Aloof

Hi, After 3 hours of debugging I want to share my learnings with the development team of Affinity. 1. I created a global palette in Affinity. 2. I exported this palette as a. CLR file 3. I wanted to use these brand colors in Apple Pages and Keynote so I opened this CLR file in the Mac Color Picker there. 4. I noticed that all colors have been changed and shifted. They are no longer the same colors and they no longer have the same color values. That is right. The color values in RGB have been shifted. These are not the defined colors in Affinity. 5. Typing in the values that Affinity shows manually results in the same color. 6. Exporting the colors as CLR from Sketch and Zeplin results in correct colors. It's only from Affinity Designer that colors are shifted. This must be some kind of color management issue from Affinity Designer. I have the file set to standard SRGB. How can I export the palette for global use across MacOS without color shifting?

Hey, Symbols are almost unusable in the current implementation as it's very difficult to have the update in the way you want with the synching feature. They broken and can reproducibly crash Affinity Designer. Because you cannot update a symbol's contents easily, if you want to replace the layers within a symbol by dragging them into the symbol in layers palette, the new layers usually do not get recorded by the symbol and do not get repeated in other instances. Quite often, the symbol results in being completely empty if you delete its original layers. In the layer palette the orange bar is still there but no new elements become part of the symbol. In this situation, you have an empty symbol frame, which has no boundaries or position in the coordinate system, and layers which are indicated as part of the symbol by the orange bar UI but they are not technically. Quite often these new layers become invisible on the artboard. If you want to then cmd+z your way out of this mess, Affinity Designer reproducibly crashes. Symbols are currently FUBAR and cannot be used even for the most simplest tasks such as multiple color versions of a logo with the same base geometry. It's more work to update a symbol definition than to just avoid using the symbol and copy and paste everything. Please rewrite them from ground up. Take a look at Sketch or Illustrator for examples of how to implement this basic functionality. Kind regards

I would also like to see this. It's a pain you cannot map a shortcut to this for masking.

Unfortunately I cannot see the file as LINKED in the Resource Manager. Instead, it creates a .tiff which is Untitled, which is even more odd.

I second that this is a must-have for PDFs, starting from CVs to magazines, we need hyperlinks for our PDFs.

Hey Walt, thanks for pointing that out. However it does not resolve the intended behavior. I want to have a LINKED document. As you can see in your screenshot, that document is embedded, creating a virtual copy, bloating the AFPublisher document and making it impossible to store that document in a proper folder structure on the disk. This makes it a poor solution. There should be a dynamic link between Affinity files in all programs. Otherwise, the programs are less compatible than Adobe (which, as we all know, set a fairly low bar to compatibility). I do not quite understand if the vector and photo personas are supposed to help somehow, but they are not accessible in Beta. Regards

Hey, so I thought that if I use Affinity Designer to design assets, I can simply place them into the Affinity Publisher document. Then when I make changes to the assets, I simply need to update the links with one click and it's done. Apparently, there is no such support available, which is very dissapointing. First of all, there is no vector file format that Affinity Designer exports without errors, even in the simplest cases if masks are used. No SVG nor PDF setting work. Second, Affinity Publisher does not allow to select and link to a particular artboard or asset from Designer. The only way to do this is to use rasterized files – for a print document, this is a no go. Work on this, please. The fragmentation in Adobe is solved better with linking from Illustrator artboards to InDesign files.

Very quick usability advice: In order to set up correct parameter inheritence in text styles, it's good to show the actual value in the [No Change] parentheses. Use that space to show valuable info so we can track errors that get inherited (for example a very high spacing when inheriting from a headline style). If I am confronted with dozes of [no change] labels, I cannot see where something odd is happening. This forces me to think of all the possibilities for that increased spacing. It could be in leading, in could be in paragraph spacing, it could be somewhere else. Find a different way to highlight that no change is defined in the input fields. Set values in italic, write a small explanation at the bottom of the dialog what [] mean or similar.

Hey, I created a non-rectangular text frame. When I put text into it, i can no longer configure its stroke. The stroke is applied to every single character. That makes no sense. There is no way I would like to apply a stroke to a character when I want have a text frame selected. I also cannot get rid of the default stroke on that frame anymore.

Adding to this, a baseline grid is also not inherited! This makes the entire grid system in Publisher unusable for what it is intended for: helping to align layout across hundres of pages. This needs to be top priority.

Hi, for layouting and big monitors it's helpful to have multiple UI palette colums. Since you already seem to have decided on this multitude of open palettes as opposed to a more contextual approach, you should allow us to stack them the way we want. I would use Pages, Paragraph and Character Styles (and hopefully soon Object and Table Styles) and everything else as columns. This is a pretty significant limitation of your current UI in all Affinity programs.

Hi, when you create a text frame, and then change the gutter width in the text frame options (by the way, this palette should be reachable via contextual right click on any given frame, not only via View menu), the frame weirdly continues visually beyond its boundaries.

This is one of the most essential features of a layout program. I recommend to have a look at Grid Calculator Pro for InDesign. This plugin calculates typographically correct grids based on a base line height of Body text, allows for modular and baseline grids, correct line-height-based margins, draws image alignment lines on x-height and many other features. Professionals use that plugin, not the rudimentary, but still not typographically sufficient InDesign features outlined here, even though that is a start. https://www.designersbookshop.com/grid-calculator-pro-edition.html Also, conceptually, having a different grid on every page is a recipe for disaster visually. The purpose of a grid is to enable the designer to be consistent over vast amounts of pages. This is not a drawing program like Affinity Designer where I design a poster or small publications at best, this is a program meant for hundreds of pages. The focus must be on reusability, smart rescaling, snapping, grids, masters, styles (object styles are missing as well!), import features. That Affinity is lacking ANY sort of grid calculator is dissapointing and a reason for me to stay away. This is the one thing that is a huge pain in InDesign.

The power of InDesign are styles. Object styles are useful for so many things: Standardizing colors for icons and other graphics, making repeatable content with vertically aligned text in a box, etc. Because Affinity styles are so useless (you cannot overwrite them), this is a missing feature from all Designer, Photo and now Publisher.

Hey, I regularly create non-destructive compound path. I then want to use these as masks and clip other layers to them. When I drag a layer onto a compound path, the path gets included into the calculation, rather than being clipped. How can I change this behavior and use the Compound Path as a clipping mask? Thanks!