h_d

I appreciate it's a learning exercise, but if I were doing a job like this for real then I wouldn't use a table. The orange shape at the top is a half-depth rectangle placed over a full-depth rounded rectangle. I then used Layer-Geometry-Add to combine them into a single resizable object. The black text is in a single frame with the spacing adjusted with the leading controls. The white text is in four separate frames. The grey shape is a separate rectangle. The three vertical rules have their blend mode set to Divide, as does the grey rectangle, to achieve the knockout effect but to allow quick repositioning. I drew a single circle with the Ellipse tool and then duplicated and aligned for the blobs. I then grouped the vertical columns of blobs with the word above, again to allow easy repositioning. As a vet might say, it's horses for courses... vetsbills.afpub

Hi @SheilaL, your sample file won't download - would you be able to upload it again?

You can also get some insight into GPU performance by running Help-Benchmark (switch of all other apps and disconnect from the internet first): Which (I think) means that for raster operations my multi-GPU combination is nearly 20 times faster than CPU-only would be.

In Preferences - User Interface I set UI Style to Light. I then run Help - Benchmark: The explanatory text is white on a light grey background and there is not enough contrast for it to be readable. It's marginally better when I turn to the Dark Side: But there's still a lack of contrast. Cheers, H

Just did a very quick and unscientific investigation... Like @Norway16 I have a 2018 MacBook Pro, albeit with a Radeon Pro Vega 20 GPU. My Affinity Photo performance settings are as follows: You might want to ensure that "Use only integrated GPU" is turned off. And in System Preferences/Battery: Automatic graphics switching is on. (Same for Power Adapter but I'm currently unplugged.) If I run Activity Monitor and Affinity Photo side-by-side and use a high-demand live filter as in the linked video, the GPU will kick in if and when it needs to (eg when rotating a live Motion Blur filter). It's certainly not on all the time, and it switches off and on pretty smartly: Adjusting the radius of the motion blur, as opposed to rotating it, doesn't appear to activate the GPU. Which is good for my battery life if nothing else... So it's pretty selective, and it may depend on individual system settings too. Also worth noting that if I play graphics-intensive games then the GPU is on all the time, the laptop turns into a lapscorcher and the fans sound like a Saturn V on blastoff. Affinity Photo appears to be a bit more conservative about when it uses the GPU. Cheers, H

Hi @Mabel Lucy and welcome! The default print presets in Affinity Publisher are geared towards multi-page publications with a vertical fold/binding edge, but there's no reason why you can't create your own custom presets and templates. In the New Document dialog you could set the the height to twice the depth of the card and the width to the full width, in the units you want. (Presumably inches?). You'd also need to set margins, bleed, colour format etc as required : This gives me a document like this, into which I've drawn a horizontal guide for the fold line: I'm not familiar with Microsoft Publisher but I suspect that Affinity Publisher doesn't 'hold you hand' quite as much, so you may need to do some experimentation. For "forming text round an image", have a look in the Help for "Text on a Path", if this very rough example is the sort of thing you're after: Hope this helps, H

Well... Here's a standard round brush (250 pixels) with opacity and hardness both set to 100%. Flow (top to bottom) at 100%, 50% and 25%: Not quite sure of the use case, it's probably more applicable to the artistic brushes.

You could set up the document as two pages, each 210 mm wide and 74mm deep, bleed as required. Uncheck 'Facing pages': You can then design and lay out the inner and outer spreads in the 'imposed' order. (I've drawn a vertical guide down the centre of the master to indicate the fold line/gutter.) Cheers, H

I don't know if there's a way to do this numerically, but if you choose Text Rulers from the View menu you can select the paragraph and adjust the sliders: Here the downward-pointing arrow slider at the top (the tab stop) has been pulled to the left and the two indentation sliders have been adjusted to the right so that the first line indent matches the overall left indent. Cheers, H

Hi @Dr Steven and welcome! 1.9.0 is the most up-to-date version of Affinity Photo and the behaviour you're describing is new with it, so older manuals/videos/instructions may show a different approach. To add an adjustment layer, you. can either double-click on the 'Default' setting for any of the Adjustments, or you can choose from the pull-down in the Layers panel: Cheers, H

Hi @Caio and welcome! Affinity Photo - Preferences - Tools... Cheers, H

Take care and best of luck @R C-R

Same here on Big Sur (EDIT: 11.2) with 1.9.0

Confirmed on macOS 11.2: Seems like an odd but fairly harmless bug, or an unimplemented feature. As I understand it, the three Affinity apps have a lot in common under the hood, and the Symbol functionality in Designer is very similar to the Layer Link functionality in Photo. Keep it quiet... 🤐

Hi, I hope I've got this right... This is my data source, tab-delimited, one row per player, (random names and numbers): This is my initial design for a single box, inside a single-column, single-row data merge layout: I then use the Data Merge Manager to apply records fields to the individual text frames in the layout: This is how my document page now looks: I then duplicate the data merge layout to create my (somewhat basic) page design: I then generate the data merge: Am I on the right track? I've attached the data source and the two .afpub files. Cheers, H sporty base.afpub sporty generated.afpub sporty. people.tsv

Definitely - you can create as many single-column single-row data merge layouts as you need, positioned wherever you want on the base document: Data will flow in as expected, and you can reposition the individual frames in the generated document if required: Cheers, H

No worries, glad you've worked it out.

If you use Artistic Text to create the text box, you can shear/skew it with the cursor: Screen Recording 2021-02-14 at 12.51.25.mov Cheers, H

You're viewing the image at 18% (approx one-fifth its actual size). Press Ctrl-1 (for Windows) and then increase the noise as required: This is 18% with your noise settings: And this is 100% with the same settings.

Code-a-lay-hee-hoo!

Hi @unformedehb and welcome! Enabling auto-hyphenation in the Paragraph panel will help the spacing in the second example. You can also use the Justification settings in the same panel to adjust word and character spacing. To align the upper-case "I", you can use the Optical Alignment settings in the Character panel. Set to manual, add the letter, increase the left alignment gradually: As far as I'm aware, the only way to close up the space to the right of the "A" drop cap would be to place an invisible (no fill, no stroke) graphic object with a run-around and then overlay a separate letter A with Ignore Text Wraps set in the Text Frame panel: This of course makes the text slightly less amenable to editing. Plus a bit of free proof-reading: it's "colour palette", not "pallet". Hope this helps! H

I think this has been an issue in previous builds but it persists/has returned in 1.9.1. After initially creating a document, if I repeat the process the "Press Ready" presets window is blank: Clicking blind in the window displays a few presets: And switching to Templates and back again to Presets displays them all: It's an intermittent glitch and seems quite random in occurrence. Cheers, H

At a guess... Paragraph panel - Drop Caps - check Enabled - uncheck Auto - set Characters to 2: But you'll need separate text styles for single- and double-character drops.

I'm not seeing it any more after logging out and in again, so it may be a one-off. I'll keep tabs on it.

Hi @StarGrazerRose and welcome! You may need to increase the bleed area to get this field clear of the trim marks. On your master pages, create a text frame. Bring up the Fields panel and double-click on the required fields to place them in the frame. Then drag the frame into (but not above) the bleed area: When you export the PDF you may get a "Bleed Hazard" preflight warning which can be skipped. In the Export dialog choose to display Printer's Marks and Bleed. This is a grab of the PDF: Hope it helps, H