Hokusai

Bond, That is a good idea, I wonder how hard that would be to implement (if it is even possible)? There are times when the menus do get in the way. Hokusai

Stokestack, Sorry I misunderstood what you were asking. If you create two triangles and then select them, yes the properties disappear from the tool bar but you can still apply a colour to them both by selecting a colour from the Swatches Palette. I hope that helps. Hokusai

Stokestack, I'm not quite sure but I would guess that your two triangles are composed of groups or they are themselves part of a group. Is that correct? For me, if I have multiple instances of an object and I select them, I can apply a colour to the fill or add a stroke to them as long as they are not grouped. If they are grouped or in a group then I can't. There are some things that don't work on grouped objects in Designer right now (whether that is by design or if will be changed in the future is a question only the developers can answer). I hope that helps. Hokusai

I can understand and totally relate to wanting to run software on an older computer but it is a little silly to expect a software company to do this. Technology moves forward, not backwards and while there are many people who cling to Snow Leopard, you can't expect others to do the same. This is especially funny to me because many people have requested this because they want to keep using Adobe CS 5. If keeping Snow Leopard is so important, then simply partition your hard drive and install Yosemite on the second partition and that way you can dual-boot (like LilleG), problem solved. No need to trouble the developers, let them concentrate on making the software better. Partitioning a hard drive in OS X is pretty painless nowadays and so it should be a no-brainer. There is of course virtualization but that requires more work and is much more complicated than simply partitioning a hard drive. I can totally relate to your situation VictorC, I've been there before too but you can't expect the tech world to wait for you. Hokusai

Oval, Why so snarky? Dave, Ben, and MattP have all tried very hard to give you a workable solution to your problem and how do you thank them, you make a snarky, sarcastic comment. That kind of behavior isn't going to win you any friends nor will it help to bolster your argument. Hokusai

michaelwg, Hello and welcome to the forums! I can relate to your need for page imposition in Affinity Publisher but I would be surprised if it was a feature in Publisher. Even in Quark Xpress and InDesign, you can only do very basic page imposition and it isn't really useful unless you buy a 3rd party solution. You are right, page imposition software is expensive and very clunky but in fairness to Quark and Adobe, the imposition software isn't made by them but by a 3rd party and so they (Quark and Adobe) have nothing to do with the prices that are charged for the page imposition plugins. It would be great if Affinity were able to include the ability to do complex page imposition in Affinity but I'm guessing that it is something that only benefits commercial printers (more of a niche market). It would be great if it were offered though, and it is something that might attract people to Affinity Publisher. Footnotes on the other hand are a real possibility. I know that many people hang on to Adobe Framemaker because of the way it handles footnotes as well as how it works with long documents. Many users say that Framemaker works much better with long documents than InDesign but I personally have no experience with Framemaker and so I don't know but that is something that I often hear from Framemaker users. You are right, Quark did develop into a horrible company. Their customer service was atrocious and their prices were high. I hated the fact that they had "special" versions for customers who didn't use English, which were of course more expensive and couldn't be opened by other versions of Xpress. This changed later on but it didn't do much to make customers like them. In 2011 Quark was bought by an equity firm and it has been under new management since then. I don't know if they have changed their ways or not but the last time I dealt with them, a few years ago, they seemed much better. They seemed like they realized that they were losing customers like mad to InDesign and they seemed like they were trying to improve. I loved Quark Xpress 3.3, a truly great product at the time but they got lazy and the development of Xpress was too slow and unimpressive after that. It is funny how Adobe is repeating some of the very same mistakes that Quark made. At least Quark isn't forcing users to use rent their software and they have also been allowing users to upgrade from any previous version to their latest version (although that was most likely only a temporary promotion). I'm looking forward to Affinity Publisher because I feel that both Quark and Adobe have lost their "beginner's mind" and they are both out of touch with what customers want and need (as well as think). Affinity has some great and very innovative ideas and I'm excited to see what they can bring to the layout area. Hokusai

Catlover, Thanks for posting this request. I don't currently have a need for the transparency tool but I can see how it would be useful. I knew that Designer had a transparency tool but until you brought it up here, I hadn't really used it. I gave it a try after reading your post and it is cool and I can see how it would be useful in Photo as well as Designer. Thanks, Hokusai

Oval, I have tried to have a conversation with you about the issue that you brought up. I made many valid points and ask some questions, made some suggestions. I tried very hard to make a positive contribution to the discussion. What did you contribute to the conversation? Nothing. You completely ignored my posts. I at least had the decency to reply to your posts and admit when I was wrong. It seems apparent that you lack good communication skills. Even if you aren't a native English speaker, your tone is rather harsh and rather nasty sounding, in my opinion. If you aren't a native speaker then I might grant you a little leeway but not that much. If you don't want to have a civil discussion about it, that is fine but I would just like you to know that you can catch more bees with honey than with vinegar. Your arguments and criticisms were not stated very eloquently. If you want to win people over, you might be a little nicer. I recommend that you work on your powers of persuasion because right now they are rather lacking. I wish you the best of luck with your future endeavors, working hard opening all those Illustrator files from Illustrator 88 and then pasting them in C4D. Have you considered asking the makers of C4D to support Affinity Designer files? Or maybe you should contact Adobe and ask them to import and export Designer files? That only seems fair. Hokusai

KevinU, You didn't by any chance hit the tab key did you? Just curious as I can imagine if you weren't expecting it, it might make you think something was up (as everything appears as black, especially if you are using the Full Screen mode) Hokusai

Huachee, Very beautiful, thanks for sharing! I love the brush stroke look! Hokusai

Oval, Sorry you misread what I was referring to. I was referring to the part of your post #14 above. Your statement above (which is exactly as you posted) says that Designer doesn't support .ai import, when in fact it does. Maybe not a full importing of everything but it does support .ai importing. You are correct that later you mentioned the native part, and I'm sorry that I didn't catch that. I find it odd that you would say that I did not use Illustrator until version 8. Did I ever say that? No I didn't, you only assumed so. I have, in fact, been using Illustrator since 1990. When I was a university student I learned vector art using Illustrator 2 and then I used Illustrator 5.5 at my first graphics job after I graduated from university. I have used almost every version of Illustrator extensively since then. I remember how terrible Illustrator 6 was because the rulers were on the bottom and right side as opposed to being on the left and top, like most other programs (this was changed in Illustrator 7). I also used Freehand quite extensively as well. I didn't use CorelDRAW much, but I have used it (I always felt that while very powerful, the interface for CorelDRAW was a shining of example of how not to design a GUI, maybe it has improved). I do have many old Illustrator files but I have decided that I don't want to be tied to Adobe and their wretched subscription model and so I have made a conscious effort to deal with any problems that I might have in moving over to an Affinity workflow. Are there some problems? Sure there are some but that is to be expected when moving your work from one application to another. I think that many people here get so hung up on having complete 100% compatibility with Illustrator, InDesign, or Photoshop that their expectations are unrealistic. For now, I use both Affinity Designer and Adobe Illustrator but as Designer continues to improve, I find myself using Illustrator less and less. Once the Affinity team has added more print related features to Designer, I will only keep Illustrator (an older version not the subscription) for special cases when I have to use Illustrator. In the end if you decide to change your workflow, you will have to make some sacrifices at first but later things will smooth out and improve. This is true for almost anything. So you have to ask yourself, "Do I want to continue to use Adobe's products or do I want to move in a new direction?". Which company's vision for their software more closely matches what you would like to see and have in regards to a vector application? For me, Affinity's ideas are fresh and they offer a new and better way to work with vectors and any tool that makes things easier and more accurate is a plus in my book. If you want to have the exact same features and functionality as well as full compatibility with Illustrator then maybe you should continue to pay Adobe to rent their software. I personally think that Affinity's vision for a great vector application is much better than Adobe's. Adobe is a prime example of what happens when companies get to big and have no competition. They get greedy, stale and lack innovation. Hokusai

Oval, Sorry to hear that you are frustrated but in your original post (post #14) you said ".ai" files and you never mentioned the ".ai files that have no PDF" part until post (#16) and that is why I said that Designer does import .ai files. If you have .ai files that you are having trouble opening in Designer, why not simply save them as PDF files, it might make it easier to open. Of course there are going to be some Illustrator files that you aren't going to be able to open in Designer but to me, that isn't unreasonable. I would never expect to have full compatibility with all of Illustrator's features unless I was using Illustrator. For me, Designer has been able to open all of my Illustrator files with no problem but I always check the "PDF compatibility" option when I save my .ai files. I can't tell if your "Other software does not ignore the needs of professionals" statement is serious or joking because if you truly think this then you obviously haven't used Adobe's software (not to mention other companies as well). The Affinity team does listen to user requests and their interaction with users is something that is unheard of with other companies. Of course in the end it is their prerogative whether to add certain features or not. As I said in my previous post "I would guess that any program that can open .ai files can also open PDF files and so what advantage does having the ability to export .ai files give that would offset the cost of offering it?". Hokusai

Oval, Affinity Designer does support the importing of .ai files, just not exporting. I would recommend to have some patience, Designer is not even a year old and it has improved greatly and at a fast pace since it release last fall. Things like 3D capabilities shouldn't be expected in such a young program (especially one that isn't designed as a 3D program). Illustrator didn't have 3D capabilities until version 11 or 12, and that was many years. Building a great vector application takes time, it isn't going to happen over night. In my opinion Designer is shaping up to be a great vector program, sure it isn't perfect but I like the direction that it is headed and I have confidence that the things are not quite there yet will eventually get ironed out. Of course Adobe's software works well with each other, if they didn't I would be surprised. You shouldn't expect Affinity's software to integrate with Adobe's software as well as Adobe's software integrates with Adobe's own software. I don't think that the Affinity team is trying to build software with the intention of offering seamless integration with all of Adobe's apps because that would be impossible for anyone other than Adobe. What Affinity is doing is offering seamless integration between their own programs, which makes sense. Affinity does offer us ways to work with and exchange files easily with Adobe and other companies' applications but there are limits. I would guess that the few companies that do offer the ability to export .ai files did one of two things. One, they reverse engineered it themselves or more likely, they pay a licencing fee to Adobe to use it. I would guess that any program that can open .ai files can also open PDF files and so what advantage does having the ability to export .ai files give that would offset the cost of offering it? Hokusai

Goompa, I think that something very important that you should know and understand is the difference between raster and vector images. Designer is mainly a vector application with some raster (or pixel) tools (but the raster tools are not a extensive as they are in Photo). Photo is a raster application with some very basic vector tools. Here is a link to the Wikipedia pages about them, they explain quite well the differences between raster and vector graphics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_graphics I hope that this helps you. Hokusai

Saltommeister, This is discussed in greater detail in this thread: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/11174-scrubby-zoom/ Hokusai

Ash, The "tab" key is different. It hides the tools and palettes (which is conveniently just like the "tab" key in Illustrator). The "F" key in Illustrator toggles through 3 different views. evtonic3, you could you the "command + control + F" shortcut, which takes you to full screen mode (and the menu bar is hidden at the top but it appears if you hover over it). You could then use it in combination with the tab key as Ash recommended. This will get you close to the 3 views that are offered in Illustrator. Hokusai

Jonathan D, That is the way it was before. I don't remember when it changed over and became one but 3 or 4 months ago (and before) the threads were divided into Designer/Questions/FeatureRequests/Bugs and Photo/Questions/FeatureRequests/Bugs. The funny thing is, it was confusing because people would post things about Photo in the Designer threads (probably because the Designer threads were on top). It hasn't been that long ago that changed to how it is now. Hokusai

monXterious, The file that you uploaded works exports just fine for me (with the latest beta version). Are you using the Mac App Store version or the latest beta? Hokusai

monXterious, I don't know the answer to your question without looking at your original file but if you are going to print them off, I would recommend that you try exporting your file as a PDF and see how it comes out. Why would you try to export slices if you are going to print it? Slices are normally used on the web and not for print, just curious. Hokusai

rosa cobos, I would recommend that you read this thread in which TonyB responses to a question about a perspective tool in Designer. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/1090-persepctive-tools/?hl=perspective+tool Hokusai

I have to agree, the colour picker in Designer needs some attention. If you read the very first Affinity Review Issue #1, and you read the interview with Jonathan Ball he replies to the question "Tell us how you got on with Affinity Designer, thumbs up or thumbs down?" He replied, "Thumbs up all around. There are a few niggles I'd like to see tweaked (a better colour picker please......" I couldn't agree more. Affinity Designer is great and so powerful and intuitive in so many areas and yet the colour picker and colour swatches sadly aren't. I also agree with many of the previous posters that the eye dropper should be made more intuitive. As well, I think that Global Swatches (or Global Colours) would be a huge improvement, and maybe that is on the roadmap? I also have a couple of questions that maybe MEB or someone else on the Affinity team might be able to answer or comment on in regards to the Colour Picker/Swatches. I have attached an imagine that clearly shows what I'm talking about. First of all, the little ink well that sits on the colour palette (next to the eye dropper) it seems like it always defaults to an RGB black (well actually a 4 colour black which it should be only black), why? Sometimes it is RGB (or a 4 colour black, which is not at all what I want). I never use RGB and yet it often shows up as an RGB black that was converted to a 4 colour black. Secondly, if I use a colour but I don't add the colour to the Swatches, why does it highlight the last colour (in the swatches palette) that I used? It shouldn't highlight anything from the swatches palette unless I'm using a swatch and yet it always highlights a colour from the Swatches palette after I've used a colour from there (even if I'm not using a colour from there). This is confusing. As well, why doesn't the "recent colours" show all the colours that were recently used? I often copy and paste colours (via copy and then paste "style") and yet when I do this, they don't show up in the "recent colours". If I use a colour in any way, I would think that would be included as a "recent colour". I have commented on it before but I don't think it was ever addressed, why do some colours appear more than once in the "recent colours" but not every colour? It isn't a matter of how often they are used, I often use some colours and yet they only show up once and yet other colours show up multiple times (and they aren't used that much), this behavior doesn't seem consistent. I think as well that the "recent colours" should display all colours in the order that they are used, which doesn't seem to be the case right now. While there are some rough edges with the Colour tools, I'm confident that the Affinity team will short them all out eventually! Keep up the great work! Hokusai

Gear maker, Good question, hide/show all is completely separate from turning off or turning on a layer's visibility. A good way to think of it is you "hide/show" objects and shapes while you "turn off/turn on" the visibility of Layers. Turning off the visibility of a layer hides the whole layer including all objects on that layer (hidden or not) while hiding an object just hides the object that was selected (it will hide multiple objects if they are selected or grouped). Designer has always had the ability to hide objects but currently we have to always go to the Layer Panel and hunt for and find the object and then click on the visibility icon to deactivate its visibility (or we can find the object in on the page and then do a right click or option click and then select "find in Layers Panel" which will show you its position in the Layers stack and you can turn off the visibility for it there). It requires a lot more clicks and it takes more time than simply hitting a "hide" shortcut. Show all just turns on the visibility for all hidden objects, and it doesn't affect the visibility of any of your layers. If you have the visibility of a layer turned off, show all won't affect it. Show all will show the object but you won't see it until you turn on the visibility of the layer. This one is even more of a time saver because as it is now, if you have a lot of objects in a layer stack and you have hidden some of them it will take you a long time to hunt through and find them all and turn them on, especially if you have hidden objects on many different layers. Using show all you can show them all with one keystroke, it is a huge time saver. Currently in Designer there is no way to easily find hidden objects and show them like the "Find in Layers Panel" from the contextual menu. Of course someone will say "Why do I have to show all? What if I want to just show some of the objects?", if you only want to show some of the objects and not all of them then you would have to navigate through the layers panel and turn them on individually like you have to do now. For me, it is easier and faster though to simply show all and select the objects that you didn't want to show and then re-hide them. Or you could separate your objects on different layers and then use the layer visibility to help control this. I hope that makes sense. To be honest with you, I'm like you, I often keep what I like to call a "Hold Layer" (the same as your "just in case" layer) where I make a copy of things that I might want to revert back to just in case I change my mind or make a mistake. Maybe I should call it "Plan B Layer"? Later on once I'm completely satisfied with my drawing, I go back and delete them but there is nothing wrong with being a layer hoarder (from someone who may or maybe not have a problem with layer hoarding). Of course, because Designer has non-destructive boolean operations I don't do it as much as I used to but I still do it (it is an old habit for me too). Hokusai

MattP, Thanks for understanding, and sorry the new zoom behavior isn't for me. I can appreciate the effort it took to program it and add it to Designer. I can imagine developing a program like Designer is incredibly tough. You want to add new features or change things but at the same time some people prefer the old ones or the old way. Luckily in this case, a preference will make everyone happy. Thanks for considering my request, Hokusai

MattP, Thanks for the response and thanks for considering to add "Hide/Show All" to Designer. If you added "hide/show all" to Designer, I would be a very happy camper! For me it is one of the few things that I actually miss from Illustrator (and I thought Freehand had it too but it has been too long since I last used Freehand and I can't remember whether it was there or not). I know that you guys are busy and I appreciate you and the rest of the team taking the time to read the forums and listen to so many requests (even if sometimes we, the users, get impatient)! Designer is a great app and I'm looking forward to seeing what it will be like in another year! Thanks again, Hokusai

Anybody?