vertices are considered parts of meshes that make up shapes.
I'm using less than 10% of Affinity Designer because I don't have a Wacom device, is how I view this. For anything complex in design, I turn to a PC and Corel and 3ds Max.

I'm afraid these are all indicative of the exact opposite of your desires. 
The "rush" on arrowheads was over multiple years. Yet it feels tacky, wacky and hacky. And is just that. So are dashes. And these are the most simplistic of line endings and line features. To me, these are yet another indication that the product design constraints and compromises favoured illustration, not design. As a result, it's years between requests for primitive design features and their implementation, for things (like blends) that are integral to iterative, creative and exploratory digital design, but of almost no use to illustrators.
The features you're talking about in Adobe Blends, that are useful for iterative and explorative design, came about as a byproduct of the desire to provide complex gradient creation and editing - via blends - something blend shapes are only tangentially suitable for. It was Adobe's way of saving time by repurposing focus on heavy blends gradients rather than creating a good set of gradient tools. I remember when this was first brokered to the world of designers. Adobe already owned the design media, so got them to parrot their beliefs, despite how clunky it was/is.
 
So I completely agree, looking at Adobe blends for inspiration should only be done from the perspective of their integration... for blend mechanics of operation, other means and methods are far superior. And there are big issues to solve, like unwinding direction and origin, interpolation when vertex counts are different, rate of change curves, etc. But to do that kind of discernment requires a designers eye and experience, just as knowing integration well requires utilising it, and learning to lean on that integration for creative empowerment, deadline targeting, deliverables and differentiation. I don't think anyone at Affinity does this kind of product feature testing and consideration, let alone being capable of separation wheat from chaff.
When Adobe Illustrator is viewed through the prism of vector based illustrative endeavour, an improved version looks like Affinity Designer. 
When Adobe Illustrator is viewed through the tunnel of programmer art creation requirements and thinking, you get Sketch, from Bohemian Coding.
When viewing Adobe Illustrator through the prism of creative design requirements, it looks abhorrent. Because it is. Freehand, Xara and CorelDraw were better for general design, Fireworks was in a class of its own for UI design, and Flash was an innovative set of odd ideas that sort of worked.
We are now at an odd spot. 3D design programs have superior 2D design features than those apps pretending to appeal to 2D designers, yet those 3D design apps have the 2D features as a byproduct of providing ways to prep for 3D.
 
Affinity Designer has somewhat gotten the effects right, but the rendering is bad, particularly in things like gradients and glows, shadows and blendings between them. And the lack of ability to reorder and add extras is beginning to look as it is: antiquated. Then there's the two different ways of interacting with them, neither of which is good. A fair indication that the features were checkpoints rather than considered and internally desired.
 
Affinity Designer vector node editing remains its strongest point (please excuse the pun), as a byproduct of the fascination with illustration, not as an end and goal in and of itself. This is borne out by the fact that the points aren't anything like capable of the elastic adjustment possible in CorelDraw or soft selection in 3D apps both of which date back to the early days of digital creation wherein vertices are considered parts of meshes that make up shapes.
I'm using less than 10% of Affinity Designer because I don't have a Wacom device, is how I view this. For anything complex in design, I turn to a PC and Corel and 3ds Max.

Unfortunately it was never like this. I would have thought that a drawing application, or design program, especially when starting from a blank slate, would have learnt from the massive rise in parametric, procedural and stack based creativity software, and made it this way. But Affinity didn't. 
 
This is much sadder because the corner tool is actually pretty good, and their non-destructive booleans show they certainly understand why non-destructive editing is so creatively empowering.
 
 

Yeah, to be able to blend shapes – at least with those options Adobe Illustrator has been offering for ages – seems like a must-have for Affinity Designer for me, too.
I really don't want or expect Affinity Designer to become a fullgrown Illustrator replica or clone, as it has a fresh and original approach which I really do like.  But on the other hand there are certain features or tools which are such useful and versatile timesavers for designers doing vector graphics that you just miss them dearly when they're not there and you really feel the program not offering them is lacking something vital. It makes it hard to love AD as much as I actually want to. Come on: even FreeHand had a tool like that and that's ages ago...
So please, please incorporate that feature in a (not all too distant) future release of AD. Or maybe in due time offer some kind of API to enable third party developers to come up with supplements/plugins for AD that maybe not everybody using AD needs or wants, but a sufficient number of users will be glad to add (and yes: for a moderate fee, if it's worth it).

Sometime during the 1.6 cycle, performance starting taking a hit, and then the energy used increasing. Now it's such that in 1.7.x the backgrounded Affinity Designer is causing other apps to run slower, MacBook to run hotter and the energy information to be showing that it's a significant user of energy, whilst in the background. 
 
When in the foreground, zooming and panning is less than the stellar best that I saw in the versions prior to 1.6. And CPU and GPU are getting flogged.
 
2018 MacBook Pro with the 560X.
 
 

These problems seem to go back to the renderer itself, as png files have problems, too. Especially if alpha is involved. To get good glows and other gradients to look their best, from AD, I have to export at 4x or 8x the size, take into Photoshop, and then export at the correct size.

that has already been done. Try to keep up.

From a sample size of two. You and me. Genius.

Not doing that. In the case of you, it's not an act.
My main issue, with folks like you, is the needless injection of yourself into something that has nothing to do with you, your choice of operating system or workflow.
Yet you still presume to know I'm wrong.

Yes, this feature needed. Miss this most from Illustrator and CorelDraw. It is the heart of geometric repetition and evolvement. 

Thanks god, I'm not the only one.
This.
First I think this behavior is a bug in Publisher, not a feature. It makes no sense at all.