gdenby

X*2 + Y*2 is (X + Y)*2, not (X + Y)*4.
If your question is actually “Given a rectangle of width X and height Y, how do I double the area instead of quadrupling it?” then the answer is that you need to multiply each dimension by sqrt(2) instead of 2.

You can also use OnyX.app. Freeware, but be sure to get the version for your OS. It is also a good system maintenance app
As far as the re-sizing, you can batch process w. Preview. Open a bunch, select all, go to tools/adjust size, and change the resolution. save

Want to rotate an object at 38.8deg by 15/30/45/60deg?
Click 'Reset Selection Box' on context toolbar, and rotate away.
Affinity has the best of both worlds

! Fine work. I checked out the "staging" page. Well documented. I admire how you could work within the task constraints, and keeping within you time budget.

I can snap rotation centers to guides, simply by dragging it to the guide!
 
OK, my hand must have been a mess yesterday. It was raining, and my arthritis was off the charts. Every time I dragged the center to the guides, it would end up just slightly off. Guess I couldn't even manipulate the mouse. Worked fine this morning. Checked in the transform dialog, and it was accurate to 2 decimal points.
Thanks for correcting that Aammppaa.

Hi, PMV,
Switch your view mode to pixels, or pixels (retina) if you are on a mac. You will see the actual pixel rendering of the vectors is quite jagged. At the least, the banner will have anti-aliasing artifacts. 
I looked into the file a bit more, having tried saving it in various formats, and noticed the when saved as .svg, and opened in Firefox and Chrome, the letters "The Hidden Costs..." rendered clearly, while the others did not. Likewise the orange enclosing shape was a blurred mess. The letters that were blurred were still as text, while the others were vector curves, and surrounded by an fx outline. The orange line enclosure was also formed by an fx. Both were being rasterized. 
Change the orange vector to have a thick stroke, and give the" Data.." letters a stroke instead of the outline, you should be able to export as .svg, which all contemporary browsers support, and have something as cleans as can be expected. Both .jpg and .png will look better too, tho' have the inevitable anti aliasing artifact that are caused by converting to a pixel format.

I have no issue snapping a rotated rectangle to a guide, simply by dragging it to the guide!

I can snap rotation centers to guides, simply by dragging it to the guide!

Here is a way to straighten your PDF scans…
Place your image to be straightened. Draw a rectangle over the image, aligned to the edge you are trying to straighten NOTE: Hold rightmouse (on PC) to draw a rotated rectangle along a line. In Layers Panel drop your image inside the rectangle. Straighten the rectangle, holding Shift, so that it snaps to horizontal. In Layers Panel drag image out of the rectangle. Delete rectangle.
Alternatively: If you own Photo, the crop tool has a straighten function.
https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/pages/SizeTransform/cropping.html

Yes, well do what I said.

Draw the path you want, (fill it with a colour, any colour) then control plus click on the path layer thumbnail. That makes a pixel selection.

Select the image layer and hide the path layer. You are left with a selection on the image.

Add an adjustment layer. That will "mask the adjustment layer to the selection area.

It is slightly harder in Designer than in Photo (two more clicks) because Designer is an Illustration program, not a bitmap editing program like Photo but it is still very easy to do.
 
 

Hello again
the mistake I made was that
1.) I sometimes did not close some triangles. Therefore some lines could not be continued and the triangle not be closed. As the result the incomplete lines remain kind of thin and pink and the white dots do not disappear like you can see on above screen print. I thought that if triangles are next to each other, they will share the same line but this is not correct. Each triangle needs three lines leading to each corner.
2.) I did not know and could not see it anywhere (there is no video about it) that when starting a new corner it has to be held and positioned on top of the existing one in that way that the existing lines show a thin yellow line. This proves that they are lying exactly on top of each other. Same with the corners. They need to turn yellow when holding them on top of each other.  So if you have like 5 triangles sharing a corner, all lines and the corner have to turn yellow (when grabbing it) if perfect. 
This is partly what it looks like now. It is a lot of work and very time consuming. I did not finish it yet, but the first result looks promising. The red lines will be removed still and changes still be made.
I hope this will help the next person when searching. Otherwise please just contact me for help. I also hope that it is understandable what I wrote. 

 
 
 
 
 
 

Hi, jimmyplaysdrums,
This is an interesting thread.
Of the last set, my preference is for row 3. 
I've looked at tarot decks, but never used them. I've only known 2 people who ever did, so I don't know if the effort on row 5 would have much response. My only divinatory use for cards is a couple rounds of solitaire in the morning to tell me if I should drink some more coffee, or maybe just pile back into bed.
A suggestion. Some decks have the pips within a border. A border could be made variable, and thicker/thinner to show top and bottom. Likewise, if you wanted to inject some color beyond red & black the boarder could have that. 

See the keyboard shortcut for your OS in the menu Select/Select All

See the keyboard shortcut for your OS in the menu Select/Select All

hi, exurbanite,
I just turned 68, and think I know some of what you are feeling. Can't tell you how many thousands of hours of work I've lost to dead programs, dead platforms, programs that suddenly required learning a whole new language. 
To the problem. Large numbers of  people posting here are trying to migrate out of the subscription model. If you can save your files of as .pdf format, it is likely you can use them in the Affinity apps. So maybe you old files can be continued. 
I'm semi-fortunate. At this point, my hands can do computer graphics as well as going back to pen and paper. Which I avoid, because what I could once do makes what I can now do look childish. That aside...
If you are scanning, some things. Work on nice smooth paper. I recently scanned a 45 year old pencil drawing that was done on whatI recall as a paper called 80 lb Bristol board.  A hot pressed, coated piece of what was called tag paper. It was still nice an smooth, so the scan ended w/o any shadows from paper texture.
Make your sketches as high contrast as possible. No smudgy pencil. No semi-tranperant marker. Pen or brush, and India ink. Removing flaws from those in the digital file is vastly easier than trying to find and remove a bunch of erased pencil lines.
Scan at the highest resolution you can.
Affinity does not have a built in vectorizer tool. There are lots out there, some free, others inexpensive and easy to use. They can often give very good results when working on clean, high contrast images. Depending on the application, smooth grey scale areas will also render well as distinct grey areas.
When these are brought into Affinity (I've always used the .svg format) every area will appear as individual curve layers, as defined by the grey level. B&W, everything will be a blob for black.Grey scale, the areas may float on top of each other from lighter to darker Every detached  dot or stroke will be its own layer. These can be selected one by one, or in masses, and assigned different fill colors, and strokes.
Not easy-peezy, I tend to go off on tangents, unlike when I was younger, and 6 hours a day of focus was the base line. 
 
 

Ad a light blue shape above the end of the river

Note, you can type in any number of cog teeth, not just what the slider allows.

Hi, simongg,
Just an ordinary user here. Don't mind complaining too much, but I am a little confused by some of your problems.
My opinion, if your bank accepts passwords of just 6 passwords, I'd use a different bank as soon as possible.
I'd never tried to use keynote before reading you post. Took me about 15 minutes to find the drawing functions. They are very rudimentary, and couldn't do much. I looked at Assembly, also new to me. 180 pre-made shapes are nice starting points. But Affinity's 20+ built in shapes have so many variations. Took me 3 weeks to try out every variable for every shape.  Expect to spend some time exploring.
I have really bad arthritis, and other problems. Using the touch interface is really hard for me. But I'm not having problems selecting objects, even strokes. Likewise, w. the node tool active I can usually get to any individual node, tho' sometimes I need to zoom in if using my fingers alone. Can you detail what is happening for you? 
Note, the built in shapes do not have nodes that can be broken. They need to be converted to "curves" befor working  w. nodes.
I much prefer using the pencil.
Like you, I often touch the screen w. other parts of my hand than the fingers. Often get things dialogues popping up, are strokes I never tried to make. I've seen adds for gloves that help block the signals from the rest of the hand other than the first 3 fingers. According to one vid, you can make on from an old sock. Again, that's why I prefer using a pencil. 
You are quite right. Learning a new app can be very time consuming. Affinity is pretty easy, maybe a  hundred hours to come up to speed, assuming you are as slow as I am. 

Hi, AlyceG
There is another limited work around. Any pen line has an associated pressure curve, which can be used to modify the stroke width. The pressure can be adjusted to form a reasonable arrow head, and then the line can be saved as a style, and applied to any stroke. See attachment.
Another work around is to use the Artistic text tool, and apply an arrow glyph as a text character.

Hi, AlyceG
There is another limited work around. Any pen line has an associated pressure curve, which can be used to modify the stroke width. The pressure can be adjusted to form a reasonable arrow head, and then the line can be saved as a style, and applied to any stroke. See attachment.
Another work around is to use the Artistic text tool, and apply an arrow glyph as a text character.

Hi, n8_xo,
First, work thru the interface. Where are the controls, and what do they do? I started w. the desktop versions, and the layout of the iPad versions is sufficiently different that I'm having to re-learn how to do what I already can. Thankfully, I stopped using Adobe products about 10 years ago, so I'm not having to try and translate methods from those which became habitual to how the Affinity apps might do the same. I see lots of people post here thing like "Here's how I did this w Photoshop," or "I saw this tutorial for Illustrator, how do I do the same w. Designer?" Sometimes it is doable, tho' quite different. Other times not because the Adobe suite has decades of development, and has all sorts of odds and ends for specific operations.
There are ever more Affinity specific tutes available online. Here's one I watched yesterday that seemed to me to offer good grounding. 
I should mention that even after more than 30 years w. computer graphics, it still took me about 3 weeks to start using AD smoothly. You are younger, so I s'pose will come up to speed faster. Still, expect Homer Simpson moments when you are stumped, and ask a question here, and the obvious answer is pointed out. And you get to go "D'oh!"

And if I want it to work as I expected it to work, like pixel masking, I can cover all the canvas with a vector layer, then make another vector shape, and combine then, like this :-) 
 

There's another way, tho' it is complicated. Select the object. Go to the stroke studio, and add an appropriate stroke to the object. With the object selected, go to the pen tool, and use click the  "use fill" button. Then with the fill tool, select "gradient" fill type. After setting the gradient, go to the color studio, and set the gradient control nodes to whatever color. 

Hi, Phil_rose,
Over all, it works. "It is too early... it is still dark. Where's the coffee? Ah there!"
Please take the following as being constructive, tho' rather nit picking.
The bright white curve highlight on the bottom half of the cup is not evident on the top portion. It also extends somewhat below the bottom line of the rest of the cup. The highlights on the "Coffee" lettering are slightly slanted, and not straight from the side. There is no luminous gradient across the letters. To get even "nittier" the band w. "Coffee" on it also does not have any trace of a highlight.

Subscription services are like eating tape worms so you can eat as much sugar as they like.

Subscription services are like eating tape worms so you can eat as much sugar as they like.

Hi, JASN,
 The envelope warp tool is much requested, and according to reports, on the way. Do note that it took Adobe 10 version upgrades to have it, so Serif's Affinity getting it before v.2 is doing pretty good.