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What OS (Mac or Windows) are you using? What is the version number of your Affinity Designer?

Nope. It is also a question of what an out-of-company chain of testing reveals to competitors about products in development, the expectations created about features & functions that might not make it into beta or final release versions for one reason or another, the company resources required to manage & evaluate feedback, resolving/observing any licensing conditions for third party code that might be considered for incorporation into the app, not making things easy for patent trolls, & so on.

Of course. But my question is what situation(s) might there be where alpha testing of APub by end users actually would be valuable? If there are, what would be the value to end users or to Serif? The Affinity apps are not open source software. They rely heavily on closed source, proprietary code. For what should be obvious reasons the developers are not going to open that up to public scrutiny. So I do not understand what the users asking for access to an alpha version expect to gain by that.

Yes.

Alpha versions of software apps typically are incomplete & unstable. They often have only placeholder code for as yet unimplemented features that does nothing or code that causes app crashes, serious memory leaks, or file corruption when called. In other words, that are not usable even for casual, non-criticals work. So why would you want to try running one if you were not a developer working on the code?

That is the same version I use. If you download your test.afdesign file from this page, can you open that in Affinity Designer 1.6.0 on your Mac?

I just realized that for other raster file types like jpg, png, or gif the Finder "Info" window has a "Dimensions:" item in the More info section, but for pdf files it has a "Resolution:" item instead. For PDF's that contain a single raster graphic element, this seems to correlate well to its pixel dimensions, but for more complex PDF's like multi-page ones or ones that contain a mix of object types, I am not sure what it means.

I get the same 307 x 192 numbers for the pdf using Finder's 'Get Info' but I believe that is due to a bug in OS X that shows the dimensions of the thumbnails instead of the document. In the Mac Preview.app, the page size is shown as 4.27 × 2.67 inches.

I get a 'filetype unsupported' error when I try to open your test.afdesign file. What version of Affinity Designer did you use to create it?

At the bottom of the https://affinity.store web page, there is a Help and Support link. It varies by country but for me in the US it is https://affinity.store/en-us/help/. This page includes many topics, including info about product keys & several email addresses to use for contacts relating to store purchases.

Straight lines can be drawn with the Pen Tool. Select the last icon in the Mode: section of the context toolbar. Change thickness using the Stroke context toolbar item or the Stroke Studio panel (Affinity Designer only).

Tick View > Studio > Adjustment to open the Adjustment panel, where all the presets are available by category.

I do not think albums will help with deleting the RAW versions of photos stored as both RAW & JPEG originals. As I understand it, albums don't actually store anything besides the lists of the items in them -- basically, just pointers to where the originals or edited versions are in the Photos library. So deleting something from an album does not delete the original & deleting an item removes it from any albums it might be in.

Is Affinity Photo installed in the top level of the Applications folder?

From the Wikipedia Raw image format article: Thus, the image you see in Photos is the result of processing ("developing") this data -- there is no RAW image in the file as such. When you have both a jpeg & RAW version stored in Photos "Use RAW as original" tells Photos to show you the image created by processing the RAW data & use it as the basis for edits rather than the jpeg image. In Photos, edited versions of your photos are stored separately from the original "master" versions, which remain in their original unedited form. If you do any edits, Photos displays the edited version but the "Info" panel still displays the data for the original, which is why it says it is a RAW file if you are using that as the original.

Prepared before I noticed MEB edited his post: Just did not want my meager effort to go to waste.

Did you buy the Mac or Windows version? As was mentioned several times, if it was the Mac version you did not purchase it from Serif/Affinity & would not have an Affinity Store account unless you bought the Affinity Designer workbook.

You can create your own export setup presets, for example one that excludes the scale suffix & 1x size, & use that instead of the Retina PNG-24 one.

I understand this is not normally the way such things are done but then what is the purpose of being able to convert an artboard to curves & making it something other than a rectangular shape?

Admittedly this is an edge case, but since artboards can be converted to curves, it is possible use artboards as cut sheets for paper patterns, similar to the 'Paper Craft' projects shown on Canon's Creative Crafts website. For that use it would be handy if dashed strokes could be applied to the artboards as the guides for cutting out the paper shapes.

Also, how many photos did you include in the panorama & about how much overlap was there among them? The stitching algorithm sometimes does funny things when there is too little overlap. Another thing that can cause odd results is motion in the scene between shots, like rolling waves. But that does not seem likely to cause the variation in the horizon for your pano unless maybe there was a lot of difference between shots.

Did you copy the dog logo as a group (like is shown in your first AD screenshot) or as individual layers? I am just trying to figure out why the AP screenshots are showing the logo as ungrouped shapes.

What version of Affinity Photo & what Mac OS version are you using? Are you able to open my 'mega jumbo' AP file? I will check again shortly for both 1.6.6 & the 1.6.7 beta but I am just wondering why I could create > 256K px documents in AP 1.6.6 & open them in the beta or AD 1.6.0 without anything crashing. EDIT: The 1.6.7 beta will not allow me to create > 256K px documents but it will (eventually) open my 'mega jumbo' file without crashing. VM memory use shoots up to >16GB (more than twice the installed RAM). When closing that document or attempting to quit the app memory use slowly declines to about 13GB before anything will close. I can also open it in AD 1.6.0 with similar behavior. After restarting my iMac, I can no longer create > 256K px documents in AP 1.6.6 either, so I guess there was just something wonky somewhere that allowed me to create the mega jumbo file. So this problem is resolved, somehow.

Thanks for the quick reply. I wonder if this is a Mac only issue?

I am unable to duplicate that behavior on my system. I am using Affinity Designer for Mac version 1.6.0 running on macOS Sierra 10.12.6. What version & OS are you using?