hawk

I'm not knowledgeable about it, but my understanding is that scriptable just means "implements Apple Events", and AppleScript is just a language that was specifically created for sending Apple Events, but any language can do it through a Scripting Bridge. This would be a third-party software that the user would install, but this would not be up to Serif to do. Affinity would only have to implement one interface/protocol. For example, there used to be a software called JavaScript OSA (Open Scripting Architecture), which I could use to write scripts in the AppleScript Editor, but in JavaScript, to automate any application that already supports AppleScript. That software has been superseded by Apple's own thing called "JavaScript for Automation" (or JXA for short), but it seems to use the same basic mechanisms (Apple Events). In theory there could be an OSA extension for Python, etc, but as far as I can tell no one has made one yet. It would be easier to just create another proprietary scripting system, but tying into native/preexisting infrastructure and ecosystem would probably be better for the user.

I think this is what Symbols is for.

I think the best way to implement it is as a Scripting Bridge: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/AppleScript/Conceptual/AppleScriptX/Concepts/scripting_bridge.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40006467-SW1 That way it could be scripted with AppleScript and JavaScript: https://developer.telerik.com/featured/javascript-os-x-automation-example/ https://macosxautomation.com/applescript/features/scriptingbridge.html

I think you're misunderstanding. Serif could have had this feature in by now, but then any of the other features like advanced paragraph & text frame options, tables, TOC and baseline grids would be missing, and you (or others) would be complaining just the same. Try to see the bigger picture. It's just not viable to try to implement every feature in parallel, instead of getting a few features implemented to a minimum level of functionality, and then moving onto other features and iterating. This way there are parts of the application that are actually usable and can be tested. We're simply at a point in the timeline of Affinity Publisher's development where not all features are implemented, but Serif is giving us a sneak peek and taking our feedback. That's all it is, a sneak peek. Obviously they know the importance of this feature and I'm personally also disappointed by its absence, it's just not implemented yet. Alternatively they could have waited another 2-5 years - would you have preferred that? It's a privilege to get early access and you should be mindful of that.

For MacBooks without keypad: ⌘⇞ is FN+COMMAND+ARROW_UP ⌘⇟ is FN+COMMAND+ARROW_DOWN

The ability to insert shapes into the text flow is great. Even Pages has it.

It's the first option directly in the Text menu. Hotkey ⌘F It's also under View --> Studio --> Find And Replace.

Steps to reproduce: Create new document with default settings (non-facing pages). Create a new master page. Change document settings to enable facing pages. Create a new master page. Double-click the two master pages back and forth a few times. The first time I did this I actually got a kernel panic. My computer immediately shut down and restarted. It's rare that this happens to me so it was very surprising and exciting! Luckily I didn't lose anything important. Crash logs attached and also in raw text form linked below: Raw text: Kernel_2018-09-01-064628_Hawks-MBP.panic Raw text: Affinity Publisher Beta_2018-09-01-065022_Hawks-MBP.crash Attachment: Kernel_2018-09-01-064628_Hawks-MBP.panic Attachment: Affinity Publisher Beta_2018-09-01-065022_Hawks-MBP.crash

Thanks for replying. I can't reproduce it anymore, so I'm sorry for creating a false alarm. The only case where it happens to me is while typing into a text frame, but that's consistent with Designer (never noticed it there before). I'm using a 17" MBP 2011. Thanks, congratulations on finally getting Publisher into beta, have a nice day.

I like to use the help menu search to quickly find menu options and normally I can press ⇧⌘/ to do that. It's especially useful when learning a new app with lots of menu options like Affinity. In Publisher this shortcut no longer works. It does work in Designer and Photo. It's a standard system shortcut that is set by default in System Preferences --> Keyboard --> Shortcuts --> App Shortcuts --> All Applications --> Show Help menu, so it ought to work. I'd also like to remind you that QuickLook previews are still not the correct size.

You can press ⌘0 to put everything back in view again. Perhaps there should be scrollbars though.

I'm glad someone else finally mentioned this! The keyboard shortcuts have been jarring for me since the beginning and are one of the reasons I still use Pixelmator when I can. I'm not a professional user so I normally keep quiet. If I have the move tool selected and press T, it always switches to art text mode (it doesn't just toggle it – it's clearly biased toward art text). And if I happen to have a frame text object already selected, pressing T makes me edit the text, even if I just want to create a new object. I have to press ESC to stop editing and then T to switch back to frame text before I can do that. I have similar problems with the node tool. I'm not always aware whether I have the move or node tool selected, especially when I'm clicking multiple times to drill into groups. I sometimes click one too many times and it switches to the node tool and it's hard to notice it. Pressing ESC doesn't switch back to the move tool, even though it deselects the object and subsequently clicking & dragging it even makes it move as though the move tool was selected. I just wish for an option to change this behavior. It's easy enough for me to press V when I want to move and A when I want to edit nodes. And when I double-click to edit some text or nodes I expect ESC to put me back to the tool I had before. Moving and editing objects are things I do much more often than creating new objects. If I want to create an object, I could press the hotkey myself. It's confusing to me, but Affinity has a few major advantages over Pixelmator, like the single-window layout and the silky smooth zoom!

I just lost 20 minutes of work because I jumped back in history and then pressed ↓ to scroll down. Instead it moved an object that was selected and all my redo history was instantly gone. Nasty surprise if you don't know this. Most other mac apps bring input focus to the list when you click in it.

Hey DWright, thanks for replying to my post! Thank you for shedding some more light on this. I've played around with text styles a bit more, but I'm still confused about why the text style "is detecting the Small Caps option on the second Text and then applies to the first". I don't see a reason for this. 'Update style' should propagate changes in one direction only, i.e. to the style definition and thus to other text that's using that style. 'Reapply text styles' should propagate the other way, right? Another thing I've noticed, which is probably adding to the confusion, is that the style's capitals setting seems to always be reset to 'No change' whenever I click 'Update character style'. This seems inconsistent to me, since e.g. if I change the font and update style, the style then changes to that font, not 'no change'. This is a bug, right? Or do you at least agree with me that this is confusing?

I'm not sure if this is a bug so I'm asking here first: isn't 'Update Character Style' supposed to propagate the current modified character style (which indicated by a + symbol appended to the name, right?) to all other users of that style? When I do it, what happens is that the style of the currently selected text is propagated to other users, then reset to the original character style. In effect the text styles appear to be swapped, which doesn't make any sense to me. At first I thought it was a bug with symbols, but it happens outside of symbols too. I've noticed sometimes a character style has somehow been selected as a paragraph style (not by me), even though that doesn't quite make sense (character styles don't even show up in the dropdown list for paragraph styles). But I removed all paragraph styles and it still happens. Made a video showing it: Is this a bug or what am I missing? text styles confusion.afdesign

I need this app before July! Is it coming out soon?

If you right-click and choose "Expand Selection" or "Collapse Selection" it will apply to all child objects. Not the best solution, but it's there. Holding a modifier key (option) like in Finder's list view would be better.

I'm trying to make a simple curved arrow for a clock/"time acceleration" icon (for a game). I started with the arrow tool to get the basic proportions, then I ran into problems: I cannot rotate selected nodes, i.e. I cannot rotate the arrow tip to the angle I want without moving the other nodes. So I duplicated the arrow, rotated it, removed the arrow tip, and I want to connect this rectangle to the base of my arrow. But when I do "Break Curve", it leaves two end nodes on top of each other, and I don't know which one is on top and if it's the one I want to keep then I have to move it out of the way in order to delete the node underneath it, then move it back into position, which is a bit tedious. Why does Affinity need to create this extra node when breaking a curve? Also, moving the first node back into position isn't a problem with snapping enabled as long as there are other nodes at the same x- and y-coordinates to snap to, which is the case with rectangles that are not rotated, but if you've rotated a rectangle or other shape by any amount other than 90 degrees, you can't snap to anything. You'd have to create two temporary nodes at each side (top/bottom & left/right) in order to be able to snap the node back after moving it out of the way. Even after I did that and clicked "Join Curves", the two shapes didn't connect the way I want them to. I tried reversing one curve, reversing both curves, selecting different nodes, and each and every time the two curves cross over each other. At this point I just wanted to give up and google for a similar icon that someone else has already made. I feel like I'm approaching this the wrong way because surely there must be an easier way to create arrows and simple icons like this. Here's roughly what I'm trying to achieve: P.S. the numbered list formatting doesn't seem to work here, so I changed it to a bulleted list.

Hi, I'm loving the new snapping features (I waited a long time for them), but I think I found out why "snap to gaps and sizes" didn't seem to be working at first. Actually, it only affects snapping to gaps. It doesn't work when another object (shape, curve, text, or pixel layer), is somewhere between the object being moved and the gaps you want to snap to, or if an object completely surrounds the object you're moving, even if that object is in a different layer, a cousin in the hierarchy. To show you what I mean: https://gfycat.com/MagnificentKnobbyGentoopenguin I had a big rectangle all over my canvas so snapping to gaps wasn't working at all. Another problem, which I show in the video but is probably unrelated, is that when holding shift to constrain an object, it sometimes moves by less than whole pixels even when the "Force pixel alignment" and "Move by whole pixels" options are enabled.

Hi, MEB. Thanks for your reply. What you said only works for separate curve objects. If the curves are already in the same object it does not work. To show you what I mean: https://gfycat.com/SatisfiedInconsequentialImago What you said also doesn't work if one of the curve objects contains more than one curve. Am I wrong in putting multiple curves in one object? Is it recommended to use groups and compounds instead?

How do you connect two end nodes of a curve? I created two curve objects and combined them. Now I want to make the two polygons into one big polygon. I tried breaking each curve at a node, selecting the two end nodes and clicking "Join Curves" but nothing happened. "Close Curve" just closed each polygon individually. I also tried first moving one node exactly on top of the other to no avail. The only way I found out how to do this is to duplicate the curves object, delete all of the nodes from one polygon from the first object, delete all of the nodes from the other polygon from the second object, select the two end nodes and click "Join Curves". Is there a faster way to do this?

This is a hot update. I've got a few questions/suggestions: 1. Snap to gaps and sizes - this doesn't seem to be working yet? It's showing the bounding box and mid point distances but it doesn't snap to them. The way I thought it would work is like in Pixelmator. For example, if I create a blue square, duplicate it and move it to the right so that there's a 50px gap between the two squares, then repeat that step, the third square should snap to 50px from the second square. 2. With constraints, if I want an object to maintain its aspect ratio but scale with its container to take up as much space as possible on both axes without clipping, I can do this by enabling the width & height constraints and the "min-fit" aspect ratio constraint. However, if I want this object to always touch the edges if possible, I have to first scale the container to the object's aspect ratio, then place the object inside the container, enable the constraints and scale the container back. Is there no way to set up this kind of constraint without this additional step? I think there should be a way to set the margin for the constraint on each side like in Xcode. 3. Every time I move an object with an aspect ratio constraint outside of its container its size changes. I think there should be a way to move objects out of hierarchies without changing their sizes regardless of the constraints. 4. With symbols, is there any way to reattach properties of one without recreating the entire instance of the symbol? Also, could there be a way to set some properties to be detached by default for a symbol, so you don't have to disable syncing every time you drop a new instance onto the canvas? There should be some keyboard shortcuts and menu items for the new features, like toggling syncing, a context menu item for creating symbols from the selected layer/group/object in the layers studio, detaching objects, etc. Thanks for finally releasing this exciting beta!

Is there a way to re-sync disconnected attributes?

Hiya, I come from using Pixelmator for years and I'm trying to switch to Affinity Designer but I cannot wrap my head around layer masks. I'd like some advice on how to think about layer masks in Affinity Designer versus Pixelmator, i.e. what is the mindset that I should have when I want to do things that I'd previously use masks for in Pixelmator. For example, I tried to design a logo and I wanted to put a gradient fill over the entire logo, but when I applied the gradient fill on the group containing the different letters and parts of the logo it behaved as if I applied the gradient on each object individually. So I thought I could just overlay a rectangle with the gradient fill on top of the logo and mask it so that it only appears exactly on the logo objects, but at first I had problems creating the mask. I command-clicked on the individual logo objects to load their selection (like in Pixelmator) but I couldn't find a way to "add to the selection" each object (holding shift while command-clicking clears the selection), so I looked for a "quick mask" editor like in Pixelmator but couldn't find one. So I manually created a new pixel layer and loaded the selection of each object and filled it (this is before I realized I can just make an "add" compound out of the logo objects). Then I applied this pixel layer as the mask for the gradient fill rectangle and it worked... except whenever I moved and resized the gradient fill rectangle it also moved the mask. I did notice there's a "Lock Children" option and while that would have worked fine in this particular case I wonder whether it would be practical in more complicated scenarios (e.g. multiple child objects that you want to transform proportionaly as well as mask that you want in a fixed position). Then I realized I could add the logo objects into a compound and add that as the mask to the rectangle, but the problem here is that I lose editability of the individual objects. I can still move the compound out of the mask slot and edit it, then use it as a mask again, but this is really inconvenient and you can't see how the changes you make affect the masked result. So I tried using each object as a mask individually but that caused nothing to show up at all, because it seems like all masks have to intersect somewhere. I think there should be a way to set masks as linked/unlinked with regard to transformations to the masked object like there is in Pixelmator, to have masks be either "positive" (the masked object appears only within the mask as is currently the case) or "negative" (the mask objects hides parts of the masked object like in Pixelmator) and to have multiple non-overlapping masks be "OR-ed" together (in the case of positive masks only). Also, compound masks, group masks, etc should remain editable separately if possible. That said, maybe I'm just going at it the wrong way and I need to think about accomplishing these tasks in a different way, and that's what I'd like your advice on. Thanks!

Thanks! Good luck finding a key-combination! ⌥⌘N seems to be unused.