Frank Jonen

There's hope. FontLab is getting a better interface in version 6. More and more people move to Glyphs though. I haven't given it much of a look myself but from what I've been hearing it's fast, makes common tasks easy and is less tech focused and more creative supporting than FontLab Studio (which is very tech focused). There are more options now to get started.

In general I keep what I like. When I use a font from a dead foundry, I tend to fix it myself. When I like a font but it's crap, I see if it's worth fixing it alltogether ot fix the parts I use, when I use them. I have a lot of good TrueType OpenType fonts and some bad PostScript OpenType fonts. You can't generalise by extension what quality or versatility a font has. While TTFs type of hinting is more screen orientated, Post Script works better on film rasterisers for print. These font sync apps don't take up much CPU, but install Little Snitch (or otherwise monitor your outgoing traffic) and you'll rather quickly uninstall some of them

BTW, I'm editing a piece of lettering with a crap font. Someone thought it's awesome to place 7 nodes seemingly on top of each other. It'd be nice to have a counter for nodes as well. Not just items. With Google Fonts for example the availability of really terribly made fonts has increased. Tools that help coping with that decline in outline quality would certainly be welcome.

Not sure if a bug. Bezier tool: The right control point isn't snapping to anything. Left control point snaps to guides. Feels like a bug since both should be snapping. Smooth or smart options. Happens with both. All snaps are on. Full Schnapps ahead!

Possibly the most affordable variants out there for pro panels. And they have an API. http://www.tangentwave.co.uk

That had happened already. Adobe famously told Pixar engineers to fk off, that they don't know the format they invented (EXR) to begin with. Now we have a similar issue with ACES. Adobe doesn't care. They have Adobe RGB and Kodak's ProPhoto RGB and that is enough for them. Which is understandable. Adobe created this island where it's hard to get in and out of by purchasing post production tools. So a lot of people just stay in there and accept it. That's why I'm so glad we have Affinity now. Which had the downside that I have to fix textures and mattes that don't hold up in 32-Bit space exposure changes because they were done in Photoshop. Not fun, but as more people move over that is going down as well. As for the compositing workflows. As long as it's documented how channels go together I'm fine with it. It leaves room for continued innovation in how renderers handle data. Chaos Group just made it super easy with how they're treating the output to go together all additively. There's also a book by Ron Brinkmann on digital compositing that goes into why things go together the way they do.

If you haven't already, what you want to do is flatten before converting to output formats. Blending reacts vastly different in floating point spaces than in integer ones. With online photo services I'd stick to 8-Bit JPEGs with embedded sRGB colour profiles. With sRGB you technically don't need a profile, but I've seen things go so utterly wrong with untagged files that I'm never doing this again. Especially with wide gamut displays that are actually set to wide gamut. For these you still need to convert to and embed Adobe RGB or the reds will overshoot. When you see these overshoots, it's not a majority. No need to panic. If it looks good on an iPad, that's what counts. PNG has issues with some browsers still with 16-Bit display getting the gamma wrong. Especially on mobile (Android). If your 32-Bit files look right in ICC sRGB (Linear) - Affinity's default space, all you need to do is flatten the document, THEN convert to 8-Bit for portfolio use. This converts nicely to sRGB.

And Levels. That's the big one for me. I only use it for the Gamma slider (that stops at 2.0), for everything else levels related I bring in a LUT.

I've done the thing today where you duplicate a line of text (one word) expand the outline of text and merge it. Goal is to have a second vector outline that can be shifted. Try it. Set the outline to around 10pt @ 300dpi with like a 100pt text. Set the outline to outside and do as I did. Maybe that example can help with diagnosing the issue. It requires a lot of cleanup and the outsides intersect. Geometric Sans 'T' shapes often bulge out on the sides and top instead of being straight. I vaguely remember similar shape issues from the first version of Illustrator that had a variant of Streamline (yeah, not really) implemented. It was bulging out as well on angles close to or at 90° and close to or at 45°. I always had to redraw these sections back then. Maybe this is similar, maybe not, but there it is.

Just tried it. Does the same here. Another thing. When I start a document in 16-bit mode and go up to 32-bit. The Artboard backdrop gamma isn't converted but assigned it seems. Brightness comes way up when I do that.

I used to have a font like that. Numbers were spaces that matched leadings from my Weiss Antiqua drawer. Top row had various dot shapes with various spacings (lowercase regular, uppercase 2x). Home row I think were underline options with various cuts for descenders. I don't know where that went, but maybe it's time to make one like that again.

I've reset Designer and now it works. Something got screwed up. BTW is there a way to make the text frame being persistent instead of going away constantly once I select another object? More questions: How do I set the character to be repeated, the distance from fill characters to word? The part that the reset didn't fix: I'm still flying blind when setting up tabs, no visual way to see the tabs in context. No invisible characters, no tab editor. Just the little list. What I found in the list: When you confirm edits in the list with 'enter', the entry gets deleted, you have to use tab to go out of editing the value of the tab stop (when you edit it within the list).

Quite likely Vray just comes in as scene linear. Going from Chaosgroup's support pages: If you haven't set up OCIO in Vray, there is nothing there to manage colours. When you output from Affinity you can uncheck "Perform OCIO conversions based on filename" in the preferences if you don't use OCIO (but have an OCIO config installed) to avoid confusions with filenames. Good luck with the renders

Your file works for me, I just can't create these here. I tried setting different languages on yours, no influence. They kept working. Hmm. Weird. Thanks for posting it. For now I'll just keep editing a copy of that whenever I need tabs. Not ideal, but whatever works.

I'm using 32-bit almost every day in Affinity Photo. If you only know 32-bit from Photoshop you'll find a few things different here. Besides ICC sRGB Linear, you have the option of viewing and translating your image through OCIO transforms and exporting with the OCIO "profiles" attached to your EXRs (add the name of the OCIO transform to your file when exporting - daft, but works). The most popular OCIO configuration right now is nuke_default, it's most compatible with regular sRGB / Adobe RGB workflows. You can download the config here: http://opencolorio.org/configurations/index.html If you work in an ACES workflow with other facilities, ask for the version or have them send you their config. You can just use these in Affinity without any extra work. That goes for Designer and Photo. So you can do complex vector work as well without leaving your project's colour space. Particularly great for making displacement maps with vector shapes, design and export in 32-bit float and no worries about stair-stepping (unless you use ZBrush, 16-bit integer limit there for alphas, maybe R8 has 32-bit now, but R7 still hat the 16-bit limit) I'm not familiar with Vray outputs as I haven't used it yet. But it looks very straight forward from their website. Set it all to Add and hope for the best. So far I've dealt only with Modo and Mantra renders in Affinity. No reason why Vray shouldn't work, especially since it's all additive. Select all layers and set it to Add. For the advanced mode you could experiment with setting a group to Add and blend layers within that group. The output of that group will then be additively blended. If your image looks too dark, the sRGB gamma is baked in. Set the viewer to Gamma 2.2. Looks right? > Add a Levels layer on top of that stack and set the gamma to 2 and another Levels layer set to 1.2. Levels top out at a value of 2. If the image is too bright, same dance, different shoes. Set all to Gamma 0.454545 (it'll round to 0.455) and you only need one Levels layer for that. In OCIO you set sRGB to Linear or Linear to sRGB for the same thing then. With one exception. ACES doesn't yet have a path back to true ICC sRGB, I'm still working on that. Blur is just a blur, it's not a defocus node, so it only blurs things. Affinity Photo has a defocus node, but it has no inputs. All channels come in as regular layers. You need to make your own masks / alphas from them. Except your alpha, which you can set to: Delete the masked area (like Photoshop) - Perturb zero EXR alpha. (perturbed describes how you feel after using it) Mask the mask area (fill alpha to white to get it back) - Associate OpenEXR alpha channels Leave your file the fk alone. - "Uncheck Everything!"™ - That way the alpha is just a regular layer. I call it "serenity mode". In some cases the un-premult mode can be useful, you get that with "Post divide EXR colours by alpha" I use the Depth channel this way: Duplicate it make sure I got the right 0 - 1 ratio dialled in Layer > Rasterise to Mask hide Whenever I need it, I make a duplicate of the mask and add it to a group (as group mask), then do the atmospherics for example within that mask. Now IF we had symbols available in Affinity Photo without having to go through Designer, we could have ONE mask and instance it. Hi there @Andy Somerfield There are probably reasons why Symbols aren't in Photo, as I manage to crash Designer on a regular basis by keeping on editing them. Now imagine people putting a whole filter stack into a symbol and re-using that on every other layer group. I hope that helped a bit and didn't make it more confusing. Affinity just has more options in that department than Photoshop.

Yes, with a tailored test to just one tabstop, it sort of works. Now try with a real world scenario. Word . . . . . . . . . Centred Part . . . . . . 1234.56 _ _ _ _ Right Aligned Word should be Left aligned, Centred should be aligned centre, numbers should be aligned by dot, right aligned should be aligned right. Instead it does absolutely nothing.

That's pretty much what I suspected. I think it's something that'll need to be addressed somehow, otherwise new users will constantly ask about it in the future, creating support overhead / frustration. The way I ended up with the inflation was when I tidied up the project and aligned all artboards evenly by distributing horizontal centres. So a way you could deal with this would be to tell the align tools to only use full pixels when dealing with artboards. Another option would be to only allow artboard edges at full pixels. That way it doesn't matter what any tool does to them. I haven't used artboards in the Adobe apps much before because of how annoying the apps started to behave with them in use. So my expectation set is: Artboard = document, artboards = documents within a document. Each with their own 0,0 point. So given an own 0,0 point, the path from 0 to 1024 should end at 1024, no matter where the artboard is placed. Placement of the artboard on the infinite canvas should not be able to interfere with how it is converted to a slice. That just makes no sense from a user standpoint as the "sub document" itself is pixel accurate. The only thing that does is create frustration.

Bug: Typography Engine, General Tab stops. There's no visual editor for placing them. It's guesswork. (AKA: Not good) The fill characters don't fill. Just one instance is placed. Edit: Alignments in tabs do nothing. Glyph browser distorts all glyphs to a square preview box, already reported by someone else in last version IIRC.

Bug: Export Persona When you set artboard positions to non integer values, the slice tool will get the values wrong. You'll get 1025 x 1024 on a 1024 square for example. Set it to an integer position and it gets it right.

Yes, I was expecting it to commit, but… your view brings up an interesting option. Why not have all scale, rotate, shear, etc. operations as modifiers (maybe with a toggle for cases where modifiers would be overkill)? This could also help with getting the vector warps done quicker, I reckon. Also helps with iteration. If you have modifiers exposed to the user in the layer stack. Similar to the fx or adjustment layers. That'd also make it possible to quickly apply complex transforms to a lot of items at once, maybe even store a modifier stack in a symbol-like fashion. Once you're good with how something looks and want to refine manually, click 'bake to object' and it's applied to your object. Or hold alt + click and create a new object with the modifiers applied while hiding and thus preserving the original.

Is the "Reset Selection Box" supposed to bounce right back when the object is de-selected?

Indeed there are. If you're doing stroke gradients it's absolutely maddening to constantly bring up that tiny widget at the top of the screen. After a while I just gave up, used an online gradient generator and brought it in with an SVG. The "creative" solution was for the birds, I can't actually see the gradient behind the blue overlay. Even when I make the stroke the wrong size just so I can see the colours during editing, the overlay distorts colour perception, so does changing the line width. I found the on-document solution to be quite terrible for a lot of use cases. You can't type in percentages of stops, you can't just click through and have the next stop placed at the 50% point between the stop you just placed and the next. It's a frustration bath for so many things. Everything has to be made in tedious manual steps and with guesswork. The time that takes just isn't available for creative tasks anymore then. This caused me to look for other options, like the various online tools for gradient generation. Also a thing that'd be useful with gradients in general but nobody bothers with is gamma lock or in HSL/HSV a saturation and luma / value lock. That way a gradient would always have the same saturation and lightness while blending across hues only. Right now it's a matter of checking and re-typing on each stop. We can edit all the values, why not put a little lock icon next to them? Linking would be useful as well. An easy way to bring up the values of an HSV gradient all at once, or decrease the saturation. This would save an additional adjustment layer. Adjustment layers can become quite expensive when part of a symbol group. This would be a simpler way.

Lines can't be turned off for active objects. Problems this causes: Accurate colour decisions can't be made while an object is selected. Myriads of unnecessary clicks to constantly deselect, select, call up the tool again, adjust the value, da capo. Accurate placements to non snapping objects because it's impossible to see past the UI edge overlay. Given the problems this causes, I think it qualifies as a bug. Also arrow key movements with the hand tool selected were once possible (so the outline overlay isn't in the way), but then it got broken.

Also can we have the Gradient panel detachable? It's extremely annoying to always have to mess about in the top left corner of the screen in a tiny area instead of where it's comfortable, like right next to the object you're working on for example. Also for complex gradients it should be able to scale that window/panel up ridiculously large. Especially when you have to simulate physical materials in a texture that have hard stops.

I'd much rather see implementations like Resolve or Baselight.