drkanukie

Has anyone used Canva - I have its absysmal. The reason its so popular is because it's got huge library of templates, that let any marketing bod build a semi decent campaign. Otherwise it's really hard to use and imprecise. Compared to Figma it's hopeless, but that's another story. I understand a trade sale makes everyone who founded the company relatively rich. I also think you probably deserve it, as building your own market is tough and customers are hard to please. But I see nothing but cynacism in this forum and quite rightly. We have all been round this cycle with other companies and it all ends up the same way, good products go here to die. The only saving feature is that Canva is hopeless for graphic design so they will not be pulling a Macromedia on you immediately. It's going to be death by a thousand cuts (integrations). I only use Canva because I have to our marketing team love it but I would never by choice as its just hard work compared to anything else. The 'This is fine' fluff piece mentions synergy, I can sort of see that and having a few million £ for more for dev may help. For the cloud stuff you are never going to be a Figma but using Canva as a sort of graphics cloud drive might work. I've also thought why my studio presets can't be saved on my Affinity account. I think we would all love to be proved wrong.

Same here I need artboards to snap to their contents or a size artboard to fit contents option. Such a common usecase if doing icons or logos. Workaround is to select the content and insert a new artboard size to selection.

Its a massive pain copying the windows files. I don't know why we can't store these in the cloud or in our affinity account like we can with brush packs. The only cloud support is dropbox and the use of it is obscure. Everytime I get a new version I have to tweak these presets.

Another hour wasted with this annoying behaviour. 100x100 art boards but can't get the slices to align, slices only can move by one pixel (good this is how things like artboard should move), I cannot by direct input get the slice origin to 0/0. Ohhhhhh the artboards aren't on a pixel boundary when the penny drops. I had I now realise used Align horizontally / Space horizontally and that had misaligned the art boards. An artboard never need to be off the pixel boundary no matter what you do. They are 0/0 origin spaces with their own local coordinate system so never should be sub-pixel. As you say they are independant canvases it like starting a new document at 0.25/-0.32. So Align horizontally / Space horizontally on Art boards should normalise then to the nearest whole pixel, please. To fix, I had move Force pixel alignment on as always and Move by whole pixels off as always. But they still went to sub-pixels so Force pixel alignment is flaky and took several moves and checks to make sure the artboards were finally on a pixel boundary.

Lovely to see this - did you look at being able to create a global variable for every slice to share? Currently the slice variable is per slice instance, it's much more useful to have a global token such as the name of a product and use it in every slice, the document name works around this as the file can be named after the product but isn't as flexible as a global slice name variable.

Version 2.4

Now stumbling on this useless feature of slice variable names. For my case I want a template where I define a set of standard sized slices for views Top, Left, Front etc and then set a single variable so that the images are named after the variable plus the slice name so if the Variable is Jeep the images will be JeepTop JeepLeft etc. Alas the user variables are not global to the file or export persona but local to the slice and so it's much quicker to just name the slices directly rather than setting a variable once. This means having a variable to name slices is wholly a redundant feature that has to be maintained and tested. Is there a Forum to raise such dunsel features with serif it should be named appropriately.

It can sync my commercial brush packs - why not any settings and studio presets via my Affinity account. I jump from Windows to Mac all the time but its never in sync. This is the joy of software like Figma its cloud based so always the same where ever you access it.

Thanks @Return thats a useful way to use an existing image as a mask. Appreciate the video. Would never have throught of it otherwise.

Same here that video is gold this was driving me nuts as to how it works. The weird thing with raster masks in Designer if you use a black and white image and drop it as a mask it acts like a single color image. If you create a mask later you can paint in black (subtractive) and white (additive). But the raster mask doesn't work that way. This is weird.

Thanks Trent this really upped my understanding in this area. Hopefully we get AI based background removal soon as this process is so common and time consuming. Your tutorial style is excellent. I'm going through your Youtube channel now lots of great stuff.

Wow Mike, that's a really well written manual, in publisher I'm guessing. Thanks so much this is really useful as I'm about to embark on a big new pub project. I really like the Tips very useful guidance. The section on master pages and spreads is very in depth and it's my least understood area. Serif need to improve their supporting documentation. The inbuilt help is terrible to use, hard to read the layout isn't helpful and hard to find anything relevant. Their videos are good but its the wrong format it you are stuck mid work. They should take some tips from this. The books they published were great but now way out of date, they should do a digital update (paid) for each major release or as an add on to the product package.

Need AVIF i they can write a convertor in node JS how hard can it be? Is there a votable feature list for Affinity?

I've moved to Figma 100% - I only use this for publishing, photo masking and compositing, things that Figma can't do very well as its vector based. Also to be fair Affinity SVG is much better than Figma too so I use it to clean Figma SVG exports. Figma even has a warning that exports are pixel misaligned. Another good idea.

I have a table where all the headings are the same on every page but the values are blank so the heading values are in the master. I only have empty image frames but they get copied empty on top of the actual instances if I apply the master page. I do have placeholder text in the master text frames I should remove it as its more trouble.

It kind of breaks my mental model too that updating the master table format doesn't update all the pages which is what I want. Seems due to limitations (the text frame is unlinked) you have to do it for every instance page at a time or am I missing a trick on how to do this?

Thanks I thought you could just detach any layer within. Much appreciated.

I can't detach the master there is no edit detached action - thats the issue, Can you also point to where the green line is explained in the online help as its not obvious what it means

Not in my file unfortunately, I cut it down to two pages and it's still broken, it's hard to analyse as it probably been through most 1.0 upgrades as the file has been around a a couple of years and copied numerous times. I reported it as a bug Serif will need to look at the file structure to determine the cause. Thanks for taking the time to look further.

This was a 1.0 file I upgraded to 2.0. If I create a new V2 file the problem does not occur. I have a table on the master page it used to have a bottom border but I removed it. The linked page to this master still has the border and there is no way you can edit it to remove it. I have the simplest file attached - try and edit the borders on the table of page 1 using V2. In the actual file I can't apply the master as it has placeholder content that conflicts with the pages content. Thanks for taking a look TableBugAP2.afpub

I created a new V2 file and I get edit detached action but not on the legacy file looks like a file upgrade issue. The table is locked and uneditable.

Thanks for replying.Linked means it's a page linked to the master the layers panel uses the term unlinked attributes for those part that aren't linked so everything else is linked to the master. The edit detached action is not there when I'm on the page later for the table. It has a dotted green line and says unlinked attributes etc. But there is no edit detached action which I'd been looking for. This was 1.0 file I updated to 2.1.1 could be it hasn't got everything it needs for it to work in 2.1.1.

I have a table in the master table with a bottom border set in each cell. In the pages linked with the master applied, it shows the table in layers as unlinked attibutes Text and Text Frame. This is so you can style the cell text & cell frame independently from the master. Except you can't change the bottom border. Selecting and cell with a border in the page shows no cell styling contextual controls and everything in the Table Window is disabled. Applying a Table format where the borders are removed also does nothing. Removing the borders in the master won't work either because they are unlinked and I can' apply the master as the unlinked text content means it just makes a mess of duplicate content. Is this a bug that you cannot edit the cell border in an unlinked table from the master table? Either that or its a terrible UX if there is a way as its impossible to discover? I would think that you could individually modify the unlinked cells but none of the cell formatting controls are enabled.

Yes i'd agree more trouble than it's worth

Agree spend ages fixing sub pixel issues that should not be there - it drives you absolutely nuts, the setting fight against you as move by whole pixels keeps the subpixel. It really needs a always align to pixel boundaries setting - which you can then disable if you need any sub-pixel nudging - I do simpler things in Figma Free now as it so much better at it as it uses a simple snap to pixel setting.