loukash

WHAT?! We may be in the minority nowadays, but I definitely do work with 1-bit images every now and then.

It just works.

The free version of Nik Collection that used to be available for download from Google still works with APhoto as a plugin. I haven't used Viveza yet, but recently I was editing a couple of photos in APhoto, among others using the Analog Efex Pro 2 plugin from the free collection. The main issue with the old Nik Collection is the installer that may or may not work properly on recent versions of Mac OS. Eventually I made it work on El Capitan somehow. Haven't tried on newer MacOS yet. Oh, and you must have the Arial font enabled, otherwise the plugins may crash. No idea if it's still downloadable somewhere. But I'm always backing up every installer that I've downloaded in the past, say, 20 years.

Not at all! I'd be just fine with the reliability of CS5(.5) because that's what I'm still working with. As noted, save for a few relatively unimportant spots where Illustrator CS5 wil predictibly crash on Mac OS El Capitan (which is what I'm mainly working with, for too many reasons that I won't go into here), it still does exactly what I need it to do. Same for Photoshop and InDesign CS5.5. Some of their tools are still very "20th century", but having been working in the digital domain for more than 25 years, I can deal with that. Heck, I made layouts with AI CS5 that look like this: The file is 66 MB without PDF compatibility (would be a few hundred MB with PDF embedded) and it takes a few minutes to load. It contains a full size vinyl LP gatefold sleeve layout, the corresponding CD Digipak layout with a 16-page booklet, and the record and disc labels layouts. All text is still "live", and all of it has my favorite Illustrator "killer feature" applied, the Roughen vector effect. Plus many other effects, filters, transparencies, you name it, where needed. Here's a detailed view: It went to print simply by exporting each page to PDF/X-3 using the built-in PDF exporter. The flattened PDF/X-3 of the LP sleeve is 100 MB. It printed without hicks. The resulting product is here: http://munster-records.com/en/label/vampisoul/product/czech-up-vol-i-chain-of-fools Everything was printed exactly as intended. Frankly, for the next release I have split each packaging part into separate files because the file load and redraw times were a tad a too long indeed… When Designer (or any other competitor) is ready to accomplish such a project as well, then I'll be ready for a full switch. And yeah, the Roughen effect is a must! I'm definitely not going to join the CC rip-off. I'm a professional graphic designer, self-employed since 1988. Then it's ultimately not worth for me to even look at that. *** Alright, we're getting very off topic…

^^ GradientExport-tints+movedmidpoints.afdesign GradientExport-tints+movedmidpoints.pdf

Alright, it's not only that: you also have to move the mid points to a different position. Then they turn to full tint.

Thanks! It's the CMYK tint swatches that make the difference: GradientExport-with_cmyk_tints.pdf GradientExport-with_cmyk_tints.afdesign The thing is that I needed exact "proportional" tints of the base CMYK color so that I wouldn't have to recalculate the CMYK slider percentages for each gradient stop. Since I wasn't able to apply tints directly to the gradient stops (why that, by the way? the tint slider should be there in the pop-up menu as well), as a workaround I have created tint swatches. There's the bug.

Stop adding features for a moment and fix the bugs instead!

And that's the problem. Recently I thought I'd check it out if one of the more recent Bridges has improved over Bridge CS5.1 which I'm still using. All that CC rubish that came with it was so annoying and resource hungry on CPU and network traffic that I have uninstalled it the same day. At least I hope so, since some of the background processes crap remained and I had to remove some of the launch agents and daemons (what an appropriate UNIX terminology in this case!) manually. My ideal DAM app would be a hybrid of iView/Expression Media (still the best concept of the bunch overall, since I need to manage other file types as well, not just images!), Bridge (some great tools in there), NeoFinder (also some great features) and the file browser of GraphicConverter (Exif data manipulation in any possible manner). One can dream, right?

Here you go: swatch_display_bug.mp4

No, Keyboard Maestro can handle the document window sizes and positions just fine. You can save its macros just to affect the Affinity apps, be it via its global menu, a keyboard shortcut, whatever. But it's everything else that's wrong with the Separated mode, starting with UI rendering bugs, unmovable palettes appearing off-screen at the top, and ending with no option to save the workspace arrangement after spending an hour to set everything up the way I like, only to accidentaly select the "reset" menu command. Been there done that… Perhaps Keyboard Maestro can access the palettes by some means, too. I just haven't wasted my time to find out yet…

Thanks for your comment, SrPx. We're getting quite off topic, but I appreciate it nonetheless. Inkspace never was a viable option for me. Running X11/XQuartz apps on Mac is a p.i.t.a. I don't have the patience for that as well. Fair enough. I've been using Photoshop since about v2.5. Since the late 1980s I was also professionally working with Aldus PageMaker 3 and 4, and later XPress 3 and 4. I also was an avid Freehand user, starting in the early 1990s somewhere around v3, and ended with v9 as long as I still was working on "classic" Mac OS. (Remember, FH9 could do multiple artboards at varying sizes already!) Then I bought the "Adobe Design Collection" back in 2003 while switching full time to Mac OS X, with PS7, AI10 and ID2. With InDesign 2.0 I was actually able to replace most of the tasks I've been doing with Freehand so far, except for multiple page sizes within a document. Today, ID CS5.5 is still my main design tool. It definitely "just works". Even on El Capitan and Sierra. Well, it's been now over 5 years (!) since I bought Affinity Designer 1.1. After more than 5 years of active development, I'd expect a "professional" application to master such basic tasks as accurate PDF/X-3 export. This is an absolutely essential workflow with top priority, before any bells, whistles, eye-catching online video tutorials et al. If anything, at least Serif should have learned from Adobe's earlier mistakes. Thing is, I'm only still giving Serif a chance to evolve because 1) I definitely won't be joining Adobe's subscription model, and 2) there are no better alternatives whatsover. And even then, there are features that only Illustrator can do so far, like various nifty vector effects that can be applied on live text; heck, AI CS3 could already do that. In order to use AI CS5's full potential without (that many) crashes, I even still have an OS X Mountain Lion partition to boot from. It just works when needed.

So why is it even in there? Heck, my Illfrustrator CS5 that was released almost a decade ago can handle elliptical gradients just fine. Not on strokes though, those need to be converted to fills first. Yeah, and creating a double star is also quite p.i.t.a. But it works. In the meantime I have rebuilt my whole logo draft in AI and safely exported to PDF. Affinity has a looong way to go to be ready for real-life production work outside the RGB color space. Whatever I've attempted to acomplish with any of their three apps in the past few years, in the end I had to humbly resort finishing all but about two APh jobs in the corresponding Adobe CS5.5 apps. Luckily all CS.5.5 apps still work on El Capitan, albeit with quirks and a few "never-touch-me-or-I'll-crash-you!" buttons and commands. As it seems, I must consider it a privilege to be a paying (not "paid", haha) Affinity beta tester.

Anyway. After wasting the best part of Friday afternoon and Saturday evening trying to figure out what's going on here, I'm giving up on Designer for the time being and head off to rebuild the whole thing in Illustrator, as I need the job to go to print by Monday. Sigh.

Upon further investigation and dissection of the exported PDF with Ill-frustrator CS5 (when not crashin'), here's how the original gradient compares: As it seems, the Mid Points apparently export as 100% tint Stops.

Is this issue possibly related? Colors don't match the Swatches panel; but they update upon reselecting the active Palette from the popup menu.

I have a CMYK document with a relatively simple graphic. I'm using a global CMYK swatch and tints thereof to create gradients. Only two gradients are involved: a background circle with a simple radial gradient from the full CMYK swatch to 50% tint in the centre a double star with its stroke set to an elliptical gradient using three tints of the CMYK swatch On PDF export, the double star stroke gradient doesn't match the setting. See also gradient_pdfx3_export.pdf *** On a related note, there seems to be a bug when changing a gradient node color without using the tint swatches, just by using the Tint panel: when I assign a different CMYK tint to an existing gradient node on the fly, the gradient may either not update its appearance, or the Tint panel may then display a tint of the tint… or other unpredictable behavior. (Also, why is the Tint panel so buried? At first I thought it's not even there… )

https://keyboardmaestro.com I can't use a Mac without anymore… And for the record: I strongly dislike the "one-window" mode, but the "separated" mode is so bad that I'm trying hard to get used to the one-window mode anyway.

Yup: Might be a font issue as well.

For the record: After spending the best part of the day "beta testing" Publisher, literally at the end of the day I have rebuilt and finished the intended layout with InDesign CS5.5 within 90 minutes and without crashes. You can't beat 18 years of the InDesign muscle memory routine yet. Same system settings, same fonts, not even a log-out to refresh the plethora of running background processes. Sigh… Hope you guys get the bugs fixed soon. Publisher needs to be at least as reliable and robust as ID CS5.5 was (don't know about CC, I've never used it). Thanks for your support!

Downloaded it, opened it, instant crash. Attaching my crash report for this file: Affinity Publisher_2019-12-12-161834_Kuk.crash.zip

Fair enough, a font issue was my thought from the beginning. I'm required to use Arial for the layout. While working in Publisher on the first layout draft a few weeks back, I have simply activated the preinstalled Arial.ttf from /Library/Fonts; usually I keep it disabled because I never use it otherwise. Oddly, while all other apps could instantly see the freshly activated Arial just fine, Publisher only displayed Arial Hebrew from /System/Library/Fonts, ignoring the regular Arial.ttf. Deactivating it and then activating a copy of Arial.ttf placed outside the standard Fonts folders manually via FontExplorer worked around this issue. I remember cleaning all caches incl. fonts just recently with Onyx, after having had some UI display issues and crashes with the aforementioned Logic Pro 9. Speaking of Arial.ttf, I also keep a copy in /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Fonts because otherwise several Photoshop (CS5.5) plugins will crash if Arial is not activated. D'oh. But that was already the case on Mountain Lion. If I have some time next week, there are a few scenarios I can test: Editing the document on my "antique" backup MacBook Pro (15", late 2008) which has a similar El Capitan setup and is more or less in sync with my regular MacBook Pro 15", mid-2012. Checking it on my other partitions – from Sierra up to Catalina – if the issue is replicable. Those partitions are, uh… more or less without any custom modifications.

Is there anything in the crash reports that would at least hint at the culprit? Frankly, I do use a slightly modified El Capitan installation; hence the disabled SIP as you can see from the reports. It's a compromise to run a mix of current software alongside some "ancient" apps (hint: CS5.5 et al) as well as a few unsupported "vintage" audio hardware drivers. That said, Publisher is by far the most crashing app so far. (And Logic Pro 9, but that's not unexpected, given that it's been last updated in 2012…

You mean creating a new Mac OS user? Well, if a user has enough time on their hands, then that's certainly part of the process of finding the offending conflict that's causing the crash. But it's not an actual solution.

After recreating a document from the scratch, I give up. This software is not ready for even the simplest tasks yet. InDesign CS5.5, here I come again. I need the job to get done today.