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.

Don't worry guys, AI will decimate the industry within five years anyway. There won't even be any point to software by then.

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.

I'm pretty sure that Macromedia and Freehand also saw a bright future on the horizon...
 
So yeah, a subscription based V3 is just around the corner.

Honestly Ash this is not first time I am seeing this, and none of what you say now, really kept. All of the software that I use, and that were purchased like this, end up as only subscription model, and their development pace was cut half. Same talk. Same promises and wishes, and outcome is always the same. It would be huge surprise for me that different happens to Affinity.

Canva is a subscription model, as Serif inform us themselves. So much for the 'No Subscriptions' tagline. We'll be 'allowed' to keep our current version, then from the next 0.1 revision we'll be offered a discount. 

The writing is on the wall. Serif have sold out.

Yeah, I’ve not a good feeling about it. 
 
That reads to me as, from v3 it’ll be different. 
 
I really really hope we don’t get any Canva crap to deal with and subscription stays away. I’m not that loyal. 
 
 

We’ve all been around the block and saw what happened to PaintShopPro when Corel acquired it (and how it turned into a bloated horrible mess). I feel sad that the Affinity apps will head in the same direction. Really is a sad day. 

LOL! I still have Adobe CS2 on my XP machine! If worse comes to worse...

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.

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.

I'm affected by this so much I've just started looking into other apps. 
 
AD is increasingly death by a thousand cuts. "Small" but important problems have been ignored for years. It's just not cut out for serious interface work.
 
Figma and Sketch and Penpot get this right. Fireworks, Freehand and all the apps of the past got it right. Where did it all go wrong?

I spent 2 hours trying to get 9 artboards and all their background layers all aligned so I could export to the right size rather than 1 pixel bigger than it should be with a transparent edge. This is not OK as a workflow. There are tools like Sketch that make pixel alignment very easy and there is a button where you can select a object and say snap to pixels and bam no sub-pixels. 
In Affinity even though the property panel looks like it's on the pixel boundary 780  it isn't because if you turn on 3 significant places on the pixels display (trick I found in forum on this issue) it's actual 780.029. I don't want to have to wrangle to 3 significant places to get my art aligned for export! Nor do I want to have to be worrying about 100ths of a pixel cluttering my property display.  If the force pixel alignment is ON then it should never allow a layer to be off the pixel grid when creating or moving it and ALL X/Y should be integral. 
I have to admit I was a big fan and advocate to other UX designers of this product until now, but it's such a ridiculous thing to implement as it is that I have lost a lot of faith in it.
Stop adding new features and fix the fundamentals you are being told about by professional designers. Or stop claiming this is a professional tool because it clearly isn't. Because for all it's excellent parts it let down by flawed thinking in the fundamentals. I'm not the only voice here there are many threads here on the same topic from professional designers. 

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.

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

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.

Perhaps this will give you some pointers.

2023-10-21 12-15-04.mp4    

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.

This is what I enjoy so much about these forums: Useful information brought to us all by forum members who know what they are talking about. Thank you, all.

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.

Quick Tips: for finding Affinity content with Google Search
Search engines: It’s easy to underestimate the power of a simple Google search (and it’s apparent many people on online forums who don’t know how to make use of it).  It can save you a lot of time, because someone, somewhere, at some point has undoubtedly had the same question you have—all you need to do is find out where they asked it and what answers and problem solutions they got in response!

With a few helpful Google search engine tricks, searching the Affinity Forum via Google can be made much more effective.

The Common Search
In general, you should string search terms with a space together to start the context search. Thus, the input "Affinity forum gradient" or "Affinity forum macro" in the search window shows all found link entries on the screen which contain those terms. Quoting ("...") helps to search after more closely related search text here.

Extended or Exclusive Search
To make Google search more effective, you should use so-called operators. Here are some of them.
A tilde (~) before a search term makes the term synonymous. So "Affinity ~forum" brings both the Affinity forum as well as hints for possible other related forums. With a minus sign (-) you can specifically exclude terms from the search. For example, the minus designer in "Affinity layer masks -designer" calls up a list of Affinity layer masks related entries without designer in the context. With a plus sign (+) you can instead specifically include terms to the search criterias.
Search in and for Websites
To specifically search a particular website/page, prefix your search term with a "site:URL" - where the URL is the web address of the site/page on which you read the info recently. For example, "site:affinity.forum.com macro recording" searches and calls for a list of threads which deal with macro recording on the Affinity forum.
A minus sign in the "-site:URL" input behind the actual search terms excludes results from the named URL. So "Affinity video -site:youtube.com" will exclude all Youtube videos from the search. With "site:de" it will only search German websites with the extension .de; Of course, other endings like .org or .com etc. can also be used here. With "related:URL" you can find out if other websites have similar content. In order to browse only publications from a specific period, you must connect the adjacent years with three points: here "2014...2018" only lists publications between 2014 and 2018 in the results list. For example in order to find at affinity.forum.com current practical contributions to macro recording you would use "site:affinity.forum.com macro recording 2016...2018".
  Some helpful browser shortcuts
To speed up the search in general, there are a few shortcuts available. For example, "Ctrl + F" will bring up a small search window at the bottom of the page that will help you to search the current page for terms. Ctrl + or - enlarges the view, zooms in or out. Ctrl + L moves the cursor back to the address bar so you can enter a new website or search term.
 
Calculations, units of measurement and currencies
The Google search engine can also calculate and convert. For those of you who struggle with mental arithmetic, just type the math questions directly into the Google search window using the +, -, * / symbols. This calls at the same time the calculator for further input of even more complicated tasks.
If you want to convert units of measure or currencies, you can also type these directly into the search window. Thus, the input "inches in millimeters" picks up a unit calculator, with "pounds in euros" you get the current price displayed as well as references to various currency converters.

Updated for Publisher 2.4 (February 2024)
This free in-depth manual is filled with steps, tips, and recommendations for:
Documents, Pages, Master Pages, Sections, and Baseline Grid Character and Paragraph Formatting Text Styles (paragraph and character) Text Frames, Text Flow, and Stories Images and Picture Frames Books and Chapters Cross-References, Table of Contents, and Index Notes - including Footnotes, Sidenotes, and Endnotes Fields - including Page Numbering, Running Headers, and Custom Variables Anchors and Hyperlinks Printing and Exporting Settings This manual does not cover objects, drawing, photo editing, or the other artistic features.
Download:
Publisher Manual Feb 26 2024.pdf
Q&A
Is this really free? Yes, I'm making it available free of charge. It's copyrighted to prevent others from publishing it as their own. Is there a longer manual I can purchase? No, this is it. Is there an iPad version? No, the steps and screenshots are for the macOS and Windows versions. Is there a version for Designer or Photo? No, but many of the features are the same so you should still find it useful. Why does it use a print layout if it's a PDF? It's a demonstration of how to use the features it describes to create a print book. Previous version for 2.3:
Publisher Manual Nov 29 2023.pdf

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

You have the table layer selected inside the masterpage layer.
You should select the masterpage layer and there you can edit detached or linked.

You generally shouldn't have Move by Whole Pixels enabled, for most work