loukash

Wasn't meant as a personal attack. My apologies if it came over like that. I fully agree. I just wanted to point out that Adobe's workflows (at least to my knowledge up to CS5.5) are not the "holy grail" and end of it all. There are many things that I, for one, definitely don't miss, as I have sarcastically outlined above.

Same here. I haven't had an app crashing while opening, using, accessing Print To PDF, or even simply just canceling (!) the Print dialog window in years, except with Affinity. For the record: HP LaserJet Pro MFP M28w via AirPrint OKI C5450n via Ethernet Epson SP R200 via USB or via network printer sharing via Time Capsule, but haven't used it with Affinity yet, in fact it's been offline for almost a year What I have observed, it crashes on "action" if I make some changes in the three Affinity "tabs" of the Print dialog, switching back and forth between them and possibly "changing my mind" like adding and then deselecting print marks, then going back to Range and scale, changing orientation, etc. Any final action will crash, like Print to PDF, and – as noted – even Cancel. It's those three Affinity Print dialog "tabs" that are somehow broken. This reproducible every time. Apparently it's somehow "baked" into the afdesign format because when opening simple afdesign files with Publisher, the Print dialog crashes as well. Crashes in Publisher are less common as long as I don't change those Print window options like scale factor too often back and forth. Then it's probably the preview generator that crashes. MacBookPro9,1 El Capitan Currently no printer even active, just using (or attempting to use) Print To PDF or canceling the job.

+1 Definitely a flaw and not a "feature"! Workaround: create a new global swatch without opacity create a temporary object and apply the old swatch Select > Select Same > Fill Color or Stroke Color (at last with v1.9.x!) apply the new swatch

Nah, still doesn't work for me. It works as a regular K<100% tint overprint on CMYK which is a Great Thing™. It just doesn't work in gradient. Why? Is the third stop the "secret ingredient"?

What the…? And I was under the impression that I would have tried that yesterday as well and that it didn't work?! Apparently I only had the thought but forgot to execute it. Congrats, you won!

Hm… Anything wrong with … … available per brush tool basis? Take that, Schmotofopp CS5.1! ~~~ Speaking of which… Just for fun I have opened a JPEG image in Schmotofopp. It opens as a "locked" background layer. With a lock symbol in the Layers panel, of course. Is it locked as in: "Don't you dare to change any of my pixels you fool!" ??? Haha! Kids, you gotta be kiddin'. Nope. You've got to to convert the "Background" layer to a "Layer" first to make it fully lockable! And when you've done that, and then you accidentally click on the canvas, you're about to have some fun with clicking away a frickin' modal window before you can do anything else: Soo… As far as I'm concerned, I'll take the Affinity approach over this nonsense any time, thankyouverymuch.

P.S. pinging @Lee D for giving more insight, thanks

Sorry, perhaps I didn't make it clear enough: Spot colors will overprint on CMY and in text frames. That includes black spot colors, of course. The thing that can break them is their z-index relative to other CMY or K objects and to non-overprinting instances of the same spot color. I already have a vague idea what the "scheme" could be, but no time today to investigate it in deep. Yep, that's the real pain in the butt here. Of course, because it's spot colors at the "correct" z-index. The best workaround to avoid transparencies and thus possible inacceptable rasterizing on X-1 & X-3 output that I'm aware of so far, is my "clipping trick" above. However, transparencies are less of a problem when overprinting a pixel layer, so using transparency gradient for K text seems to be OK there. Yup, let's call it by name. Anything that requires that amount of user's time and work to investigate and comprehend, is a big, fat bug!

So it's on Windows. I can't help here. This is the MacOS forum. You must post in forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/82-publisher-bugs-found-on-windows You can reuse your already uploaded screencasts by clicking the "Other Media" button > Insert existing attachment

I somewhat vaguely recall that it used to work in an earlier version of Photo on MacOS Mountain Lion. But I could be wrong. On El Capitan, I can see the Filter Gallery from PS CS5.1 in the Filters > Plugins > Effects menu but it's grayed out. In fact, no PS filter works for me.

Alright, a dirty little trick how to "overprint" a CMY and a spot background at the same time with a K gradient: And the trick works like this: We need to clip both backgrounds because clipping the magenta background breaks the text overprint for the spot background. So the clipped backgrounds are now overprinting the black text, not vice versa.

Key #4: To overprint K tint gradient, it must be Artistic Text. Unless when overprinting CMY background which will never work with tints, as demoed above. Whereas K gradients in Text Frames will never overprint, even if it's a K100 to K100 "gradient". They can also break other text gradients from overprinting. Spot gradients in Text Frames do overprint if having the "correct" z-index, unless the text frame background is CMYK. CMYK objects with high z-index may kill overprinting for spot gradient text, even when they don't overlap. Hierarchy matters. Keep spot colors on top of CMYK when possible. To knock out overprinting spot objects with CMYK, subtract them. Oh well… More food for thought: spotoprint193.afpub spotoprint193.pdf

To reset a bounding box "permanently" yet non-destructively, group the object with itself: ade_bounding_box_group.mp4

Can't reproduce. Can't reproduce. You may want to record a screencast.

Meanwhile, I have actually figured out a pretty usable workflow for multipage spreads. If you have Designer, that is: Won't work for brochures where you need just one extra foldout spread unless you set up the complete brochure as nested artboard spreads. Unfortunately it's either spreads or artboards in Affinity documents. Cannot be mixed up.

Upon wasting even more time with further tests: Nope. Some metaphysical keys I've found in ADe 1.9.3 (MAS version) and exported as PDF/X-3 are: creation sequence of objects z-index CMY(K) background It's nuts, but there is a pattern. For sure is that CMY(K) background breaks K-tint overprint incl. gradients. Always. The z-index thing for overprinting spot gradients can be fixed by fidgeting around with the layers to find a sweet spot where it works. Why the creation sequence matters and what steps should be avoided or followed while building up a document: no clue yet. The Super Bad Fonky Thang® is that you can only tell what's happening by exporting to PDF and inspecting the separations in Acrobat because, eh, you know why, right… Exhibits: overprint193.afdesign overprint193.pdf I didn't track the creation sequence because I only figured that out when almost finished. The numbers denote z-index, the layer with the background color labels being z=0. The cursor is approximately where it says "#10", showing that under certain ideal conditions, Affinity can do what it's being told even with complex overprint scenarios like a spot background overprinting a CMYK background while being overprinted by spot gradient text… And on a second thought, I wouldn't be all too surprised when in the end it boils down to a bug with – or a flawed concept of – the "auto-overprinting" K. Layer hierarchy:

I'm beginning to see a pattern why my above example has "worked": no CMY spot colors overprint As soon as I change the background to regular spot or CMY, the overprint gradients will die. Need to do some more tests, but as it seems, a swatch can be be either overprint or not. When I'm using only overprint swatches, everything works as expected. Also, even if objects don't overlap, z-index makes a difference! Definitely a bug, not a feature. @Serif, we need object based Overprint attribute, now!

@Angel Slavchev, I haven't had the aforementioned issue neither with version 1.8.x nor with v1.9.x. But in the meantime, I've also "given in" and keep the Arial font active at all times, and I have changed my default Affinity font to Menlo while deleting all the factory text styles and adding my own. But I'll try to reproduce your steps to see if I can still make it crash.

Yep, my experience as well. That said, same applies e.g. to AI CS5 and its text/character styles. It is a literal pain in the butt to make them work. This in contrast to ID CS5.5 in general which lacks many of those bells and whistles we love in Affinity as part of the Studio Link and also has some clunky UI parts which are annoying, but its basic "pro" functionality is just rock solid, and from my experience after nearly two decades with ID, it's 99% reliable, the 1 % usually being a user error or oversight. But this is a APh bug thread and I'm getting off topic… Now, @Serif: Give us Duotone mode in APh already!

Just to add: You can clip as many rectangles as you want, i.e. overprint individual words or lines or use different spot colors. What you can't do is to reflow the clipped rectangles. If the text reflows, you must reposition every rectangle manually. What you can do however, is to apply the same workaround to individual words in their own text frames, and pin those into a parent textframe as inline object to make them flow with the rest:

For illustration, here the Acrobat screenshot from spotoverprint193new3.pdf (PDF/X-3): The cursor was hovering over the "l" in "black". The green spot plate has no knockouts whatsoever. Also, some odd things may happen where two overprinting gradients between two different spot colors overlap…

@BennyD @Lagarto @Dazmondo77 See my reply in … as it's likely a more appropriate thread for this specific issue. In short, believe it or not (I barely do) but by some loop garoo voodoo majick I made it work. In Publisher. For now. Ugh. Sure. That was a rhetoric dialog…

I don't get it… I still keep v1.8.4 as a "reserve". So, what I did: removed (renamed) ~/Library/Application Support/Affinity Publisher folder to start anew there but kept existing ~/Library/Preferences/com.seriflabs.affinitypublisher.plist (that's where the majority of app preferences are being saved) launched v1.8.4 and created a new CMYK document added a bunch of regular spot swatches plus duplicated them as global overprints created a bunch of gradient rectangles and text blocks using the overprint swatches and K100 exported as PDF/X-3 say what?! all overprints are there and intact! spotoverprint184.afpub spotoverprint184.pdf Next up, I have restored my original ~/Library/Application Support/Affinity Publisher folder, reopened the document with 1.8.4 again. Overprint still working. Next up, I have opened spotoverprint184.afpub with v1.9.3, exported as PDF/X-3. Overprint still intact! Next up, I have added a few text blocks more, using the existing swatches from v1.8.4, exported as PDF/X-3. Overprint still intact! spotoverprint184to193.afpub spotoverprint184to193.pdf Next up, I have created a new CMYK document with v1.9.3, added a bunch of regular spot swatches, duplicated them as global overprints, yada yada, same as before. Gradient overprint still works! spotoverprint193new.afpub spotoverprint193new.pdf WTF was going on there? Did v1.8.4 perform some kind of cache cleanup or what? What often is broken but for some reason works sometimes: Gradient fill using two or more global spot swatches set to overprint. A no-brainer in InDesign, sometimes it either converts to CMYK or doesn't overprint in Affinity. And then, suddenly, sometimes it works. spotoverprint193new3.afpub spotoverprint193new3.pdf WTF?!

And how do you apply two spot colors as a character style? The only other very ugly and dirty workaround known to me is an inside-aligned stroke set to the other spot swatch, and either one set to overprint, depending on the z-position of the stroke. Unfortnately, an inside-aligned stroke won't always fill every character shape; some characters will have holes.

Objects outside an artboard must overlap the artboard bleed to be included on export: