loukash

InDesign is scriptable, so you could convert all INDD documents to IDML in one batch. duckduckgo.com/?q=indesign+script+convert+to+idml Publisher is not scriptable directly, but on Mac, basic UI commands like "open" and "save as" are generally scriptable even with Affinity apps. Given that you want to convert 600 documents, it would certainly make sense to try a scripted solution. For the record, I'm in a similar situation, started with ID 2.0 and in the process of a transition to Affinity. And a quick Spotlight search just shows that there are currently 656 files with the *.indd extension on my Mac, too…

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Only via UI scripting:

If you have Designer, then yes. The document format for all three apps is universal, so all features are seamlessly possible. You just need the respective app to activate them. Go to File>Edit In Designer, add as many artboards you need, then switch back to Photo to use its features.

Probably in the Serif (Europe) Ltd. marketing white paper. No, I consider it a very smart marketing move. Seriously! One important thing to remember here: Serif is a for-profit company, not an NGO or something. And it better does, considering how much cash Schmadobe wants for that piece of dog poo. Yeah. Life just ain't what it used to be, back in the day when we all were happily living on trees and licking ants from a wooden stick all day. Oh, those were the glory and simple days of the human kind…

You can switch documents between the three apps on the fly, even untitled and unsaved ones. At least on Mac it's totally seamless, apart from a few relatively obscure bugs. And in Publisher you have the StudioLink, meaning you can switch the apps as personae without ever leaving Publisher. So unless you need one of Photo's unique personae (you don't need Designer's because "Pixel" is just a poor man's bitmap editor and "Export" is identical to both), you don't even have to leave Publisher at all. The only bad thing about this otherwise brilliant app concept is that there's no built-in way to easily sync preferences, assets, presets, shortcuts etc. I.e. out of the box, the Designer and Photo personae in Publisher behave as independent apps, instead of sharing all existing preferences with the respective full apps "outside". A new Publisher beta has just been released earlier today, so I'm currently at it syncing all of its personae settings with my regular Publisher release as well as with the Designer and Photo betas. That's a bit of a p.i.t.a.

You mean 1.9.4?

The real "killer feature" of Affinity is the universal document format! Essentially, the only difference being the file suffix which then simply defines the default app to open the document. But else, you can add features from any of the three apps, and they will work. Major exception being artboards vs page spreads: it's either/or. Probably because page spread appeared much later in the game.

There is a gesture trigger where you can draw a specific gesture with your input device to execute a macro. That's about it.

This is probably too hardware specific, so it will unlikely happen on app level. I don't know if there's a utility than can translate multi-finger gestures to keyboard shortcuts or other commands. E.g. looking at Keyboard Maestro macro actions, I don't see a trigger by trackpad gesture there. Tabs as in document tabs! Hence my initial question: E.g. on my MBP mid-2012, the three-fingers gesture is for click-and-drag that can be activated in the Accessibility preferences. That works globaly, including Affinity. I'm using it all the time. Document tab switching is usually done by ctrl-tab (I think; or is it my custom shortcut? don't remember, been using it since many years), and that works also for open documents in Affinity. Whereas the Affinity panels are non-standard UI elements anyway. They are hard enough to even target by UI scripting (the aforementioned Accessibility features), so don't even expect there any features available in "Safari and all other apps that have tabs"…

You can lock a layer against accidental click-through by grouping it with itself and locking the group. The child pixel layer still remains fully editable if you select it directly in the Layers panel.

Perhaps it's a Mac only bug.

In theory yes. In practice there is a known issue (can't find the thread link right now) that while it is possible to assign keyboard shortcuts to custom presets, they will neither work nor stick upon relaunch, and may even crash the app.

I don't have much experience with Windows, so I can't help you with that. On Mac, all that Affinity can respond to are the MacOS "Accessibility" features. That means all main menu commands and many UI elements are scriptable as virtual "mouse clicks", plus more or less all keyboard commands. However, there are further limits because Serif has chosen to use many non-standard UI elements, likely for crossplatform compatibility and "consistency".

This has been discussed before, and I think the limitation is primarily with the sandboxed versions of the suite, i.e. those from the Mac App Store. So such a feature would likely only work "out of the box" for the other versions that aren't sandboxed – which is not necessarily a good UX strategy. (E.g. my ADe/APh being from the Mac App Store while APu is from the Serif store. They still work together as StudioLink though.) A possibility on Mac might be a user prompt upon first launch to allow access to a shared Affinity folder in ~/Library/Application Support, or otherwise to define a custom folder location for shared data. Although I'm not that experienced as a "developer" to understand if that's even possible, given the restrictive sandbox options on MacOS. But a similar principle is already in place for allowing 3rd party Photoshop-compatible plugins in Photo, so I'd think it's not impossible. But still not in Designer's Assets panel…

A somewhat related issue:

I see. Yeah, that would be handy! What you can do (and what I did) is to assign individual keyboard shortcuts to each panel that you're frequently using in View > Studio, then open each panel by that shortcut: Also, I have released an Automator plugin that can open all panels that are currently closed (i.e. without the ✓ mark): I might try to figure out another script that would actually cycle between them. I already have a vague idea how it could work…

You may want to upload an example file, or at least a screen cast of what you're trying to acomplish, ideally with the Layers panel visible and expanded.

Unfortunately so. For some reasons known only to the Gods of Affinity, this command is only available in Designer and Publisher: Select > Select Next/Previous From what I've observed, Affinity macros can record and replay layer selections. The Layers panel is essentially the only one panel I keep open all the time, in all three apps. (And, previously, in Photoshop and in Illustrator.) And I'm painstakingly organizing everything in layers, sublayers, groups, you name it. And… literally naming and color-tagging them to keep track of everything. That's really a meanwhile decades old habit of my workflow…

What do you mean by "tab"? Open documents?

On Mac, it should be possible to access the two text input boxes by an external macro via AppleScript's System Events scripting, i.e. essentially using the built-in MacOS accessibility features. I might actually try to do such a macro for myself, as I'm also regularly cropping scanned images to specified absolute values.

No: D sets the color wells to black/white. X toggles them.

If you're starting from scratch with a new object, then you can likely skip the rasterize step, as long as it's not an "Image" type of layer. Although… I haven't tried it, but in theory it could work even with placed images in Publisher's picture frames, the latter being the synced symbols. Unlink the placed images then, replace them and move picture frame only. I'm sure it is, but you know, my last algebra lessons must have been like almost 40 years ago. I have done only graphics and music since I was 16, so meanwhile algebra is quite a "foreign language" to me. But – as you may have noticed – I still seem to be somewhat good in "mechanics", even the virtual ones. Ah, I never was much into games so I'm not so familiar with these things. My favorite game was (still is but I had to stop playing it decades ago because of its addictiveness!) Civilization 1 for Mac. And that wasn't even isometric yet.

For page layout. That's why it's in Publisher. If you need additional text functionality in Designer, use Publisher as its "advanced text features plugin". You can switch your document back and forth on the fly either via File>Edit in…, or in Publisher's StudioLink without even leaving the app. This modular Affinity concept is – literally – by design.

affinity.help/photo/English.lproj/pages/Workspace/shortcuts.html: