h_d

Brilliant work. One refinement for a more 'organic' feel might be to apply a pressure gradient to the strokes, but it's a matter of personal taste and may not be your style:

This is great, saved hours off my total edit time, thank you.

Hi @Darwin Lau and welcome!
The blend mode on the outline Effect for your text has been set to Soft Light:
 

 
One way to improve the result would be to change the blend mode to Normal:

 
(I don't have the font you've used but the results should be the same.)
Cheers,
H
 

Or create and assign a master page that doesn't have a number.
Or place a white rectangle over the number on the edition page.

Go to Document and uncheck Transparent Background

You could also add a Fill Layer below the Background image layer if you wanted a background other than white.

Alternatively, use  the Flood Select tool with a fairly high Tolerance setting (about 60%?), Contiguous checked. Feather the resulting selection to give a soft, smooth edge and add a Levels adjustment. Dial down Output White to the desired level:

 

Alternatively, use  the Flood Select tool with a fairly high Tolerance setting (about 60%?), Contiguous checked. Feather the resulting selection to give a soft, smooth edge and add a Levels adjustment. Dial down Output White to the desired level:

 

Sorry, I didn't explain myself fully. If you choose (eg) Frame Break in the Find and Replace dialog, then the symbol that is displayed in the Find field corresponds to the pseudo-character in the text. It would certainly. be a bit laborious to go through each special character, but at least you would have a reference to their appearance, from which you could construct your table of equivalences :

There doesn't seem to be any way to search for Index Markers, though:

And there may be others that don't appear in the list above:
EDIT: from the Help, you can also identify the Unicode values of special characters in running text by placing the insertion point immediately after them and and choosing Text: Toggle Unicode 

 
But as @Alfred says, I don't think there's any single reference for all invisible characters.
 
 

There's something very naughty going on in that bedroom... 😝

Your screenshot appears to show a small circular selection (marching ants)
You can/should deselect that using Select > Deselect 
But I suspect your main problem is that you have the View Tool (a hand shape) selected in the Tools column, switch to the Move Tool (black cursor) in order to select objects on the canvas, which you can then manipulate at will.
 

Here is the afphoto file I generated essentially doing what @Old Bruce suggested.
kirk
lamp.afphoto

@walt.farrell @firstdefenceThank you I got it fixed.
I tested it out on my laptop and was working as  it should, so I looked at the setting that was using 16bit.  I changed it to 32bit and it still was working.  After I exited Affinity and opened it again then it stopped working.  So my answer to my question is I have to reopen Affinity before it is changed to 16 bit.  I went to my desktop and did the same thing and now its working. 
@h_d Thank you again you were right on. 
I am new to Affinity so all you guys have been a great help.  

OK Thanks for that I will give it a try. There are several different size pics in the publication so I will see how your suggestions work out.
I use a mac

Ok, it looks like I had an extra data merge layout layer, sorry for bothering  Sometimes you just need to talk to someone 

You need to be well into six figures to appear on the leaderboard. And before you ask, I’m nowhere near that: I’m in the low five figures and likely to remain so.

Likewise.
Until I used FontBook to create Collections. These aren't accessible through the Font menu in the Context Toolbar, but they are in the Font pull-down in the Character Panel in Studio.
For example I created a FontBook Collection called "Purchased", dragged my own fonts into it, and now they're easily available in the Character Panel. Publisher shown here, but it works for Photo and Designer too:

 

 (He who dies with the most fonts wins. I'm losing badly. 😉)
 

WHAT A MAGIC
it works
 
thanks and love from israel!

Does make an interesting artistic effect.
Fixed it for you!

With Preserve Alpha checked, at higher Radius values I get this is in the corners:
 

 
That's on the OP's original screenshot though, which is a very small low-res image. With larger originals the issue isn't anywhere near so obvious, and by the time you reach a point where it kicks in, the original is so degraded as to be pretty much unusable anyway.
Bottom right corner before:

After:

 
(Could make an interesting artistic effect though...)
 
 
 
 

+1 for column guides 
It would be fab if vertical and horizontal gutters could be set independently: the current arrangement is quite limiting.
As an example, I want columns with 6mm vertical gutters, and rows with 2mm horizontal gutters. If I set the gutters in the Guides Manager to 6mm and specify a number of rows greater than 1, the horizontal gutters are too deep:

The only solution that I can see is manually, and laboriously, to add pairs of horizontal guides:

And if I later decide to change the depth of my rows, I need to recalculate and re-input all the vertical spacings.

I've been trying to set up  a data merge sheet for a typical Avery label template which only has vertical gutters but no horizontal gutters. I've got a work-around suggested by forum members, but it would be nice to be able to specify horizontal and vertical gutters separately. Indeed, it would be great to be able to do this on ordinary page layouts too.
See attached for an example label template from Avery.
GM33
Avery_L7160_WordTemplate.pdf

And it has to be one that you're not going to use for typing (eg letters and numbers on their own, or combined with Shift). Working on a large editorial system long ago I set an all-user shortcut key to Shift+B. I didn't half get some grief when people tried to type "Bristol".  

Nikon used to make adaptors for this, one for each end of the lens. They were known as "Reverse Macro Adapters" & "Rear Lens Protection Rings."
When I was in Tokyo a million years ago I visited the worlds largest Nikon store in hopes of finding better than US prices for Nikon cameras & lenses. No luck with that but they stocked just about every Nikon accessory there was so I picked up a pair of these for my old Nikon. I think I paid the equivalent of $20 US for both, probably the least I ever spent on any Nikon product.

OK, well I've solved it.
In spite of having Force pixel alignment and snapping enabled as well as the Transform panel showing that the x-coords of all the nodes on the join line are 100px this was clearly not the case. I set the user-interface pixel decimal places to 6 and then it showed as:

I then selected all the nodes on the join line and overtyped the 100px with "100" and pressed Enter. No apparent change but those x-coordinates were definitely 100px. Then repeating the steps above created the result that the curves on the join were no longer in the resultant shape. Bingo!
This is clearly a rounding error issue. Those 100px values were not exact and so never were co-incident after the move and the union.
Maybe what's needed is a way of forcing all (selected nodes) to whole value pixels coordinates before this type of operation to ensure alignment.
For me I now consider this solved. I don't think this is a bug as it is working as designed but any devs out there might consider the UX here.
Thanks for all the comments and suggestions everyone.

And drum scanners...