andrewsimper

+1 for linked Markdown file support

External text file linking for content would be brilliant. This would not only make focusing on written word content easier for authors, but also allow for revision control systems like git to be used to track changes. I understand it's not exactly trivial, but if the scope was limited to a highly structured text format then some easy wins could be had. I'm not sure if there are any industry standard structured text file formats to use as input to a page layout tool, but a wiki like markdown type language may be enough, it has basic heading / subheading, paragraphs, and lists all covered in an easy to edit way with enough structure to pin formatting changes to in Publisher. There are also a few extensions to markdown that add citations and cross referencing like multimarkdown: https://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/

External linked text would be much appreciated.

The copy drag of an area onto another area of a single layer without having to switch from the marquee tool is a very big use case for a lot of possible customers for rough and ready mockups of user interfaces and other situations where speed is more important than the quality of the end result. I recommended some friends try out Affinity Designer / Photo, but because it doesn't have this one feature it's a no go for them as the workaround is too slow and messy. It seems that the Command modifier is ignored when either the ctrl or alt keys are also pressed, so there are possibly two different sorts of copy drag possible, a copy merged (the visible pixels in the selected are are copy moved) or single layer copy and move. These could be done with the chord of command+control and command+option (for mac, and equivalent variations on win). I realise that modifiers on iPad throw another issue at this whole thing. Perhaps then another way may be best, have a menu item for what happens on command+drag, and under it you can have move / duplicate / merged duplicate to cover the 3 options. Most of the time people would just pick one of these options and stick with it, and this would default to move so that existing customers would not be impacted, and this will make it easier for those that always want the merged duplicate since they have to hold down fewer keys to get that.

I would be happy with not having a specific layer creation / flatten and leaving just the cmd+g and shift+cmd+g to group and ungroup if there was another easy command to switch the item between being a group and a layer, eg alt+cmd+g

Layers and groups are different, please read this: And no, adding a "new layer" is not an option as this will place it at the top of the layers view panel. Moving it back into place, and then manually dragging the previously selected layers onto it takes a lot of time for even an moderately complex set of layers.

The point is to keep it vector but allow direct selection of each sub layer.

In 3D software I use transforms are a big thing, and most of the time it's great as you move each group / item the transforms stay with the groups / items, but a lot of the time once things are in place what you really want is to zero out all these parent level transforms and push them all to the innermost level possible: either the points of the geometry directly, or to the innermost text items possible. A lot of the time, for basic layouts, this would just consist of pushing all the translations (x, y position changes) into the innermost item translation - and even if just that option was added for starters it would be a huge improvement. This is typically called Freeze Transforms in 3D land, but Flatten Transforms would also be fine. I noticed such an option in SVG export, but it doesn't actually work, <g> elements in the SVG still have matrices with translation in the stuff I've exported, it hasn't been pushed down to all the individual text items. Thanks!

The same operation that Group and Ungroup currently do, but create a layer instead. Also it would be super handy to be able to switch a group to a layer, or vice versa with a single command.

Remove the stroke from the shapes, just keep a solid fill and you get what you want, but I do agree that allowing a slice based on a line without thickness would be awesome. So would better snapping (to tangents and mid points), mirror above an arbitrary axis (with snapping), and a whole bunch more, but hey, Affinity Designer is an awesome tool for first release, and props to the fellas for their hard work

Hi guys, great work on designer, I'm already being very productive! Like many other people I would love to see transform tool improved, especially for translations. A lot of the time I am fine tuning positions only of small objects, and it is really hard to do it right now since the scaling handles get in the way. I've got a couple of suggestions to make this workflow better: For small screen pixel size selections draw a normal blue bounding box, but do not draw the control points for resizing and rotating on that bounding box, but instead offset them away so the selected object is always visible and there is a minimum of 20 pixels in both the width and height of the control handle box (see mockups attached) Offer a toggle option to lock the size and rotation, and only allow the translation of objects that are selected. In the transform studio allow for a drag that begins in between the x and y number circles to fine translate in both x and y with snapping.

Can you tell I'm a programmer

Feature Request: allow one finger modifier + draw rectangular selection to add to the current selection, two finger modifier + draw rectangular selection to remove from the selection. Congrats on the release of Designer for iPad, it is already an awesome tool and I can't wait to see how it improves over time. One area I think would be nice to have consistency between tools is adding and removing from the current selection with things like object selection with the move tool, and control point selection with the node and rounded corner tools. Currently a single finger hold and then clicking on the new object will add to the selection, which is great, but I can't get a marquee rectangle to add more than one object at a time like this. It would also be great to be able to deselect multiple objects at once with a marquee. One finger for add, and two fingers for remove would be awesome Also adding support for free form marquee selection would be brilliant. The two finger tap for undo is becoming the standard and I use it in Concepts all the time and automatically did it in Designer and it worked too, awesome!

Draw your rectangle, select the rounded corner tool, drag a marquee to select all the corners, click on the radius and type in a number.

Any chance of tangent snaps within a range of the cursor? This is super useful in CAD type programs like Moi3D which I use even for a lot of 2D stuff because of its snapping. I've attached a few screenshots to show how a line can be drawn and snaps are pre-highlighted, then the end result, and a practical use shown for a user interface design where two dials are joined by a background marking.

Yes please, I would love tangent, midpoint, and intersection snapping added to Designer! I currently use Moi3D for accurate 2D work, but it would be nice to stay with Affinity instead of bouncing around designs in multiple bits of software. PS: also mirror around any line you draw between two snap points would be really useful, and split line on snap points.

Thanks to the Affinity team for having very clean and configurable SVG export! One thing I noticed when not flattening transforms is that some very near zero values are exported inside affine transformation matrices which are no doubt just rounding errors in computations of positions. I've attached an SVG file that shows these, an example of which is: <g transform="matrix(1,-1.22465e-16,-1.22465e-16,-1,288,228)"> I was wondering if an option could be added to clamp these values to zero? Any value below the clamp value forces the value to zero, for example a clamp value of 2e-16 on the above would produce this output: <g transform="matrix(1,0,0,-1,288,228)"> If the rounding error is not from computing the SVG export then another option that could work would be to add a cleanup option that would clamp values in the internal representation Affinity is using. scream-schematic.svg

Another thought on this topic is that would be more powerful and more generically useful is to have a customisable "temporary tool" area in the bottom left of the screen that stays across personas. For example if the move tool was added here then while you hold a finger down on it the move tool would be switched to, so from the selection persona you could quickly move the current selection, but when you let go it switches straight back to previous tool (eg the lasso tool) so there are no further clicks to happen to get back to the other tool you were using (eg to select a new area to move). This would be similar to how you hold down the spacebar on the desktop version to temporarily activate the hand tool.

Great work with Affinity Photo on iOS! I was doing some editing of textures the other day and found the workflow for lasso selection and moving things around really slow at the moment. I would really appreciate the Move tool being promoted to the Selections persona, and also for the last selected tool on a particular persona to remain selected when switching between personas. I also use a progam called Moi3D which has a great selection tool, if you drag a rectangle from left to right you have to surround entire objects to make them selected, but if you drag from right to left they only have to intersect with objects. This is super useful since you don't have to switch modes via some option like you currently have to do with Photo.

I've just got an iPad Pro and it's amazing to have Photo running on it. A huge thanks to the whole Serif team! I downloaded the free DUAB brush set directly from my iPad, and saved it to iCloud Drive, but the file is in .zip format so it won't import directly into Photo. It would be very cool if Photo could detect it's a .zip file and have a look at the files inside to see if could import something, as this would mean no computer is needed to unzip the files

I just bought affinity designer and photo, great work. Your roadmap looks cool, very solid and useful stuff, but I want to bring up something that will take things to the next level, something you guys would definitely be capable of. A lot of repetitive tasks need doing, either driven by data or repeated basic transforms. Being able to instance duplicate vectors with transforms applied would be ridiculously useful for lots of tasks. Very complicated tasks can be achieved and then re-generated and changed and applied to different data sets. Think of everything from creating a data visualisations to bar graph of data points to creating very complicated artwork from basic shapes. The instance destinations would remain locked, so editing the original shape would change all instances, but then the ability to freeze the instancing would then "render" the shapes to actual editable vectors for fine tuning, or possible then re-instancing and transforming to create even more complicated shapes. Having a scripting language is fine for me as I'm a programmer, but if you guys wanted a more "designer friendly" approach then check out this: