tomek

The live layer option does not appear to be available to me. I am running AP 1.3.5 (Trial). See attached screenshot.

I think I've found the answer that I wanted: use the perspective filter (Filters->Distort->Perspective). I haven't tried it before because I thought that it would have been similar to PS's perspective transform which in my opinion is not all that useful as it tends to be very fiddly to use. I always end up using Distort because I can achieve the same effect as with Perspective but it's much more intuitive and predictable. It turns out that I should leave all my assumptions some place safe and just try things out. I am certainly more and more impressed with Affinity Photo the more I use it.

Photoshop has a very handy transformation feature: distort (Edit->Transform->Distort). What is the Affinity Photo equivalent of this feature? If there isn't one please add it in. It's incredibly useful.

Publisher documents should have the notion of Sections InDesign documents have the notion of Chapters, if one is working on a book type document. Non-book documents do not have a section-level grouping of content. Yes, there are "sections" that one can create using the "Number & Section Options" in the Pages panel but these "sections" are not really first class citizens in the document. Rather they're more like a meta citizen. In particular, there is no way to use the "section marker" in numbered lists. Publisher should implement Sections in such a way that sections can be referenced in a variety of ways, and in particular section numbers should be available in numbered lists.

I agree with everyone... to a point: I agree that "low level" compiled languages provide superior performance and even enable methods that are not possible to use with "scripting" languages. I don't have any particular preference for a scripting language. A well designed plug in API could be made available in whatever language the developers choose to support and the same functionality could be accessed from C++ as well as JS or Swift or Python or Ruby. Then everyone gets to pick their favourite and the world is happy. I do not want to use anything more than a text editor to write a simple script. Requiring a full blown IDE for scripting will be a big barrier to creating a rich and thriving ecosystem.

Sounds like I started something a bit contentious. Python is a fine language that is suited to both casual scripting and automation as well as developing highly sophisticated, pre-compiled plugins. I certainly wouldn't mind having Python available. And yes, the plugin architecture should be suite wide, not just limited to a single app. In particular, the architecture should allow for live data exchange between the apps. So it should be possible to write a plugin that can interact dynamically between two documents open in two different apps of the suite. I can't give an example of a use case off the top of my head but my gut feeling is that this would be very useful. An example closer to home of what I would like to see is that ability to interact programatically with external services. Here's my use case: I am currently writing my masters thesis. I want to separate the content from presentation. I am writing the manuscript in Google Docs with the help of Paperpile. I want to use InDesign to handle graphical layout. I use DocsFlow to sync between Google Docs and InDesign. The system works really well. I'd love to be able to do something like this in Affinity Publisher, alas it feels like it won't be ready in time for me. -t

Hello, I'm just playing around with Affinity Photo and I was wondering if there is a way to convert a selection to a path? I know that it's easy to generate a selection from a path but can you go the other way? cheers, -tomek

I know that you're hard at work with on the other cornerstone of the Affinity suite - Publisher. And having seen the quality of your work with the other two applications I have no doubt that you've done your homework. But, when doing research on this sort of development project it is easy to lose sight of things that are not on the development map. It's also easy to dismiss ideas that go against the architecture or particular implementation details. And in the end it is what is useful to the intended end user that is actually more important than the internals of the software. Hence I would like to start a thread where all serious DTP experts, professionals and advanced users could contribute ideas. In particular, features that have been long standing requested of other software but haven't been implemented. Anyway, I await the first beta of Publisher with much anticipation and to get started here's my first request: Enable plug-in architecture similar to InDesign which would allow a whole Affinity eco system to flourish while freeing the core team to concentrate on the important bits. cheers, -tomek