deeds

I commented on page one of this thread and only now came back. In the meantime, I was out there doing real work, some of which involved teaching Affinity products. In the interim I updated to version 2, despite the fact Publisher is lagging quite severely behind the other components. 
I have just read several posts saying that Publisher works just fine and is "missing nothing" from Adobe's products. Such comments are simply the product of ignorance. Perhaps it's worth repeating the missing features, so that people joining the thread more recently can learn.
No spreads of 3+ pages. This is a problem I encounter on day two of teaching first year design. Day two. It's not an advanced feature at all, but rather a requirement for covers with spines, flyers, and many other types of publications.  No informal spreads, which allow temporary reorganisation for side-to-side comparison. No scripting, which strictly limits automation, making Publisher unsuitable for complex documents.  No conditional text or objects. Ditto. No regular expression search/replace. Ditto. No global layers. The current layer implementation works on a page-by-page basis which is unsuitable for many use cases.  No Markdown import, IDML export, ePub export, etc. which seriously limits inter-operability in professional workflows.  No cross-references for story text, only indices. No vertical text or RTL (right-to-left) text. No typeface sets, which helps organise resources across project pools. On the plus side, we did get these features:
Footnote / endnote support. Ability to compile documents as a Book. Not all of these features are equally important, but this list should at least demonstrate the gap between Affinity Publisher and the competition. There's far more room for improvement in this application than the rest of the suite. But I suppose that DTP is less glamorous and has a smaller user base. So perhaps we will never have a competitor for Adobe?

"I personally hate the Mac way to have no application frames..."

that is your opinion
if you spend your whole day in just one app - it is a 100% legitimate one.

on the other hand - if you use 2-3-4 apps in parallel, dragging and dropping objets from one to another, taking files from folders and dropping them on the artboard....
whatever you think is not important. window mode has been an industry standard for 30 years. same as cmd+C/cmd+V/cmd+X... space for hand, cmd+space for zoom, option [alt] button for modifiers....
if window mode was not an option in v1, i would not have bought it, switched my workflow from adobe to affinity etc...
now, updated to v2, strips me off a basic app functionality.
how to use dual screen setup without separated mode?
 
whatever....
 

It's highly unlikely this was designed by a designer with any formal training and/or significant experience and/or user empathy.
- Enormous amounts of space is wasted.
- The top row misses out on utilising an enormous opportunity for comparative demonstration of their differences... making them vertical would show their relative positions compared to each other. This is an astonishing miss.
- There's excess information in the second row, in that the inside corner doesn't need to be shown and the inner line could be removed, arguably, too. This would greatly break up the three rows, in and of itself, by making one row entirely single lines.
- Weight is not used in the 3rd row, where it could and should be used. 
- That colour is not used is completely befuddling. 
- The orientation of the corners in the second two rows is odd. There were several better options. The only one worse than this might have been having them being the same. 
Affinity, hire a very good designer from the past to head hunt a good UI designer for you.  Affinity is clearly not able to ascertain shit from clay when it comes to designers. icon design is a serious art form, and this is icon design for designers doing design. Your users deserve more respect.
 
And we don't need : after each Label:

I think it was simply a matter of course that the separate mode existed and that it was more than useful for professional users. Why praise something that Mac users take for granted? It was simply a big mistake to abolish it.

This would only matter if they were significantly using Metal and OpenCL.
There's no indication they are significantly using these APIs and the GPU hardware. 
These benchmarks indicate most everything is being done on the CPU, and only one or two cores, at that. 
If you doubt that, examine the processes whilst doing some real world work with these apps, and you'll see the situation quite clearly. 
Open Xcode if you want to examine how little these apps use the GPU on Macs. 
 

Are you happy with the performance of your apps on PC Workstations and the new M1/M2 Macs?
Why do these apps appear to only use a modicum of a GPU's potential and (at most) two cores of a CPU?
What is being done to improve the scaling of performance of the apps on higher end hardware (many cored CPUs and high end GPUs)
Has the supposed rewrite of the apps been done with a view to multithreading such that you can saturate any number of CPU cores and more fully utilise modern GPU power and performance? 

Are you happy with the performance of your apps on PC Workstations and the new M1/M2 Macs?
Why do these apps appear to only use a modicum of a GPU's potential and (at most) two cores of a CPU?
What is being done to improve the scaling of performance of the apps on higher end hardware (many cored CPUs and high end GPUs)
Has the supposed rewrite of the apps been done with a view to multithreading such that you can saturate any number of CPU cores and more fully utilise modern GPU power and performance? 

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.

When a manual is in .PDF form, I can simply read one page after another, till I get to the end, and know I have read the entire manual. HTML-based manuals force me to navigate a maze of links, hoping beyond hope that I have successfully found every page. Even with a navigation bar on the side, one cannot be sure that every single page is linked to in said navigation bar. Many, many HTML-based manuals end up with sub-pages that can only be found via an obscure link, buried in a paragraph somewhere. So, you are forced to click every link you see, out of fear of missing out. This makes reading a manual kind of exhausting. In a .PDF, I can annotate the document as I see fit. I can highlight important parts. I can insert any questions I may have while reading (even when away from my main computer). Then, I can go back and try to answer those questions when I am either at my main computer or when I am online. Plus, sometimes you just want to insert a question and then keep reading. With HTML-based help, you have to use a separate method to keep track of all these notes and questions. It then becomes extra tedious to keep track of which note or question is about which part of the manual.  I can synchronize a .PDF manual (along with all those annotations) between different devices, simply by storing it in some cloud-based service. Yes, I can sometimes save "favorites" or "bookmarks" in an HTML-based help system, but those can never be synchronized between all my devices. So, if I want to make use of that feature, I am forced to always read said help on a single device. Without these abilities, reading HTML-based help can become extremely frustrating. Especially when said "help" glosses over most of the actual detail of how to use the program. As a former network manager, and a former technical writer, with a degree in Computer Science and Education, I can definitely tell the difference between me simply not being able to understand something and just poor documentation.
 
I do have the tools available to convert existing HTML-based manuals to PDF. But it can be a tedious and error prone process. And the whole process must be repeated each time the HTML-based manual is updated. It is always far better to just start from the source files and use a reliable utility to produce the .PDF version of the document. Usually, the same tool that generated the HTML-based manual has a feature to generate a .PDF file as well. So there is often no real excuse for a company to neglect doing this.
Sometimes it feels as if software companies rely solely on HTML-based documentation just so they never have to worry about users working from an outdated copy of the manual. But I also feel that this is a bit of a cop-out.

Last I checked CSS did not have one, while SVG did have one for closed paths then deprecated it with the intention of dropping support for it.
All said, limiting features based on what is possible in an export format is not very useful when there is such a broad range of export formats to work with, all of them with their own quirks and capabilities.  If a feature is not supported in an export format, the results can be rasterized, or adjustments can be made in order to achieve the same effect (such as shifting the position by a half pixel or whatever is needed upon export).

Here's hoping they're just still overwhelmed and we see changes in coming updates, but I get what you're saying here, deeds.

Look at the UI within both version 1 and 2 of the Affinity Suite.
 
Do you really think Affinity understands the needs and desires of UI designers for pixel level consideration?
 
If you want to do pixel level considerate UI design; it's Sketch or Photoshop, or PhotoPaint if you're adventurous. 
Or an old copy of Fireworks.

That sucks, I got excited when I saw v2 earlier today, then I realized it only supports Catalina and up on s, — which I'll never downgrade to, I'm staying in the older macOS 'till my Macs die — so that leaves me with Windows Server RDS which isn't great, then activation which I saw coming when v1 suddenly could connect to your account and now this.
I'm out.
Thanks for sharing, though. <3

Win10/AD2
I HAD all my Presets set to either Landscape or Portrait - I entered the correct dimensions - WHY is AD2 Changing them??? 
Whose brainchild was that??? How do I disable that feature??? 
I just want to scream: IT'S A PRESET!! THE POINT OF PRESET IS THAT IT'S PRESET SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO THINK ABOUT IT. 
 

I hate to be a nagging complainer, but I figured this would be worth a comment.
Is Serif a small company with limited resources? Yes. Does Serif have to maintain three different platforms with the same code-base? Yes.
But does Serif also have an obligation to make their paid Windows software as optimized, and well maintained and the other two? Yes.
I've got an AMD 6700XT paired with a Ryzen 3800X. You may expect this can destroy a little passively cooled Apple laptop or iPad. Unfortunately, that's just not true. With a combined Multi CPU score of 524, this desktop workstation has less performance than an M1 iPad. I'm not sour or jealous at Apple for releasing an objectively amazing product. But the fact is, the M1 does not have a superior CPU to the 3800X. M1 scores about 7000 in Cinebench R23 while the 3800X scores about 13,000.
Lets consider something else, my desktop class GPU. With a combined Single GPU score of 1114, and no Multi GPU score, the M1 Max is about 16X faster than my 6700XT. That's not a "wow Apple is so fast they beat everyone" that is a FAILURE to optimize for Windows in any fashion. If anything, it's so slow that it could be considered a fault in the software or a quality assurance problem.
To add more insult, hardware acceleration adds so much flickering and stuttering in the UI and canvas that it may as well be left off. Can you blame AMD for this? I'm not so sure. Software like Photoshop or Blender works perfectly fine, with proper acceleration.
I'm convinced if someone at Serif had actually USED the Windows version with regularity on different GPU platforms they'd realize how far off the mark they are. Seriously, it's like Windows has been abandoned.
(I've owned Affinity 1 on Windows since it just came out of Beta. It may have always been this slow, but I cannot recall.) I also own an iPad and recently sold my MacBook so I know what it is CAPABLE of. If I remember correctly, very fast performance and optimization was one of the selling points of Affinity. Now it's one of the major downfalls, unless you own an Apple product.

am from the STrain of 68000 divergence
 

Near as I can tell, the OP is disgruntled because the money spent was within the prior 6 months, yet they're not being offered an upgrade discount, consequently... wondering why is that?
All the OP's subsequent responses to subsequent challenges to their disgruntlement (which fail to address the question) are compromised by the need to defend and justify a feeling... which nobody should ever need to do outside of professional counselling.
Near as I can tell... none of us are likely qualified to provide an answer to a question about why, other than suppositions, guesses and speculations.
I'll make one: I think Serif considers 3 months prior purchases to be the window of prior purchase sufficiently deserving of a free upgrade and enough time to prevent significant amounts of disgruntlement. and that they're willing to deal with the few that purchased in the 3 to 12 month window that might feel disgruntled to have missed out on a discounted (or free) upgrade offer.
To the OP, I'm sorry you've had to experience this, and tend to agree. If I'd bought in the last 6 months, but further back than 3 months, ago, I'd be a little disgruntled, too. And I very nearly did rebuy during this window... 

Near as I can tell, the OP is disgruntled because the money spent was within the prior 6 months, yet they're not being offered an upgrade discount, consequently... wondering why is that?
All the OP's subsequent responses to subsequent challenges to their disgruntlement (which fail to address the question) are compromised by the need to defend and justify a feeling... which nobody should ever need to do outside of professional counselling.
Near as I can tell... none of us are likely qualified to provide an answer to a question about why, other than suppositions, guesses and speculations.
I'll make one: I think Serif considers 3 months prior purchases to be the window of prior purchase sufficiently deserving of a free upgrade and enough time to prevent significant amounts of disgruntlement. and that they're willing to deal with the few that purchased in the 3 to 12 month window that might feel disgruntled to have missed out on a discounted (or free) upgrade offer.
To the OP, I'm sorry you've had to experience this, and tend to agree. If I'd bought in the last 6 months, but further back than 3 months, ago, I'd be a little disgruntled, too. And I very nearly did rebuy during this window... 

Ebola?

My eyes are bleeding...

maybe juicier with some pseudio skeudio from Fill Kolourins:
 
 
 

I suspect the amount of upgrading suite users is significantly less than the number of new suite buyers convinced by the fact that this Suite has reached version 2 status, and is therefore worthy of considering as an investment of time-to-learn (the most expensive part of switching to a new creative suite) and by the fact that they're being offered the same discount as existing users and therefore they're feeling targeted/welcomed/embraced/encouraged etc... as they also have no idea about the reasoning for this all encompassing discount... it feels, therefore, like it's time they jumped in and gave it a shot as a suite.
It's a great pity that Affinity hasn't found a way to inject an upgrade button into one of their v1 updates so that users that have recently bought could directly communicate via their licensed version of v1 to request an upgrade pricing discount FOREVER, regardless of current new user discounts of the v2 Suite and individual products.
 
However, it's still possible. 

Affinity could provide an update to v1 that inserts an upgrade button which queries the license/machine/owner registration details such that an informed decision can be made by Serif as to the time the owner bought into the Affinity software.
Upgrade pricing discounts, from one version to another, commonly aren't time limited in the manner that promotional and launch discounts are.
 

@Ash
Don't be ashamed to look for inspiration in Capture One Pro, this export window is quite usable, never considered it state of the art, but it does the job nicely and notice the show all options (bottom left) that shows several more options for expert users.
Presets are located at the top, so no matter how many output formats that COP support now or in the future, users can pick their most used formats and settings and have them readily available right at the top as presets. Export window even support batch export.

Look, I'm in this forum to provide feedback to Serif, not to kill time or explain rudimentary UI, UX and accessibility principles to strangers on the Internet 10,000 times. I've been working on the topics for years, and know what I'm talking about. And I know where these threads end up. 
There are plenty of design guides from Microsoft, Apple and Google as well as WCAG to read up on if you're really interested. Plus all the theory behind usability and interaction design. Applied practices - and much more. You won't get bored.

There is a "workaround" (in Brazilian Portuguese: "GAMBIARRA") to avoid this BUG (yes, as much as they insist on saying no, this is a BUG!"
1. Group everything in the "unpurgeable" file
2. Copy the group
3. Do "File / New From Clipboard"
4. In the new fresh file, ungroup
5. Save as other name.
 
Although not an elegant solution, it has worked for me, because the "phantom information" is not copy/paste possible.
But it is extremely tedious to have to do this every time you save a final file in Affinity. The EDIT/PURGE command is extremely necessary to implement.