LCamachoDesign

Apps: Designer and Photo
Platforms: Windows, macOS and iPad
Both Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo now have the option to "Show Special Characters" if required. This is available from the top Text menu on desktop, and via the preview mode drop down on iPad.

Resolving this may be complex and there is a related issue with different facing-pages masters being applied to different sides of a spread. Publisher even has a challenge with the first page in a facing-pages document, the objects on the left master still exist even though there's no left page in that spread.
I don't work for Serif but I think that if these issues aren't resolved before Serif chooses to add multi-page spreads, then these issues could be resolved at the same time. I hope multi-page spreads are in the plan for someday. InDesign has a very basic approach to spreads and I'd like to see Publisher do better.
In the meantime, avoid adding, moving, or deleting a single page in a facing-pages document. For books this isn't an issue because text is in stories and pages need only be added or removed at the end of a chapter, but for a document such as the one you're working on this can be a pain. It's best to use single-sided masters for this situation.
Good luck!

I agree.

I stand corrected, that's indeed how InDesign does it (had to install for the project I'm working on anyway for other reasons). I still think the option to keep the object should exist, but that's just me. I've edited my post to match the corrected information. Thanks!
 
Again, checked with InDesign, that's how it works. It's easier to see this in action using the Story Editor. It would also be nice for Publisher to have a Story Editor, but that's a different problem.
 
This is a pretty good idea!

This https://www.microsoft.com/store/productId/9N5MVVBD0TGW
Although soon enough it won't be necessary, as Windows 11 will get Screen recording in Snipping Tool
 
I'm not quite sure what's the point of your message? To say that what's on the video is normal behaviour, or user error?
If splitting master spreads doesn't work, then internally have setting like InDesign's "Allow Document Pages to Shuffle" set to off. Otherwise, ensure that when pages do shuffle, the content moves along appropriately. For a visual reference without forcing me to reinstall InDesign, see here: 
Thanks!

Deleting pinned objects along with the text is standard in most apps and I'd hate for Publisher not to do this. If I select a range of text that includes a pin, the pinned object should be deleted with the text.
But I agree that there is a problem and thank you for pointing this out, I've been tripped up by it before but hadn't taken time to think it through. Double clicking a word to select it should not select any hidden control characters to its left or right, the user can't see that they've been selected and it leads to accidental deletion as you've experienced. Any control characters embedded in the word should be deleted even if they're hidden, they are then part of the word. This also applies to the new note references in v2 even though they're visible.
Publisher is selecting everything up to the space before the word and up to the space or punctuation after the word. I believe it should omit any control characters before or after the word. This is the way most programs work.
<space><pin 1>Word<index mark><pin 2><footnote><space> - double click will select the red text but it should select just the word <space>Word<footnote>.<space> - double click will select the red text but it should not select the control character between the word and period <space>Test<pin>ing<space> - double click will select the green text - this is correct, it's a control character embedded in a word

Indeed. The toxicity around here, especially after the 2.0 release, is increasingly off-putting.
I wish Serif would do what I already suggested years ago. Close these forums. Keep the forums as a community thing only. In their place, For bug reporting and tracking have a UserVoice page, or any of the other alternatives like Nolt or SleekPlan. Something that allows us to easily search and post bugs, but greatly limits all social interaction, and as result limits the toxicity.
And it isn't just for their employee's sake, that have to navigate these forums daily. It's for our own sake too. We have to browse and search these forums in order to find out if a bug has already been reported or solved. That means we also have to read and navigate this toxicity. That's something I'd like to avoid, it's unhealthy, and frankly something that reduces my willingness to post any bug findings.
Do us all a favour Serif, close these forums. have a separate bug reporting system away from forums.

Indeed. The toxicity around here, especially after the 2.0 release, is increasingly off-putting.
I wish Serif would do what I already suggested years ago. Close these forums. Keep the forums as a community thing only. In their place, For bug reporting and tracking have a UserVoice page, or any of the other alternatives like Nolt or SleekPlan. Something that allows us to easily search and post bugs, but greatly limits all social interaction, and as result limits the toxicity.
And it isn't just for their employee's sake, that have to navigate these forums daily. It's for our own sake too. We have to browse and search these forums in order to find out if a bug has already been reported or solved. That means we also have to read and navigate this toxicity. That's something I'd like to avoid, it's unhealthy, and frankly something that reduces my willingness to post any bug findings.
Do us all a favour Serif, close these forums. have a separate bug reporting system away from forums.

Indeed. The toxicity around here, especially after the 2.0 release, is increasingly off-putting.
I wish Serif would do what I already suggested years ago. Close these forums. Keep the forums as a community thing only. In their place, For bug reporting and tracking have a UserVoice page, or any of the other alternatives like Nolt or SleekPlan. Something that allows us to easily search and post bugs, but greatly limits all social interaction, and as result limits the toxicity.
And it isn't just for their employee's sake, that have to navigate these forums daily. It's for our own sake too. We have to browse and search these forums in order to find out if a bug has already been reported or solved. That means we also have to read and navigate this toxicity. That's something I'd like to avoid, it's unhealthy, and frankly something that reduces my willingness to post any bug findings.
Do us all a favour Serif, close these forums. have a separate bug reporting system away from forums.

That may or may not be a legitimate request. I personally hate the Mac way to have no application frames and the ability to see other app palettes or windows behind the app in front and was really glad about Adobe introducing the application frames. But if it would be optional, I would have no problem with this.
I'm sorry to take your request here as a reason for another topic, but it is another example of this, that the tone here on the forum lately leaves a lot to be desired. At least a "please" would not have hurt the desire. "Give me back" reads like it was yours before and Serif stole it from you.
A great many users here are very demanding and formulate their criticism in a way as if Serif had personally insulted them with the appearance of V2.

I forgot to update this ticket.
For some reason the problem went away on it's own... I don't think I changed anything, anywhere, and the apps haven't updated either so... I don't know why this was happening, or it stopped. You can close this. If I ever stumble upon this again I'll let you know.
Thanks and apologies.

Look,

I get that Affinity is a small team, but prioritizing a plugin API offloads the work of adding features/formats that people want to the public for FREE. The amount of control we could have over affinity tools would make it worth wild to switch, both Photoshop & paint.net have huge community backed plugins that extend the tools well beyond their default capabilities.
Start small, file formats, expose the canvas, etc. Then eventually you can allow plugins to extend the UI beyond simple list items.
Affinity is a great product, but it could be amazing with a dedicated plugin system.

I can even offer to consult how to integrate it cross platform.

Let me translate this to designers: no matter what software you use (Adobe, Affinity, whatever), if you're doing print stuff, do not send source files to the printers. They will find any reason to charge you fees for anything they don't like. Instead, learn how to prepare a proper print-ready PDF. Talk to your printer about this. If they don't accept PDFs then find a printer from the 21st century.
If you've used Adobe apps for 40 years, learn the differences between their apps and Affinity's. Don't just assume that everything must work the same. For example:
In Affinity overprinting is applied to global colors, not on individual fills and strokes. You have to adjust your workflow if you do overprinting. "Need to pull down menus to change stroke weights and type sizes" – The shortcuts for changing the stroke width are the square brackets [  ]. The shortcuts for changing the font size are the same like in Adobe apps. Learn the software if you want to use it. "non-printable layers for die cut rules" - This is important only if you output files directly from the source application. But for a PDF-based workflow, just make a spot color and name it "dieline" or "FPO" (for position only).   

I have this exact suggestion, and was searching to see if someone already had posted a request. So... +1 from me.
I'm wrapping up a project that wouldn't be possible without Photoshop's Neural Filters, or something similar. It's a packaging project where the client has good product photos, but they're low resolution for the huge packaging size needed. They're also saved as JPEG, with the usual artefacts the format includes. Using the Super Zoom filter I've been able to bump them image resolution by 2x to 4x depending on the photo, and clean up the artefacts too, resulting on a photo that's usable.
Sure, there are 3rd party websites that do this for you. Buy you have to buy "credits" to process the images, raising the project cost for the client, and for no good reason. I have a perfectly fine GPU that's able to do it locally in a very acceptable time frame. Why spend more? There's also Topaz Labs offerings, but they are rather limited in scope when compared to Photoshop, especially if you take in account the price asked...
I think a good start for Affinity Photo would be an upscale, a denoise, and a JPEG artefact AI filters. These 3 would cover most cases.

It would be hard to compete with Blender even if it was a "normal" software. But it's not, it has an infinite money cheat code. Just look at the bottomless pocket sponsors list... The Blender foundation get 150.000 € per month just from that. They can keep pumping out features, development, etc and not worry about costs. And that is just raw money.
Many of these corporate sponsors are also providing code, if the foundation had to pay someone to write, it would be very, very expensive. A recent example is Apple engineers providing Metal rendering on Cycles X for free.

I've made topics on these lines over the years, and nothing changed so far. 🤷‍♂️
I see people comparing with Adobe, but you need to remember that there's no such thing as one Adobe. This type of corporations can be thought as many different businesses that happen to have the exact same name, and some teams are good, others are terrible.
The InDesign "team" (is there even a team for this application any longer?) for example is terrible, InDesign is essentially abandonware at this point. It wasn't changed significantly in almost a decade, many pain points are the same as CS6. There's even the story about a specific panel that no one fixes, because the person who wrote it left long ago, and no one know how it works anymore. 😃
I do however think, and I've made this point before, that Serif ought to look at a specific team of Adobe. That team is Adobe XD. It's probably the best team they have at the moment. Save for a few exceptions, there's a new version of Adobe XD every month, normally between the 10th and 15th. Like clockwork. The new version might just be bug fixes, but it's always there. It rose from a barebones app to a top contender for UI/UX, surpassing (IMHO) Sketch and being neck to neck with Figma. And I'm positive this fast release cadence is what helped them get there.
Another team worth looking, for another reason, at is Adobe Fresco. They don't release as often, but their strength lies on the team leader. It's They are headed by Kyle Webster. This is the guy that made one of the most popular brush sets for Photoshop, ever. Even Disney was purchasing and using his brushes instead of doing their own. He's that good. He knows what it takes to do a good drawing app, he was a top brushes creator, he knows all that's really needed by people working on this, and it shows. Fresco went from 0 to neck-to-neck with Procreate in a jiffy.
Both these teams highlight, with practical examples, what Serif is missing. A fast, reliable, consistent release cadence. A focus on what actual real users need and want.

Photoshop has, as of version 22.5, a warp mesh of nearly the same functionality as Affinity Photo. Nearly because it's still weird to convert anchor points to sharp (Alt+click), and the handles are still tiny and heard to see. But it's getting there.
Photo's is still better and easier to use, it just needs to be live rather than pixel.

I think Serif may have had their hands tied, and promptly been shot in the foot by someone else.
Blender's upcoming Cycles-X is much faster, and reworks its foundations to deliver a future proof renderer. It also does something else, and I quote:
This means that Cycles will do GPU accelerated rendering on NVidia cards alone, through CUDA and Optix...
It continues saying:
Having in mind that both AMD and Intel are very large corporate sponsors for the Blender Foundation, I don't think the decision to axe OpenCL and leave them without any way to hardware accelerate rendering was taken lightly... without hardware support a scene can easily take 10 times longer to render. It's a massive kick in the teeth.
I don't know anything about these APIs, but the decision to remove OpenCL leaving the large sponsors out in the cold, calling it out as stalled and buggy, really doesn't give me confidence about OpenCL.
And as you know, OpenCL is exactly what Affinity uses for hardware acceleration. In fact I think it's the only API it could use. Unlike Blender, Affinity is used in many lightweight laptops and 2-in-1 tablets, and these exclusively use Intel's integrated chips. They have no other option but to use OpenCL, or nothing at all.

Good news! i've been able to replicate the crash on my Windows 10 PC here in the office  
I'll get this logged with the Dev team

Maybe related to
As you already found out yourself, as a workaround avoid TIFF format when loading as displacement map or lighting map, functions which may share some code leading to both being affected. 

When I write in Arabic, the letters do not communicate with each other and are not written correctly. I hope for a solution

Yes, live warp is amust... Especially because live warp has a potential to be much faster than live liquify (which is slow as for now // unfortunately)

New beta is around, time to bump this up and see if it comes around this time.
We really need this to produce good packaging and print mockups.

I have sometimes seen the blurry text in Designer as well
Rasterising the layer or simply moving it slightly, immediately produces the sharp version
Very odd...

Thanks for helping everyone, but I feel you're taking this in the wrong direction. This is a simpler problem than what you're making it to be, no need to fiddle blending modes or what not. I'm going to reiterate a few points, and add a couple more to help narrow down the issue.
There's nothing wrong with the pixel contents of the AFPHOTO file, no need to test this. This is clear, opening the file in Affinity Designer or Publisher shows the contents in a sharp way, as expected. Also, as noted by @Komatös copy pasting the layer to a new file shows the contents sharply. It's not related to white colour at all. You can see the blue and purple lines on the image also look pixelated. And as I've mentioned, this issue happens with any image, not just this one. Try with something else without white and you get the same results. It's also unrelated to the renderer, at least in general. Otherwise all files would exhibit this, not just raster files resaved as AFPHOTO.  
New information:
This is unrelated to hardware or drivers, I've opened the files in my Surface Pro and the same issue happens. My desktop is AMD/Nvidia, the Surface is Intel/Intel. If I open the file saved with Windows Affinity Photo on my iPad Affinity Photo, the file also looks blurry. Further cementing this is unrelated to hardware. If I create the AFPHOTO file on the iPad by following the steps 1 to 4 of my first post, the file will render correctly on the iPad, and it will also render correctly on Windows. With the above new information I think it's becoming clear there's some sort of issue with the Windows build when saving raster images as AFPHOTO files. There's no damage to the pixel contents, but it seems like there's some error when saving so sort of metadata. I feel like a "divide by two" typo slipped in somewhere on the code. At least there's no damage to the pixel contents, and it's limited to Windows (can't say anything about macOS, but if iPadOS is any indication, it should be fine).
 
Thanks!