loukash

Since you seem to be using a Mac (according to your forum posts history), just go with iMovie. It's simple enough for an absolute newbie, and good enough – albeit not necessarily fast – to edit even quite complex multi-camera shots. I've already done several live videos for my bands with iMovie, shot with up to four different iPhones. With no previous video editing experience, aside from trimming TV recordings years ago…

Obviously. Please re-read my workflow above.

@MKap2, on some text you're using the Outline Effect to add an outline stroke. Don't! Using certain FX on text will inevitably rasterize it, including anything below that may be also affected by the effect. Use white stroke on the text instead. Other than that, exporting your afpub using the PDF export options from your screenshots works as expected, with only the aforementioned parts being rasterized.

But it will mess up the original formating. Whereas when you simply place your Publisher pages, on double-click you can edit the original instantly within Designer. Or even better, simply change the artboard document's suffix to afpub. Then you have the cake and you can eat it too, everything in Publisher.

To streamline this workflow in certain scenarios, e.g. if you need to place many pages, you may want to: save afpub create afdesign with only 1 artboard place the 1st afpub page duplicate the artboard as many times you need and name them adjust each placed (duplicated) afpub object to display the page matching the respective artboard I just quickly tested the whole workflow on the iPad, so it should work even better and faster on desktop.

save the afpub create a blank afdesign with as many artboards of the size of your pages you need and name them as you like place the afpub pages on your afdesign artboards voilà

I understood it differently, in context of responding to my "Why not update to 10.15.6?" (or 10.15.7 which is the last Catalina version): ^ emphasis mine Since the Catalina installer is only available via App Store, and since the App Store is known for having serious issues at times (a few years ago, older versions of GarageBand and Logic Pro were unavailable for several weeks when trying to download e.g. from Mojave), it appears that some time ago, @JohanRosenberg may have resorted to other sources to update Catalina; how ever foolish this decision may have been…

You're aware that my comment was pure sarcasm, right…?

My uneducated guess – and hope – is that Serif is aware of messing up the code for vector operations with the v2.5 "overhaul" (a.k.a. "one step forward, two steps aside, three steps back"), and that they are intensively working on a serious bug fix as we speak, before they would add another half-baked feature on top of the faulty code. One can dream, right…?

All fair points, @lacerto. For the most parts, we're free to choose the tools that work the best for us.

My personal "trick" since many years to avoid such nuisances is the use of multiple Spaces/Desktops. For example, my Affinity apps are assigned to Desktop 2, whereas the browsers, Mail and Messages are assigned to Desktop 3; having four desktops in total. That's a setup I've been using ever since multiple desktops/spaces were introduced in MacOS over 15 years ago. Each desktop can be assigned a global keyboard shortcut in System Setings, so it's easy to switch back and forth. And it also helps to stay focused and not getting too distracted by other seemingly "interesting things"…

Folks, we don't know the "whole story", so… meh. In any case, it's not "illegal" to download a MacOS version directly from Apple servers and install it on a compatible Mac that a user owns. Here's a 3rd party website with direct links to Apple CDN servers, listing most of the MacOS install packages from Sequoia back to Lion: https://geekschalk.com/how-to-download-macos-installers-for-new-old-versions (Not Catalina, however.)

If the hard drive has enough free space, there's no need to reformat. On Catalina (and higher), you can simply create a new APFS volume with Disk Utility and install the new OS on it. Then you migrate your data from the old volume. Then you can delete the old volume. The volume size will adapt dynamically. (That's the beauty of APFS! )

Also of note is the fact that Affinity is technically just one document format, where the file extension has only the function to set the default app of the three to open a document. In other words, if you want an afdesign document to always open in Publisher, all you need to do is to change the suffix to afpub. (I do this always when I have an artboard based document but need the advanced typographic tools of Publisher.) That's a major and deliberate feature. Not a "shortcoming". But it obviously makes file exchange and conversion to 3rd party formats more complex than we can imagine. Whereas each Adobe app lives in its own little universe. You can place a PSD or PDF into an INDD, perhaps turning some layers on and off, but that's about it. The last time I checked (admittedly long ago), InDesign still wasn't capable to open PDF, only place them as is. Stuff like that was driving me nuts for almost two decades. So as a personal side note, I'll take the clever Affinity concept over Adobe's anytime.

This nice old tutorial may give you a couple of ideas:

Have you tried some of the markzware.com tools? Frankly, their apps and services are not exactly cheap…

Settings → Shortcuts → Designer popup menu → Edit popup menu → Defaults: Synchronize from Selection Hm… assigning a shortcut to "Synchronize from Selection" (and to "Revert" to get back to default) is all that it needs. That's what I did long ago.

Ha, using my original drawing from the first post above, I made v2.6.2 crash after clicking the Smooth button a few times. So apparently it can't handle that many nodes very well. The same image doesn't do any harm in 2.4.2.

Hm… so now I tried my exact method as outlined in https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/179630-unexpected-feature-vectorize-a-bitmap-image-directly-in-publisher/#findComment-1037287 above using APu 2.6.2 3228 BETA (which is identical to the public release), and no crashes at all. In fact, the "Smooth" button returns even somewhat better – or at least different – results than in v2.4.2.

I just quickly checked in APu 2.4.2 using its three personas, and it works fine without any crash. So it must be the new algorithm and "improvements" introduced in v2.5. Which was "one step forward, two steps aside, three steps back", as far as I'm concerned. Even though we've raised our voices very early in the beta feature announcement thread:

Yeah, the UI logic – or the lack thereof – is sometimes weird in Affinity. But here it makes somewhat sense. After all, in Adobe CS apps the XMP export was also buried in a modal (!) window submenu.

I thought so, so I'm not shocked.

Metadata panel, ideally with some metadata in it, of course click its "hamburger" menu Export to XML Or as usual, if everything else fails: https://affinity.help/photo2/en-US.lproj/pages/Panels/metadataPanel.html

Oh, I haven't used this "feature" for quite some time, so I don't know. Some time ago I bought https://apps.apple.com/app/super-vectorizer-pro-ai-vector/id1152204742 while they offered some discount, and that works fine for me as vectorizer when needed. It could be related to the new smoothing algorithm though, which is also one of the reasons I'm sticking with v2.4.2.

And that's what you should use. Use any free online "bitmap to vector" service to convert the TIFF to vector PDF or SVG, or an online barcode generator that will create a new barcode from your data as a vector PDF directly. Then open (do not place) the new vector barcode file and copy the curves directly to your layout and give them the required color, usually K100 if the layout is going to print. Been there done that many times. As a side note: Although Affinity doesn't provide a vectorizer built in, there exists an "accidental feature" (or "happy bug") in Publisher that can sort of "vectorize" bitmap layers. It works pretty well especially with barcodes and QR codes: