loukash

*intelligence [two els]
 
 

Monotone black images are 1-bit, monochrome black images are greyscale (i.e. more than 1 bit, usually at least 8).

@influxx your last reply to loukash was attacking him on personal level (without any reason), against the forum rules.
please adhere to the forum guidelines. We are happy to have a pointed professional discussion with you, but will not tolerate personal attacks.

Ouch!
I haven't run a MacOS beta since the Mac OS X 10.0 Public Beta days (has it been 25 years?!) so I'm afraid I can't help much.
Some other things to try:
Manually create a bootable installer on a USB stick; there are online tutorials, e.g. at macworld.com if I remember correctly. Then try to install over the current installation. This method might work better. Clone your current installation onto an external drive as a bootable backup (make sure to test it first that it's bootable!), then wipe the drive and clean install, then migrate your data from the backup. Been there done that many times, e.g. when replacing the internal HD with a modern fast SSD. My pick for bootable drive cloning: SuperDuper app from shirt-pocket.com

To get the best results, it's always a better idea to scan in full color and perform any cleanup and conversion later.
In that sense, Affinity Photo offers pretty good tools to "surgically" adjust the monochrome conversion non-destructively, as seen in my screencast.

Affinity lacks some live version of destructive filters - for no detectable reason.
This tutorial describes how to achieve a live pixelate effect - with some restrictions.
open the file to pixelate Choose Radius (changing requires repeating the masking step) activate grid, set to 2*radius +1 create pattern layer of same size like grid move it to upper left  use pixel brush and set exactly 1 pixel to white in center  nest pattern layer into masking position of image/pixel layer add fill layer in black below image add maximum blur filter on top. Set radius. Chosen in step 2. due to Affinity mipmap rendering the rendering works correct only for zoom level 100% or larger.
if you want to change the radius:
change grid accordingly delete pattern layer and recreate it with new size (according to step 3) adjust radius in blur filter. i will provide a procedural texture filter later replacing the pattern layer, allowing to change the radius on the fly.
 
Constraints:
pattern must use even integer values zoom below 50% gives wrong preview  

I understand that this is natural and unavoidable, but it seems to me that wanting Affinity to replicate Adobe is a mistake at its core. From Serif's perspective, it wouldn't be wise to reproduce what others have already done — they need to have their own ideas; wanting to be another version of something that already exists is a mistake and shows lack of character. From the customer side, asking Affinity to do what Adobe does can come across as actually wanting to use Adobe, just at a lower cost. Affinity is behind Adobe in many ways, and with this mindset lingering, it will always be.

Given that for a hypothetical "Affinity Peedeefer" app, Serif would likely be using the same PDF library from pdflib.com, it would be "six of one and half a dozen of the other"…  
So yeah, just gimme a proper separation and overprint preview in Publisher and I'll be happy. 
(Just recently I have found out that to properly check exported PDFs, I can run Acrobat Pro X on Apple silicon in a MacOS El Capitan emulation using https://mac.getutm.app. The emulation is too slow for any other work but it serves the purpose, should I be "out of town" with no network access to my old Intel MacBook.)

Affinity has QuickLook built in: /Applications/Affinity Photo 2.app/Contents/Library/QuickLook/QuickLook.qlgenerator
That's what displays the small preview when you select a document and press spacebar.
But QuickLook and Smart Folders are two different things.

It generates a QuickLook preview of files in Finder. Many apps have one built in, and sometimes it works even when the app is in the trial mode, like IDMarkz. For instance, I also have a demo version of BetterZip which I use only to quick-look Zip archive contents. This can be managed via System Setting → Privacy Security → Extensions → QuickLook. There are apps available that are meant to be used mainly for QuickLook; for example I have here Syntax Highlight, QLMarkdown, QuickLook Video, Apparency.
There used to be quite a large selection of standalone QL plugins (that would go into ~/Library/QuickLook) available online, but sadly, dozens of them haven't been updated in years or even decades. From my collection, only a handful still works on Ventura.
 

I love the design of this coffee pot. I have a collection of over 100 enamelware coffee pots which I decided to sell. The best part is that I have to photograph them which I've wanted to do for a long time. I thought it would be fun to make a series of posters.

 

On Mac, typographical quotation marks are available on all Latin keyboard layouts right away:
« » “ ”
On Italian keyboard that would be option-1, option-shift-1, option-2, option-shift-2
No idea on Windows.

Limited to these features, I would like to see them integrated into Publisher.
Paolo
 

Thank you very much, that helps me a lot.
It would be nice if Affinity could make it selectable whether the artboard displays the crop marks or not...

OK. Diving in....
 
Thanks, 
David

It works when strictly following the steps.
while using the gradient tool, assign a global color to the node. to create a swatch of the gradient: switch from gradient tool to node tool or shape tool. The gradient is not global! Only the nodes that used a GC react to edits of that GC, for all objects using that gradients. The gradient will forever show the color values used at the time it was created. to modify the swatch impacting the gradient, you must edit (in color panel) the single color swatch used in the gradient node, not the gradient swatch. only existing objects using the gradient are updated. 
the gradient stays unchanged. If you apply it to new objects, the colors used during creating of grad swatch will be used. You. Must remember to edit the global color again (just change any slider and go back to the old value), then the gradient swatch will recognize the change.
This topic no. 4 is a bug in my eyes.  

ScreenRecording_04-17-2025 07-34-16_1.mov

A theoretical (means impractical) workaround to reduce effort is always add one gradient node with a specific global color, to every gradient created.
Whenever you change any global color, you must edit this „gradient trigger“ global color to get all gradients updated.
This trigger color/node should be practically invisible. Choosing „no color“ will crash Affinity (on iPad), so reducing opacity to 0 may do. You must put this node at as first, last with closest possible distance to other nodes, or bracket between 2 nodes having the same global color.
Again, more a thought experiment that a workaround.
it just spares you from remembering what gc were used in what gradients.

AFAIK, 10.15.7 (build 19H2026) is the latest (& last) Catalina version, as shown on my iMac in the Apple > About This Mac window:

(Although MacTracker says the last 10.5.7 build was 19H524.)
EDIT: I left out the most important part, which is all 3 Affinity apps worked fine for me in every version of Catalina I have used, including the current version.

^ Hm… I just noticed this.
How did you come to the conclusion that Designer should behave like Photoshop, of all things?
If you want behavior similar to Photoshop, use Affinity Photo.

XnViewMP can convert to *.ico, too. 
https://www.xnview.com/wiki/index.php?title=How_to_batch_convert_and_batch_process_with_XnView_MP

That’s really good input. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge 😊😊

No, it's apparently hard-coded.
A workflow for new documents might be to create a template with a default layer that already has your favorite layer color set.
In existing documents, you'd need to create a blank custom color layer just once, then copy it and paste onto each page.
For such purpose, I'm usually using a spare master page that also serves me as a non-printing notepad and the like.
Existing nested layers (as in "Layers", not regular objects) won't inherit their parent layer's color properties, however.

In Designer and Publisher:
nest your object(s) into a plain "non-pixel" layer (Layer→New Layer) in the Layers panel, right-click on the layer and select Properties change the layer color In Photo you can only add pixel layers or groups which don't have the Properties option, so you'll have to temporarily switch to Designer or Publisher via "File→Edit in" to add a "non-pixel" layer, then switch back to Photo for anything else.

Some users have expressed that they are in work situations where they are so restricted in this area that if the tool supports it at all it is much harder for them to prove that they did not use these features, which they are strictly banned from using in their work situations - if they can show that they are using a program which does not have these features, or that these features are completely disabled in the software, it may mean the difference between whether or not they can use that software at all for their work.
As I have said before, I believe the best approach to this is if those features will be introduced, they should be created as separate plugins to the software, so that those who want them and are allowed to make use of them can install the plugins, and those who are not allowed to have them or who do not want them can simply not install those plugins.

@Domske asked if there were any plans. I related the last-stated plan at this point, which I consider relevant to the question they asked. I was not debating the merits.

It's always been my understanding that when a beta replaces the released version, at that point in time both versions are identical as regards functionality and bug fixes
Indeed, it would not make sense for the released version to contain extra stuff that had not been tested in the beta
For this reason, I have no problem using the beta for all my work as I believe it's the same as the newly released 2.6.2 production version
This allows me to keep the old 2.5.7 release available on my PC for a/b testing and, additionally, as a fall-back for something that used to work in 2.5.7 but now breaks in 2.6.2