GrahamvdR

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that: That would have been developed by ESRI, not Adobe (and similarly you’d need to talk to ESRI to convince them to build something to integrate with Affinity). However: Adobe has support for plugins, scripting, etc, that allow third-party developers to integrate with their products. Affinity doesn’t have this yet, as far as I know, and I’m guessing it’s not high on their list of priorities at this stage of development. I really hope it’ll come sometime in the future. As someone who has never used ArcGIS (I use QGIS), or the plugin above, I’d be interested to hear what you envisage your workflow looking like with ArcGIS and Affinity. For most of my map work I save PDFs out of QGIS and edit those with Illustrator or Affinity Designer. Presumably that plugin builds a much more powerful bridge between the two programs? I’d love to see something similar between QGIS and Affinity, but I’m not really sure how it would work.

Thanks Mark, good to hear! I hope that proper curly quotes and apostrophes will ultimately be automatically formatted inline and won’t be classed as “special characters” that require complex key strokes (though obviously having that option for when the default glyph is incorrect would be useful).

Thanks for the reply, Bhikkhu Pesala. That seems like a fairly major shortcoming, especially for an app that looks like it wants to take typography seriously. Even when the keyboard input issues are resolved, we shouldn’t need to be using custom keyboard layouts or cumbersome key combinations to insert apostrophes and quotes. Any word from the Affinity team? How is it implemented in the Mac version?

I’m pleased to see how quickly the text has been improved / fixed with version 1.5.0.4. Text in the first version was practically unusable for me, but now seems fast and stable, so far. I really like the options for leading. I haven’t worked out how to get proper curly apostrophes and quotes (i.e. ‘’“” vs '"). They appear as straight / dumb quotes when I type them. I’ve installed a keyboard layout that allows me to get them in most apps, even in this post, but it doesn’t work in AD. So far the only way I’ve found of getting them into my text is to copy and paste from another app. Is this something I’m missing, a bug, or a feature coming in a future update? Thanks for the super program, quick updates, and great communication through the forum. It’s great to know we’re being heard and things are happening, fast! Well done. Buying into a software suite is about more than the programs themselves − it’s also about the company culture and interaction with users, and support. Affinity has impressed me on all counts. I’m excited about the future.

Thanks for your reply, Chris_K. Layer effects: fair enough. Different to what I’m used to, but possibly better. I just need to get used to it. I do like the realtime previewing of effects, etc, so it makes sense that it’s been done this way. Filler text: Ah, I see. Again, different, but possibly better. I’ll see if I can get clear steps to reproduce the missing characters issue. I feel like I had more issues when using fonts other than the default Arial (several different high quality fonts (I hope!) that I bought from reputable foundries and have had no trouble with in other software), but I’ll keep experimenting. Thanks for the other tips. Clearly this is a work in progress, but as a first step it’s very exciting. I look forward to watching it mature as features are added and the bugs are ironed out. There are one or two features alone that make the $50 purchase price worth it for me (such as the ability to convert text to outlines on export to PDF), so even if it’s not ready to take centre stage in my workflow it’ll certainly be a valuable addition until it is.

I’m so excited to finally be playing with the Windows version! Well done, and thank you. Some observations, queries, and suggestions based on my first experiences: I have my Windows taskbar set to auto-hide, and it’s not accessible when I’m in AD. I can press the Windows key to bring it up, but it would be nice to be able to move the cursor down to the bottom of the screen to access it, like I can from most apps. It would be nice to be able to tab between input fields, in dialogues and in palettes in the studio. I like to use keyboard shortcuts as much as possible, but it feels slow and clunky to have to manually click in each field to enter a new CMYK colour, for example, instead of tabbing between them. Esc doesn’t work across dialogues as I would expect it to. For example, if I bring up the preferences, I have to click “Close” to make it go away. Likewise for layer effects. Again this interrupts my keyboard shortcut flow. Also with layer effects, it would also be nice to have a single Cancel option. Sometimes I like to fiddle and play with effects to see how they look, but then decide to cancel. As far as I can tell, I need to remove each effect I’ve added. Perhaps this is just a different approach that I will grow to like once I’m used to it. Are there ways to create presets for new documents, PDF export, etc? That would be very useful for me. What about viewing colour separations? It’s essential for my work. I’ve found working with text to be extremely buggy. AD has crashed more than ten times on me just doing basic text operations like changing fonts, font size, leading, escaping the text frame, etc. I will create another thread as soon as I can pin it down and be a bit more specific about the steps that lead to crashes, but for now it seems like there are a lot of issues with text, and many things have triggered the crashes. Also, relating to text: Ctrl + Shift + > makes the text bigger, as I am used to in InDesign and Illustrator, but only one step for each press. It would be nice to be able to press and hold it to scale a large amount quickly. Or is there another way to do this? No warning for overset text? Is it possible to flow text between frames? Filler text isn’t selectable, except as a whole block. It would be useful to be able to edit it directly, as if I had typed it. A few times certain characters wouldn’t appear when I typed them, but others would. An invisible space would appear, so I could continue typing afterwards, and clear the missing character, but still not type it. This seemed inconsistent and irregular, but was consistent for certain characters within a frame in a session. It was usually followed by a crash. If “Check Spelling While Typing” is checked, everything I type is marked with the red squiggly line. When I restart AD after a crash it usually (but not always) says that it has been restarted after a serious error, and asks if I would like to send the error report. I always choose Yes, but then don’t see anything else about it. Does it send in the background, or should it be obvious that it is sending? Any other suggested best practices for error reporting, or tracking steps that cause crashes? Obviously it’s helpful if we can list steps to recreate a crash, but anything else? Any way to automatically track and save a history? Aside from the above problems I’m excited. It seems fast and has lots of useful features that I look forward to exploring more thoroughly. I look forward to a time when it’s stable and I can really start relying on it in my day-to-day workflow. Thanks for all your hard work, and the chance to give it a spin for free!