R C-R

It is sort of a Catch 22: once you can get the link to appear in the Welcome window & use it to "buy" the freebies (for a total price of zero), the links to download them do appear in the "downloads & product keys" page.

Thanks for the quick reply. Please do post back here if you cannot duplicate this, but that can wait until next week. I hope you & the other staff will take at least part of the rest of the weekend off -- you certainly deserve that after all the time you have put into answering the torrent of questions since the 1.6 retail updates went live! I don't know if it matters but the 128 layer file I used as a text came from https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/11/freebie-nice-things-icon-set-png-ai-source/. It is a complex ai format file that opens perfectly well in Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo.

On a Mac, you can use the File > Reveal in Finder menu item when any file is open in AD or AP to open the Finder window containing it. However, for the sample files this will show a sub-folder location deep in /private/var/folders/. The contents of that folder are emptied every time the Mac is restarted (it is a feature of the Mac OS) so you really don't need to worry about deleting it. Additionally, you may find it difficult to delete files in this location manually depending on the OS version & the permissions of the folders enclosing it.

So what the function of the "Auto-scroll to show selection in Layers panel" item in preferences > User Interface now? In Affinity Photo 1.6.6 on my iMac it makes no difference if it is checked or not; only the new Layers menu item has any effect. Do you see something different?

That is not happening for me: whether the box is checked or not makes no difference. Only if "Auto-scroll" in the new menu is checked does the Layers panel auto-scroll. I just checked this with a file that has 128 "Layer" layers. If "Auto-scroll" in the new menu is enabled, scrolling occurs regardless of the preference setting. If it is not enabled, no scrolling occurs regardless of the preference setting.

I just noticed the addition on the Layers panel menu, so I stand corrected on that ... but that makes me wonder what the function of the "Auto-scroll to show selection in Layers panel" item in preferences > User Interface is supposed to do. It apparently does nothing.

This topic may help. Basically, the help topic is wrong about the name & where to find it. Apart from that, it is perfect.

Not even if you go to Affinity Photo's Help menu & select the "Welcome..." item?

It is called that but unfortunately the confusion caused by Apple's fondness for using generic names for its apps (Photos, Preview, Contacts, & Notes are other examples) is a problem all Mac users must live with.

It also would help if Mac users would quit referring to the "App Store" as if it is the only store. It is only 4 more keystrokes to type "Mac App Store" when that is what is being referred to, or the "MAS" abbreviation could be used instead.

That should not normally be necessary for either Mac or Windows users. The circled item destructively resets any custom user settings to the defaults, & should be avoided if at all possible unless nothing else works.

I considered it just a typo & an opportunity to lighten the mood a tiny bit -- I am fairly sure you have written "staff" before & know the difference between "staff" & "stuff" in English. As for me, I consider myself lucky when I can type an entire paragraph in English without making mistakes or typos.

It is not just "the store for Windows users." In fact, I believe the first product the Affinity Store sold was the Affinity Designer Workbook, possibly before the Windows apps were out of beta. That's why I kept asking if your Keychain app specifically showed an entry with "Affinity Store" in the name. If it did, & you have never bought one of the Windows apps, it should be a strong indication that you bought the Workbook -- otherwise I do not see how you could have an Affinity Store account. What is really confusing about it is that the Affinity forum account, the newsletter & old beta test signups, the two store accounts, & the Serif account for the now legacy Windows-only Plus products are all different things. If that was not enough, most (all?) of the free content is distributed by but not owned by Serif/Affinity, so the content owners rather than Serif/Affinity determine how they will allow it to be distributed. How could all that not conspire to make this considerably more than a bit messy?

Probably better to leave it for the staff... Sorry, could not resist the urge to inject a tiny bit of levity into the discussion of this puzzling issue.

For Mac or Windows?

So basically, everybody is getting different results?

That (sort of) suggests a font issue on your system with AD. I assume you have already tried restarting your PC (which sometimes helps when AD is "confused" about which fonts are installed), but maybe trying the AD preferences > Miscellaneous > Reset Fonts button would fix (or at least change) this behavior. As far as I know, the only language related features AD supports are those relating to unit formats & the language used in the UI & help topics, & the former only through whatever the OS provides for that. It can't translate any text in a document from one language to another, so it seems dubious that language is somehow involved in this.

In Affinity Designer, what font is shown for the text block you selected in your screenshot? Is it shown as a missing font or an installed one? I have no idea if this is relevant; just searching for clues....

Different accounts & passwords for these forums, the Mac App Store, & the Affinity Store, plus a sign in page to get the freebies at the Affinity Store that as a "New to Affinity?" tab that really means "New to Affinity Store?" ... Gee, I cannot imagine why anybody would find this confusing.

For whatever reason the file would not open with my copy of Libre Office, & produced a "some errors occurred" message when opening it with Nisus Writer Pro using the default conversion method based on Libre Office. However, Nisus offered to use a different converter to open the file & that produced a two column output with English text on the left & what I assume to be the Macedonian language version on the right -- no sign of any Japanese characters. I don't know if or how that might have anything to do with your problems working with PDFs in Affinity Designer, but it suggests there might be something specific to some Word files exported (?) to PDF that some other apps do not handle gracefully.

I don't have Word installed on my Mac & the apps that I have that can open .doc files do not necessarily open them as they would appear in Word.

Thanks for the clarification. I thought I had read somewhere on the forums that there was at least one other engine that might appear as a choice if it was installed (maybe a third party one?) but I could easily have misunderstood what was meant.

For me, the "undo" keyboard shortcut is not just the first one I learned, it is also the one I use far more often than any other. Using a button for that would mean moving the pointer away from whatever I am doing & back again afterwards, & would literally have added unnecessary hours to my computer use time by now.

I read your post as carefully as I could but it is not clear from it if yre you talking about translating the text or just a font substitution?

Well, for Macs we get "Noise reduction" & for Windows you get "Noise correction." But seriously, the only significant differences are the choice of RAW engines (because for Macs the alternative is the one built into the Mac OS) & the Map Default Region setting, which (I think) hooks into the Mac OS service that displays maps.