WillBellJr

^I'm literally here for the SAME reason - the wifey is printing out a business card design in Publisher v2 and I was looking in the layer list for a way to just "non-printable" the Avery layer and welp, here I am typing... Now if this is fixed for v2, I haven't found it yet... ...And if it isn't fixed in V2 what the heck is going on? Reallly?? -Will

I'm here today looking for a similar "Notation" field. I'm currently using Designer to create icons for my Loupedeck Live. A couple of months back I had to perform a backup restore due to a browser plugin borking my system, I lost the first configuration I created (didn't know how to export the config at the time), and I didn't save the individual images - I would just load them into LD as I created them. This time around I've created a nicely organized Designer document, and I'm saving out all the individual PNG images! The majority of the icons reference websites, or folder / file links on my computer - being able to save a snippet of text on a non-rendering "(sticky) Note" layer would have been perfect for saving the hyperlink associated with each icon. Yes, I will use a hidden text layer to accomplish similar, but I'd request - please consider; having say a small colored square icon at the end of a layer (similar to say the Lock symbol), could denote that some informative text is included for that layer - clicking it would pop up a panel revealing the text which can be selected and copied from, or edited. This way I'm keeping all my icon information in one spot. What prompted this was I noticed the LoupeDeck was missing an icon on the display this morning (I was doing some export testing and apparently I overwrote a newer version) - I have the icon, but now I have to find the link to that forum post again - having that sticky Note text, would have saved me here! I'm adding this hyperlink information to my icons now... Thanks for your consideration. -Will

Hi, Medical Officer Bones, in my graphics software travels (oh the money I've thrown away in my day[/i], I have an old license of Photoline, which I hardly ever used, and hence, never updated - interesting to hear, the feature set has parity with Firework's abilities! I'll take a peek at it again, though now, I honestly, enjoy my Affinity tools way too much, and would prefer them to remain my goto apps for all my 2D graphics work... I believe I also took a quick look at OpenToonz back in the day, when I first heard about it - I forget why I didn't take a liking to it; perhaps the UI, don't remember now - I'll take a look at that again as well (you can never have too many graphics tools LOL!) Yep, I have an old license of ClipStudio Paint EX, I have yet to reinstall that software since I rebuilt my computer. Thanks for your suggestions - I WISH I, had FW CS6, I'd mostly likely still have it installed (I have AfterFX CS6, my last purchase right before Adobe switched to the dark side...) -Will

Another one here looking for DDS. Currently I'm trying to create Sky Boxes for a space game I'm working on (using the Spacescape program to generate starfield images - which exports DDS). With Unreal Engine 5, Unity, Godot and, Blender, YES, DDS is a very important checkmark for Affinity to have at this point in time, especially with the extremely powerful capabilities of all these game engines, and graphics programs. -Will

Currently I use Moho v13(.5) if you need a reference as to how I'm currently doing my 2D anims. I've been reading up on Spriter and Spine 2D as well; I love Moho for its vector based creation tools - I always prefer vector over pixel where possible. For games development, I've been using Unity and Unreal Engine for years, I'm currently learning Godot v3.x . I'd be appreciative of ANYTHING Affinity offers in this realm of graphics development! -Will PS - I selected a separate tool for 2D anims, because animation is not something trivial; especially w/bone anims and image warping (again I reference the tools listed above). I would however, absolutely LOVE if Affinity supported GIF animation the way (Adobe ugh!) Fireworks did in the past! Fireworks was THE BEST GIF animation and optimization tool available! Till this day I miss FW and at times I'm tempted to reinstall my Fireworks CS3 package, but that tool had bugs that was never fixed and the UI is way dated. Today I find myself using Camtasia to render out GIFs when I'm that desperate, but I'd LOVE if Affinity had GIF anim editing on par with what Fireworks offered back in the day, when it came to the color and file size optimizations it offered. I would take GIF editing / optimization features NOW, over everything else related to animation, that may be under consideration... ...Let me, ahem, restate that - I would take any kind of anim offerings from Affinity (thank you kindly), as long as it also supports GIF OUTPUT as well!..

I pre-ordered simply because I LOVE Affinity Designer and Photo, AND I want to show my support early and often! But I agree, w/every Publisher beta download, I'd try the Designer/Photo personas to consistently be greeted w/NO JOY as to the functionality working. How can Publisher be considered ready for release if we've never had an opportunity to try out the Designer and Photo personas - don't even know what can be done w/the extra functionality!?? Just saying.... -Will

Thanks, v_kyr! Funny cause when I went into my Affinity folder under my documents, I saw that I had already saved a YT video about Affinity Designer "Power Duplicates", which was helpful. I'll see which way I go - I'll start out w/Publisher since it's in beta and needs to be banged on to help out Serif. -Will

Hi folks, I ran across some old business cards I did for myself, back when I was doing freelance motion graphics designs and figured, yeah I need to make myself a new set of cards! Having both Designer and now Publisher in hand, Iwas kinda wondering and interested in any opinions which program I should attempt to do my new business card designs with? I'm thinking to save time, it would be nice to do a singular card design and have that copied across and down (10 cards - 2 x 5 per page layout). Perhaps using Symbols, and/or master page features - not sure which route would simplify making adjustments across all cards, or just simply copying the first design to the other card panels? Ideally, coming up with a method that would allow easily being able to create and copy across designs for the other, various Avery paper stock sets would be really nice. Any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated! -Will

Thanks so much for the update guys! I'll never be able to express how happy I am that you've obtained beta status for Affinity Publisher! My prayers for a successor to Page Plus have been answered! -Will

No-brainer purchase! Can't wait to get mine! Glad that both Designer and Photo are QUALITY, hardcover books - also nice to have great, readable offline, documentation for my favorite software! -Will PS - I'm still waiting for an "Affinity PagePlus" replacement for my beloved PagePlus program!..

I'm hoping similar Normal map tools will be added to Designer. While I can appreciate working with pixels, I like the precision and edit-ability of using vectors for the majority of my 3D artwork. I just prefer using vector tools along with any capabilities of placing bitmaps, filling vector shapes with (tiled) images etc. I used to use Fireworks, and this was done in Xara more recently, but now having Affinity Designer, I've dropped all that cruft and now only use my beloved Designer! I often work with texture sets like these as well: -Will

Congrats on the release candidates - so glad this program is coming to fruition and I FINALLY have a great replacement for Fireworks! I have a quick question - a big part of my job (when using Fireworks) is knocking out product images from their backgrounds. Under the Pixel Persona, the Selection Brush tool - how do you adjust the "sensitivity" of how much the brush selects? At times I'll select near the edge of the product within the image but the selection will "spill over" into the parts I want to keep. I see the Refine options, but traditionally that's for "cleaning up" the selection after the fact. How do you adjust the "Tolerance" / sensitivity of the Selection Brush tool? Thanks! -Will Edit: While I'm here before I forget, at times when see what I consider a "complex" selection, I'll usually draw out a rectangle, make it 50% transparent and then add nodes to fit around the object I wish to knock out - then (again using Fireworks), there's an option "Convert object to selection" - I'd love to see this in Designer! I see the option to Layer -> Rasterize to Mask, but it makes the image disappear in unmasked areas and the area under my shape becomes semi-transparent?? Guess I need to find the docs on this to understand why the remainder becomes dimmed out? All I need is a selection from which I can cut out the selected part and paste back in as a separate component / layer...

I'm getting a REPEATABLE crash when selecting pixels and then clicking the Refine... button. Also when cropping out pixels with the selection tools I can use the selection brush and get everything I want to delete selected (typically white backgrounds during a knockout) but then when I press Delete or Cut, when I select the object, the selection rectangle is WAY LARGER than the remaining pixels in the image? I have to go around using the erase brush, blindly wiping across transparent pixels to finally get the bounding box to collapse down to what I see as the remaining pixels. To perhaps visualize some "hanging pixels" I tried the Refine dialog but as I mentioned it constantly crashes for me using ..12. This is on Win8.1 Enterprise 64-bit. -Will PS - Also is there a way to control the "strength" or color range of the selection brush (Fireworks user here) - changing the brush size helps, but how can I control how many similar colors it selects?

How Oval? I just tried 3-times again just now? The last time I even held down the CTRL key?? With all 3 of my layers selected, I click and drag left with the mouse over the other open document. When I let go, the document the mouse is over is still empty? and the objects on the original are moved to the left outside the workspace I have to click undo... Holding down Alt ended up duplicating the selected objects - had to undo that. Searching for drag-and-drop in the manual talks about the style panel, I'm just attempting to drag across pixel and image layers. This is v1.5.0.10. -Will

Hi Oval, again, thanks for your help, I just wanted to report back that I've been successful! I'm currently working though my task using Designer which I would have totally needed Fireworks for (as a side note, I'm not that much of a Photoshop fan, I've ALWAYS preferred FW over PS; it's my love of Vector artwork, and the ability to add bitmap styling along with the ease of edit-ability of vectors!) The only thing I would do in FW which doesn't seem to work when I tried with AD was during the step to export final JPEGs from my source document (3200x3200) to my web-ready document (500x500). I start off by having the two documents open, sitting side-by-side. In FW, I would select all the various assemblies (layers) for the particular configuration being exported and >DRAG< the large source-layers over to the 500x500 document. (Which I then center snap to the document and then drag-scale down to fit within the 500x500 document). In FW, this is essentially a COPY operation where it copies all the selected objects into the selected layer of the drop-target document. In Affinity Designer, it would just drop all the objects off in space where ever I released the mouse button to finalize the drag-drop operation, even though my cursor was over the 2nd, target document. Of course I was able to get around this by doing a Copy / Paste to achieve the same, so no-harm-no-foul. (It would be nice though, if you could drag - drop between open documents, within AD!) Anyway, I'm straight! I LOVE Affinity Designer, it has saved from my Extinction-ware that I've been forced to use for so long now, and believe me I've TRIED EVERY OTHER VECTOR package out there, none of them are as nice as AD, even in its Beta phase! Kudos to Serif for having the courage to take on new development like this AND to the development team for putting out such high-quality work! -Will

^And there you have it - totally didn't read / realize this was possible! Thanks so much Oval (and Serif)! I'm actually thinking I can totally do everything I need within Designer today on this new project - I may finally be free of my need for (buggy) Fireworks CS4 at this point! Again, thanks for helping me, Oval, especially the pointer to the field expressions! -Will PS - In my defense, I typically always copy any PDF documentation to my dropbox and read it on my Kindle in my down time (my preferred way of learning my software). If Serif could find it in its heart to create a PDF manual for Affinity Designer when its finalized (using your lovely, ahem, PagePlus perhaps), I for one would truly appreciate it.

Are you talking about the panel that is by default next to the Navigator and History? That was the first panel I was looking at, but just now trying, I didn't realize I could just type 70% into the field - awesome! Thanks, you saved my day! -Will

Hi folks, today I'm attempting to do my work, (which I've always done in Fireworks) using Affinity Designer. In particular I take high resolution images of the devices we manufacture, knock them out from their backgrounds and then split the full device into its individual components. Typically, depending how how large the original images are, I work off a 3200 x 3200 canvas and scale the images down so I can fit all the individual components back together again >layer by layer< so I can create various "assemblies" for our "Device Configurator" website. One of the first things I'm missing is a numeric scale?? In this case I need to make sure I scale each component down by the same amount so they all mate back together within my document. I'm looking for a way to transform my images - scale in particular down by say 60% or so? I can easily select the image and drag-scale, but for this task I'd rather have fields or similar where I could just type in 60 and have the image accurately (and repeatably) scale down by that amount? I'm looking though the menus, but I don't see an option for that - I'm hoping I just need new glasses! If not, PLEASE add in a way to numerically scale images! For years now I've been looking for an app to replace my beloved Firework - AD is so close! I was thinking I could actually do everything I need now with AD now, until I ran across this one omission... -Will

I'm on my way of using Designer to replacing Adobe Fireworks and so far I'm LOVING IT. I don't use the web page related features, just the vector / bitmap synergy and Designer is providing a lot of that already! I do however tend edit a lot of GIFs, so I do hope Designer will may one day do the same. -Will