R C-R

I had customized the toolbar in earlier betas, mostly just by replacing flexible spaces with regular ones, but also by rearranging & adding a few things. When I opened 133 for the first time, I also saw the mysterious "Rotate anticlockwise in plane" button, but also a "Snapping Options" one that duplicated the options of the down-arrow menu in the regular "Snapping" button group. Neither of these items appears in the customize toolbar menu. Also, several of the items that previously were in my customized toolbar (& are in the customize options menu) were missing -- the regular spaces that I used to separate them were there but among others the "Wrapping," "Tool Options," & "Defaults" button groups failed to make the transition from the previous to this beta. Dragging them back into the toolbar worked OK, but the "Assistant" button is missing & no longer in the customize toolbar menu so I can't add it back.

From https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/desktop/full-feature-list/#system-requirements The designer system requirements page says the same thing. 10.7 is Mac OS Lion, last updated in 2012. Its successor was Mountain Lion (10.8), last updated in 2013. Mavericks was introduced a few weeks after the last 10.8 update, & was the first Mac OS Apple gave away for free.

It is possible that your Freehand files do not include an extension in their filenames. If so, Affinity Designer won't recognize them as Freehand files & they will be greyed out in the open dialog. For files stored in the version 10 format, the file extension should be fh10, so the complete file name would be something like "My Freehand document.fh10". If you do not have the Finder set to display file extensions (Finder > Preferences > Advanced > "Show all filename extensions"), you can check for the extension by doing a 'Get Info' on one of your Freehand documents. If there is no extension, try adding the .fh10 suffix to it & then see if Affinity Designer will open it.

Has build 133 been released?

Apologies for going a bit off-topic but there is an old saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This has never more true than in the magazine industry, which must cater to the ever changing tastes, interests, & sensibilities of an increasingly fragmented & multi-cultural readership. I mentioned Wired as a prime example of this, because its focus has always been on emerging technologies & how they affect everything including culture, politics, & economies on a worldwide scale. But the same thing applies, perhaps even more so, to other magazines like the other 13 Condé Nast print publications. Like many others, ' adapt or die' is fundamental to their survival, & to some extent to the publishing industry itself. You can not write off something as just for teenagers, not just because they will mature (one hopes) to become future buyers of other print publications, but also because what one culture might see as just for teens, another might see as more for adults. Like it or not, a big part of 'adapt or die' is adapting to paperless electronic publication, which means we can't even assume that the text styles seen by all of the readership will be the same.

It has been included for years but it is an arrow shape tool, not the same as the much requested feature of arrow ends for open curves.

Ever see an issue of Wired magazine?

All I mean is discussing things in this specific forum without knowing if or how they are relevant to Macs, the Mac OS, or the Mac version of Publisher can cause confusion.

Ghostscript is a licensed product of Artifex Software, Inc. It cannot legally be freely distributed as part of a commercial application without obtaining a commercial license from Artifex. I do not know anything about the licensing fees involved, like if there are per seat royalties involved, but there may be other reasons this would not be practical in at least the Mac version of APub. P.S. Windows users, please remember this forum is for reporting bugs in the Mac beta version, so comments & suggestions that might apply to Windows will not necessarily also apply to Macs.

Brilliant observation! I was going crazy trying to figure out how to manually enter '⌘+' in the keyboard shortcuts for all three apps, but using the + key on the numeric keypad on my full-sized Apple Aluminum keyboard works for that. Interestingly but still a bit weirdly, in APub using CMD and the keypad + key works in table cells, whereas CMD and the usual + key in the number keys row does not, so that is a bug. Just guessing but I imagine they are using key code conversion charts to detect which non-modifier keys are pressed & left out the code for the + key in the number keys row in the beta ... maybe?

Am I correct in thinking that the big problem with licensing the preflight/passthrough/whatever technology from Adobe (or callas or whoever owns it) is the per seat license cost is too high to offer it in Affinity Publisher without substantially increasing the app's purchase price?

Maybe so, but as things are now, I find it waaaay to confusing to even consider testing this in the beta. A video tutorial might help with that, but even so I have some doubts about if this implementation is the way to go.

This is weird. On U.S. English Apple keyboards, this is how the 2 keys are configured: Thus, normally '+' is entered by holding down the Shift key while tapping the "=" key, while '-' is entered just by tapping the '-' key. But in Affinity Designer & Affinity Photo, the default zoom in shortcut shows as '⌘+' (both in the View menu & in Keyboard Shortcut preferences) & works without having to hold down the Shift ('⇧') key. In Affinity Publisher beta that does not work in a table cell, so this seems to be a bug. But the really weird part is in all three apps, if I try to set the "Zoom In" shortcut manually in Keyboard Shortcut preferences to '⌘+' without holding down the Shift key, that doesn't work. I get '⌘=' instead, more or less what I would expect to be normal for U.S. English Apple keyboards. If I do hold down the Shift key, I get '⌘⇧=' and that works everywhere in all 3 apps, as does '⌘=' if I set the shortcut to that.

As @Old Bruce mentioned earlier, if you try to open an APub file in Designer or Photo, you should get a descriptive 'failed to open' message something like this one: I am not sure why you were not.

As mentioned earlier, only files saved as Freehand versions 9 through 11 are supported.