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I haven't tested how this impacts that particular export format, but have you tried dragging from the corner of the rulers to the point you want to use as the origin? That does at least adjust the origin point within the app itself...

As a workaround, you could try duplicating the shape that you want to export from and use it as a mask for the parchment, then export the selection area. The mask can be turned on and off so that you would only enable the mask when you want to perform that particular export.

For text styles you can already do this: right-click the style in the Text Styles panel and choose the option to Edit the style. There is a field for a "Keyboard shortcut:" on the "Style" page of the resulting edit window. Frame text is meant to contain paragraphs of text. It creates a text frame which is already prepared to receive text and which you can use immediately, covering the most common use case without requiring extra steps. Placing an empty text frame on a master page gives you a placeholder for entry of page-specific text on pages which include that master. Artistic text is text that can be warped, put on a path, etc. - text that is "loose" within the page as opposed to containing entire paragraphs. It gives more creative control for special decorative use cases. Uniquely, this cannot be used empty as a "placeholder" on a master page. The shape tools create an assortment of shapes which are not initially prepared to contain text. You can convert them to text frames in order to add text to them, but this is an extra step. Placing a shape on a master page without explicitly converting it to a text frame does not give you a placeholder for entering text. The image frame tools are not meant to contain text, but rather pictures. These are used on master pages, for example, to create placeholders where images can go. File -> Document Setup and on the Model tab in the resulting window turn off Facing pages.

This would be better handled by adding support for stroke offsets to the Appearance panel and allowing a choice of strokes, fills or both from the panel to be saved as partial styles which can be applied to arbitrary objects from a palette, replacing only those parts of the appearance which match what was saved to the partial style.

I believe it is rather obvious that the OP is asking for the "global layers" feature that has previously been discussed at length in other threads (making this one redundant). The lack of this feature seems to me like one of the most blatantly obvious major shortcomings of Publisher in particular.

MSI vs MSIX? Were they installed under different user accounts? Are the users who do not have the option enabled local administrators?

Not sure to be honest as I've never actually saved anything with a duplicated RAW layer or paid attention to that. I did test that procedure to the point of it working but for any actual work on RAW images I use a dedicated RAW processor (Capture One, DxO PhotoLab, etc.) to handle the RAW development then round-trip a PSD from the RAW processor into Affinity Photo when I need to perform edits I can't do as well or at all in the RAW developer. While I am sure Serif would not present it this way I tend to think of the Develop persona as a concession to people who don't have "real" RAW development software to work with... the dedicated software that is out there will generally be faster to work with and give better results.

They do show up in the menus in the menu bar, so yes, the shortcuts are there and do work (except they are Command+X, Command+C, etc. rather than Control), it is only the context menus that do not display them.

Platform convention. Context menus do not show shortcut keys.

Please search before posting new threads which are simply duplicates of existing ones. In particular, there is a pinned topic "Scripting" at the top of the forum where Serif has already announced that they are working on this. It is not anywhere near ready for release yet, but it is underway. It is best to keep discussion on one topic in one place, rather than scatter it across numerous threads.

If you click within the area of the text frame it will simply move the insertion point, and if you click on another text frame it will simply switch to editing that. If the shape extends beyond the edges of the text frame you should be able to click within the shape but outside the text frame to select the shape. Even better, don't bother creating a text frame for this: right-click on the callout shape and choose Convert to Text Frame. This will make the callout shape and the text frame one and the same so there is no need to change the selection.

If all you are trying to do is switch layers/objects you don't need to switch tools to do that. Even with the text tools selected you can simply click on another layer to switch. Doing so also takes you out of text editing mode if the layer you click on is not another text object so you could then switch tools directly to whatever you need to use.

Yes, the "iPadification" effect - it changed from Preferences to Settings in macOS 13 (Ventura) throughout practically the entire system, with even most applications changing their "Preferences" menu option to a "Settings" one, but some older apps may not adapt unless/until their authors update them. Some apps are too bone-headed to adapt to platform conventions regardless and will probably always say "Preferences" or "Setup" or whatever they chose to use for that app; apps with completely custom interfaces such as Blender generally fall into this category. The Affinity apps are kind of half and half on this, but they do say Settings under macOS 13 in any case.

This already seems to work as the guides already appear when moving the artboards. The guides being requested seem to be more for comparison/analysis purposes, and that is where I am a bit lost, as they export largely independently of each other, so I'm not sure what the benefit of that would be.

While I see no problem with this request, out of curiosity, why would you find it useful?

"Document-Wide" and "Custom" should be replaced with tabs at the top of the panel for "Selected Note(s)" and "Document Settings". The choice of note type would be immediately underneath that. For "Document Settings" you would always see all properties, and they would always adjust the document-wide settings regardless of what note was selected. For "Selected Note(s)" there would be a checkbox "Use Document Settings" and the rest of the settings would be disabled when it is checked.

It would not be logical to do this in application preferences when you might want light-colored guides in a dark-colored document but dark-colored guides in a light-colored document. To borrow a paraphrase questionably attributed to a famous physicist, things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler... If you want to avoid setting these repeatedly, the ideal solution is to set them in a template that you use to create new documents.

Multiply by a constant is basically the opacity setting of the layer on a normal blend mode, or alternatively an Exposure adjustment. Adding/subtracting a constant, I believe, is the Brightness control on a Brightness and Contrast adjustment. I think most of the others are already covered by the various blend modes? https://photoblogstop.com/photoshop/photoshop-blend-modes-explained

A parallel concept might be that of a style variant. We can already base styles on other styles: for example, if I have a base style named MyStyle, I might create another style which inherits from it and simply changes the text color to red, maybe MyRedStyle. Now consider having a "Style Variants" panel with a list of variant names and a "Default" or "[No Variant]" option already present as part of the document - names might be "Screen Display", "Printing", "Proofing", etc. - and being able to create a "Variant Style" as a child of either a paragraph or a character style, which rather than having a name of its own, would inherit the name of its parent but with one of the defined variants associated with it. When the user selects a variant name in the Style Variants panel, any styles that have a variant style as a child which are associated with that selected name, would have that variant substituted for the base style; any that do not would simply use the base style. This generalizes the concept and allows for quickly reformatting the text in the document for different purposes by making a selection in the variants panel.

The problem with this is that the grid is a per-document setting - you can have different grids selected in different documents - it is not an application property. The canonical solution for this in the Affinity products is to create a template with the grid set up the way you want it, then use that template when creating new documents. There is a problem, however, when working with Photo, in that many documents are created by "opening" a RAW file or other raster image file, which in effect creates a new Affinity Photo document and imports the image into a new layer of that document which is then named "Background". Currently there is no opportunity to access a grid which is stored in a template when "opening" raster images in this way, and I believe that is the problem which should actually be solved. Rather than a piecemeal solution for one property at a time (grid, etc.), I think the best way for this to work is to allow the user to specify a template of their choice to use when "opening" raster images or RAW files, perhaps with an option to use it (or a different one) when creating from a preset also (as this is something that is a bit more iffy). The user could then save a template with their desired grid settings, maybe a few adjustment layers for soft proofing (likely turned off but still set up and ready to go), and when they open a raster image, it would open a copy of the template, set the document size to match the image being opened, and import the raster image into a new layer on the bottom of the Layers panel. This would solve the problem for the grid, allow the user to rig custom adjustment layers to be ready to go for any new image they open, have custom document color swatches (even global ones) in place and ready to go, etc... and it should be fairly straightforward as all of the underlying mechanics to make it happen already exist in the application.

It is curious to me that you can't simply select the group and make the desired changes. You can, for example, select a group of shapes and choose a color to apply that color to all of the shapes in the group, so why could you not select a group of text objects and choose a text style, or a font, to apply it to all of the text objects in the group? That omission seems both inconsistent and unnecessary.

Yes, they are based on the symbols technology from Designer, but it kind of defeats the purpose for which master pages were intended. Master pages are to create uniformity among the individual pages of a document. You can misuse them in the way that you demonstrated here, due in part to their connection to the underlying symbol technology, but this purpose would be better served by switching to the Designer persona and using actual Symbols, or to the Photo persona and using Linked Layers, both of which are intended for what you are doing here. If you do not have Photo or Designer, then this usage of master pages could be a valid workaround, but it is not really their intended purpose. You are finding an alternate use case for them which is supported by an implementation detail. In a smaller document you could get away with this more easily: when you start working in longer documents such as books with hundreds of pages, intermixing this technique with the more genuine, intended function of master pages, I would think more likely to lead to confusion.

Even setting aside the ability to misuse master pages and treat them as if they were symbols, completely missing the point of why they exist in the first place (to create uniformity among pages and reduce the amount of work needed to create a long document with said uniformity), consider that you can have more than one master page (more usefully several different ones) assigned to a page. Placing them in the Layers panel allows you to alter the stacking order of the applied masters, not only in relation to each other, but also in relation to the objects on the page itself. It also provides a mechanism for removing a master page assignment (you can delete the layer). This ability to alter the stacking order is in part a workaround for the fact that there are no "global layers" (as have been discussed separately) but also presents possibilities of its own, though it is much less useful than having real global layers would be.

Just to point it out, the styles can also be selected using drop-down lists on both the context toolbar (when editing text) and on the Character and Paragraph studio panels. The drop-down lists do separate the Character and Paragraph styles from each other, so while it does mean one more click (to open the drop-down), using these might help to eliminate the scrolling. Or, you could use the Text Styles panel for the paragraph styles, and one of the drop-down lists for the Character styles (or vice-versa)...