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Meanwhile, additional Windows beta versions of Photo and Designer have been posted, but they again appear to be mostly bug fixes and relatively small tweaks, none of the more significant added features yet.

If you are in a rush, try one of: www.adobe.com www.vectorstyler.com www.coreldraw.com Otherwise, you may need to be patient.

Different programs have different variations, but I believe most of them keep them cached locally long-term after first retrieved. An option to download all of them right away for offline use might be helpful unless there are a very large number of them (which is the case with some of those apps, thus the reason not to download them locally as part of the app install); in any case there could be an option to download local copies individually if the user wants them, and that would happen automatically upon the first use. I'm not saying Serif should or will go this route, just tossing it out there as something that is starting to happen in a lot of cases and is not an unreasonable approach. It would allow for a large library of templates to exist without bloating the size of the initial download of the program for people who are unlikely to use more than a small number of them (if any); users could selectively download the ones they are interested in.

Some software is now keeping the templates online and downloading them within the app the first time they are used.

This is a different feature request, and there are already a number of threads in which it is being discussed; in particular this one, which is pinned to the top of the forum containing this thread:

How would it be any different from what could be achieved by adjusting the control handles and the positions of the individual nodes that make up the shape?

@Jeremy Bohn, @Murfee - those seem like great suggestions, but they should be on a separate thread. The announcement thread for a release is a dangerous place to put these as they may get lost in the shuffle when the next release is made and this thread gets locked.

All the more reason to stop using that product...

That would get old fast, as this would require large tooltips that would get in the way of seeing what you are doing. That is not a normal behavior for a checkbox and does not impress me as a good idea. I think it would be better to select the layers in the panel (which would allow for discontiguous selections as well) and have the click of a checkbox for any of the selected layers applied to all those selected.

Found it: That is a reply from one of the Serif developers that was posted on another thread on this topic.

This has come up previously in other threads. Perspective grids (or other similar functionality) are not yet supported.

I agree that it would be nice to have both options available; I personally don't care which one is the default.

I get the impression he is looking to have the dimensions added to the document itself. This is really a CAD feature rather than an illustration feature; not a bad request, but not sure how much of a priority Serif is likely to give it. That said, this has already been requested on numerous other threads, making this one redundant, but also indicating that there are others hoping for this as well.

Serif does not normally respond to feature requests. This should be expected. Also, this is hardly the only thread on this topic, including at least one going back to August 2018: Examples:

By default, the Affinity apps scale most shapes non-proportionally, but images and artistic text (that I can think of off-hand) scale proportionally by default, since stretching them is not likely to be the normal desired action. Using the shift modifier reverses whatever the default would be for the object(s) being scaled. You can change this behavior using the "Move Tool Aspect Constrain" option on the Tools preferences page.

The issue I had previously reported concerning the column rules section missing from the text frame panel is still present in the current beta. The section appears if I set the language explicitly to "English" (UK English) and restart the app. It disappears again if I set it back to "Default".

I agree there doesn't seem to be a way to do this with macros, but do note that you can do this directly in the various resize dialogs using expressions like "+=20%" - just in case you had missed that...

This has been discussed on other threads. The Windows version of the Affinity products are built using a toolkit from Microsoft which is not supported (by Microsoft) on ARM64, such that Serif would basically need to rewrite the application to get this working. They have indicated that they are evaluating options, but due to this limitation, I would not expect that version to be released any time soon, as it is not a simple matter of a recompile; this will take a lot of work.

Hi @TyNik, welcome to the forums! You can already do this using the Move tool. Holding down the command key (Mac - if you are on Windows check the status bar to see which key it is there) will normally scale around the center of the object. To change the point it scales around, turn on the Enable Transform Origin button on the context toolbar; this will show the transform origin in the center of the object, then you can drag it to the point you want to scale/shear/rotate around (for scale and shear need to hold down command).

You can set individual tab stops using the text ruler on a text box (View -> Text Ruler) or in the Tab Stops section of the Paragraph panel. Individual tab stops are listed in the list that covers most of the panel; the single width box at the top is used for the remaining tabs stops after the ones listed. On the text ruler, if a tab stop is shown stuck to the bottom of the ruler, it will stick to the left side of the text box when the box is scaled. If it is shown at the top of the text ruler, it will stick to the right side.

Yes, you can import plain-text, RTF and Word DOCX (not DOC) files. You can also copy/paste from other programs.

You can put text on a path by creating the path using the normal shape/pen tools, then with the path selected, clicking on it with the artistic text tool. The path itself will become invisible, but the text will follow it. You can tell when the mouse is over a valid path because the pointer will change to reflect creating the text on the path. The Affinity products do not yet have a mesh warp tool that keeps objects in an editable vector format, though Affinity Photo does have one that operates on raster layers, and this can be accessed from the Photo persona within Publisher if you have both programs installed and have started them both at least once. IDML import is partially implemented in the 1.8 beta which is currently underway. INDD and QXP import are not expected to happen. Normally you should be able to edit text imported from a PDF file, but if the text had operations applied to it which cannot be cleanly imported into the Affinity products (things they do not currently support natively) my guess would be that they were rasterized or converted to curves during import. If they are coming from PDF files, it may also be that the other program converted to curves when producing the PDF). If your text is converted to curves and is a single object (one entry on the layers panel), then it will have a single, shared appearance (fill/stroke/etc); if you want to color the letters individually, you will need to break it into multiple objects. To do that, right-click on the object and from the Geometry submenu select Separate Curves (you can also find the Geometry submenu in the Layers menu).

Not true. In Affinity Photo, this activates the color picker when using the brush tool. @walt.farrell, correct: it is control+option+LMB drag on the Mac. The Mac has four modifier keys instead of just three so none of the mouse chording is needed (that is how Serif seems to be compensating for Windows having one fewer modifier key to work with).

Some time back one of the betas did have a destructive mode for the cropping tool but they backed it out because it was causing problems of some kind. I don't think they are specifically opposed to this, probably just isn't a high priority at the moment to fix whatever was broken in the previous attempt.