BatteriesInc
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Everything posted by BatteriesInc
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I'm still very tuned :rolleyes: - any official updates, prognosis, thinking or estimates on this? -
Linux. Seriously now.
BatteriesInc replied to netsurfer912's topic in Feedback for the V1 Affinity Suite of Products
The challenge is estimating the possible Linux market, but I do think there are some valid arguments to do it: Most of the movie industry has migrated to Linux because it's so easy to hook up a complete render farm to a front end and write extra custom code that it's a no brainer. In other words, there is already a whole design industry out there which may be interested in having something better to work with than buggy, aged expensive software from Adobe. Secondly, there are enough people out there who are willing to pay a sensible price to have GOOD tools available and to be frank, I don't consider Affinity's prices excessive - they definitely are within a range that even a casual user as me has no problem with and frankly, I can't wait to add the rumoured DTP software to the collection :) . The main challenge will be the various desktop frameworks, though. Gnome, KDE, Xfce - the only distro I know that seems to be consistently able to make either of them work just about the same is OpenSuSE because they've been offering the user that choice for, well, I reckon it must be a decade by now. The very fact that there is variety of choice may prove a challenge, but I had not been running OSX I'd definitely buy both AD and AP for Linux. For Windows, no - I abandoned that platform quite a few years ago and especially Windows 10 is very busy proving just how good a decision that was :rolleyes: .. -
I would be happy with just the ability to set a dimensional scale for a drawing and (right now) an ability to just type in the size of certain objects. I note when I draw a line I don't even have a length measurement (unless I've missed something), so I have to start anything isometric with drawing markers first. The video tutorial on building a site map is fun, but you'll soon realise that counting squares on a map isn't quite hacking it for something a bit more involved. But hey, I guess that's why people use CAD or Blender so at some point I'll have to go through the tutorials there. I already sorted out a middle mouse button :).
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True. Having said that I'm missing a fairly basic one: text contour flow. I've worked out how to flow text into oddly shaped boxes and how to make text transparent to a background (both turn out to be very easy to do in AD), but to place an object in a swath of text and have the text flow around seems not easy to do. I can create a container for the text no problem, but to work out where the object fits needs a live reflow of text, and that seems impossible as AD is not really meant for what is in essence DTP work. As I don't have the time to work this out I'll do a LibreOffice or Pages hack tomorrow - thankfully I don't need precision yet. (and yes, I'll probably buy Affinity Publisher the moment it's released :P)
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Thanks, but I think I'll still be able to coax better result out of AD than LibreOffice :rolleyes: . I appreciate that I won't have absolute precision, but with the text controls in AD I can better coax things into place than fill justify alone. The only challenge I really worry about is that I need the text to follow the contour of an image - I have something in a circle and I'd like the text to flow around the image. Maybe I'll post that as a separate question.. There is also an outstanding issue with printer margins, but as I'm the one that filed it I also already have a workaround (AD doesn't pick up actual printer margins so you have to enter them manually - where it gets the values from it suggests by default is anyone's guess ;))
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Hi, I am looking at converting a text (2 pages A4 in LibreOffice) into a double sided A3 brochure, and I figured I could use Affinity Designer for it because it should allow me to play with the layout side of things (as Affinity Publisher doesn't yet exist - big beta tester nudge here :) ). I can also do it in LibreOffice, but What You See Is Not What You Get in LibreOffice once you drop the image in the place you are expecting it to go, and Affinity Designer has already been spectacularly helpful in helping to create good looking drawings so it has rather grown on me :) Content is ready so I don't have to worry about any ability to edit it later, but is there anything I as amateur need to know about doing this? The two images on these pages have been drawn with Designer and are 100% vector mode so they'll fit right in, and there is plenty of breathing space as the 2 pager was drawn up with headers and footers which the A3 version can ditch (as that ends up on the outside). I was thinking about creating text boxes per section and for each section header, and set up a general colour for the section headers so I can change them quickly in one go and more or less start from there, probably with grid snapping in place so it's quick to align. There may be a background image, but that would be very light/faint so we don't have to fling a lot of ink onto pages. I'll do inside and outside as separate files as that makes printing easier. Once this project is funded we'll get a professional who will probably take 30 seconds to do what might take me a full day, but part of me relishes the opportunity to learn something in the process :). Thank you in advance for any tips, gotchas I need to look out for, and any tutorials on brochure making.
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Thanks - just had the same question :)
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Yes, that's roughly what I do now, insofar that the things I want to keep go into a separate file and I use grouping to create separate slices. If I replicate a design on the canvas I'll eventually end up with a lot of duplication that is hard to manage - and the canvas gets full :). It is exactly the requirement to do all of that extra work to create slices that suggest the Persona interface could maybe do with an extra option "create slice from selected elements". I must also check how you set the default export size of a slice, or maybe that's another optional extra to add to a slice..
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Google Nik Collection is now free for everyone.
BatteriesInc replied to MEB's topic in News and Information
You could have worked out that if I go into such detail I would probably stick to facts too :). You can download it no problem, but you will need to agree to all of what I mentioned during install. I presume you didn't spot this because you're too used to clicking through the legal agreement (which is quite normal for most end users). Sadly, I don't have that luxury :( because I sometimes work on very sensitive projects (hence the need to read these things instead of treating them like TL;DR as others do). Sneakernet won't make a difference, nor did I make a statement of what this specific software may or may not do because that is not the real issue. These terms cover ALL your use of Google services that they can tie back to you, not just the software you're about to install. Thus, even if you avoided setting up a Google account, you will still have agreed to their Terms when you install it. One of our guys once called them "infective" Terms, which is actually quite to the point. So, welcome to Google. To repeat: for most end users this makes no difference, but if you work with Intellectual Property this stuff matters. I can't find any way to attach a file or a screenshot, otherwise I'd show you the installer (note to Admin: where is the "attach file" menu gone?). -
Google Nik Collection is now free for everyone.
BatteriesInc replied to MEB's topic in News and Information
You make your own choices, but be aware it requires you to accept Google's Term & Conditions and their Privacy Policy. Here's the bit you need to pay attention to: When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide licence to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes that we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights that you grant in this licence are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This licence continues even if you stop using our Services. I may be mistaken here, but it appears to me that if you do something that they could use to promote their service you've just given it to them for free, in perpetuity (interesting use of the word "limited", by the way). As I said, you make your own choices, but if you develop information, graphics or other Intellectual Property you may want to think what you agree to. "Free" is a very dangerous illusion. -
I did a big JPEG - small BPG comparison on the site ExtremeTech links to, and I did pick up some smoothing on the BPG side of things. That's not bad in itself, but just something to keep in mind when your needs require faithful rendering. Having said that, BPG produces significantly less encoding artefacts in the image at the same size - it makes the JPG rendition look positively coarse in comparison. I agree, worth keeping any eye on.
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Maybe a side effect of what I was used to before AD (let's call it Anno Designer -AD- :P), but I greatly appreciate the automatic selection of "Export Selection" mode (as opposed to "Export whole document") in packages such as Pixelmator or OmniGraffle when you choose Export with something highlighted, and I miss it in AD. Is there a way I can achieve that in AD? At the moment, everything is driven from the document size but if you're experimenting you just set up a large canvas and try out ideas, and to then have to hammer everything back into a specific document size is quite an enterprise - ironically losing the whole benefit of vectorisation to pixel related issues. So far, the only way way I have found to exercise some control is by using an Export Persona Slice, but here too, you must start with first mapping the elements you want to export into one group, as the slice creation tool will otherwise create a slice for each component. Maybe a modifier to the "Create Slice" button would help. If you could alt-click or shift-click to create one SINGLE slice of all the selected layers instead of a herd of individual slices of each selected layer it would already be a big step forward. Anything I missed?
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I knew that it had to sit somewhere - thank you ever so much :)
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Hi, Is there any clever way to align the edge/border of one shape with the centre of another? A classic one is a square where I'd like a side or a corner to align with the centre of a circle. I've come across this often enough to assume this must be a common enough task to warrant someone having worked out a way to make that easy. (and no, it's not a 1st of April question <_< ) Cheers!
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How about SWIFT? It appears to be a serviceable language, is now available on multiple platforms (leading to one headline "You can now tailor Swift" somewhere :) ) and it's open sourced now. That does not maketh a public language yet, but the signs are good. I don't know Affinity's code base, but as they started on Mac it does not seem unreasonable to assume the core code is closer to OSX than Windows which has implications for porting features across. Having said that, just some plain Applescript support would be a good start :).
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Thank you - eagerly awaited feature, certainly in vector mode as it will allow better text shaping, for instance.
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Is it me or is there no ability to warp in Affinity Designer? If not, which day this week will that be added? :p (it's a bit odd to have to start with AP, but at least it makes me glad I got both)
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Just downloaded an AD file that contained fonts that were not on my system. Is there a way to do a 'search & replace" for fonts, or otherwise exercise some control over the font substitution? Cheers!
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Just found it after some more hammering of Google (the words "cheat sheet" finally popped the origin). It's on the Affinity website blog.
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I seem to have managed to pick up a wonderful AD keyboard template PDF from somewhere, but I have no idea where from (there isn't a "downloads" or "resources" section on the Affinity website which is IMHO an omission). I find templates handy because they speed up the shortcut learning process, a lesson I learned long ago in the days of WordPerfect and Wordstar :). The challenge: I would like to adjust it as the key outlines are too faint for me (on account of the negative correlation between experience and eyesight), so I was wondering if Affinity was willing to release the source of this document (at least, I hope it was done in AD). You can pull the PDF into AD and edit it, but if there is an actual AD starting point I would prefer that, and it would also help others who may have to work with different layouts. So, in summary: 1 - where can others download this AD keyboard shortcut PDF from? 2 - is there a more "AD native" version available? Ditto for Affinity Photo. Cheers! (edit: attached the PDF in question) Affinity-Designer-Shortcuts-Cheat-Sheet.pdf
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Ah, OK (or in your case, Danke Vielmals :) ). What I found interesting in the video is that it even seems to directly support Affinity applications - you can see both AD and AP fly by at 0:19", and even OmniGraffle (think Visio on steroids). I think I'll grab it anyway. I'm sinking in a quagmire of a LOT of graphics and images with no sensible way to tag and organise them (certainly since Photos did away with the iPhoto organisational structure and turned it into something horrid), and this seems to have at least the sort of intelligent thinking behind it that also typifies Affinity. I just hope it imports Photos, although I'm at a point where I'm quite prepared to export the lot if it gets me better organisation.. Next up: anything to easily manage EXIF. exiftool rocks, but I need to come up with some sort of integration. Noch ein schönen Abend ;)
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Hi, I just came across the Pixave app which seems to be a cataloguing facility with some impressive tricks up its sleeve if the video on the website is to be believed (and why not if it indeed got a "best of 2105 app" tag). It's not dramatically expensive, but I was wondering if anyone has used it already. Cheers, P
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OK, in summary it appears that the colour eyedropper and cut/paste operations (style as well as whole objects) are the tools that persist between instances, unless I create a swatch for it (which might be an idea for consistency when I'm doing some illustrations). It initially took me a moment to work out that the eyedropper works by moving instead of first clicking it, which is again an action saved :)
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Probably a "duh" question, but what is the best way to copy a colour between two open AD documents (in tabs)? Each tab is its own microcosm so they don't share colours in use. At present I just copy a coloured object between the tabs and use that, but I'm sure there must be a far more efficient way.. Cheers!
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Toll :)
