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For what it is worth, I have opened a pdf version of a 469 page Honda owner's manual in Affinity Designer. The pdf is 30.5 MB. The pages are mostly text but there are some raster images & vector shapes as well. Every page has trim & registration marks comprised of around 200 objects, so it is a fairly complex document. It takes about 25-30 seconds to open on my not particularly powerful iMac (specs below in my sig) but once it does I see a grid of each page as a separate artboard, so 469 artboards! When I zoom in on a part of the grid it can be a bit sluggish while redrawing the included pages but not as bad as I expected -- about 0.5 to 4 seconds, depending on the complexity of the pages. Remarkably, Activity Monitor says AD is using less than 3 GB of memory for the whole thing, so even though I have only 8 GB installed on the iMac, there is still plenty of memory for other apps & processes.

Sima, I just wanted to say that is one of the clearest, best presented explanations of a feature I have ever seen, at least as good as if not quite a bit better than anything I have seen in the built-in help topics.

I am not sure how this could be implemented without compromising the reason I use symbols to begin with -- I do usually want everything to propagate through all instances; otherwise I would not use symbols or turn sync off to edit any property I did not want to be propagated to other instances. I can see maybe adding a feature that exposes each property of an instance of a symbol in the Layers panel, with the ability to enable/disable them individually on a per instance basis, but that could get very confusing very fast. How would you like to see what you suggest implemented that still retains the ability to propagate anything to all instances?

Not to be confused with XQuarts, an indeterminate volume measurement unit like XPints & XGallons. :P

Do you believe it is delusional to think that the only thing that works when nothing else does is somehow not a viable solution?

That is true for any file format used as an interchange format. Even TIFF, for all its flexibility, cannot save every type of application specific data that might be considered extremely important in one application field or another. There is no perfect "universal" interchange format & I sincerely doubt there ever could be. Technology advances too quickly for that to happen. Since I believe that to be true, it seems a bit pointless to argue over which formats qualify as interchange ones. If the potential for information loss is strictly applied, no format would ever qualify because in one way or another every one of them in existence will fail that test.

In the Swatches Studio panel, if necessary click on the 'hamburger' menu to create a Document palette. (Application & System palettes also can be used where appropriate.) Optional but recommended, name the palette something meaningful & easy to identify. Then select or create some object with the desired RGBA attributes & click on the the little artists palette icon to add its fill to the palette. Also rename it if you want to make it easy to identify. From then on you can select objects & click on its entry in the Document (or whatever) palette wherever stroke or fill swatches can be set.

To put it as simply as I can, I do not care what Adobe or anybody else thinks PDF is intended for. I only care about if & how I can use the information in its file structures. If you think that is delusional, then so be it. It is a delusion shared by a great many people besides myself.

I am unable to duplicate this for JPEG format exports, either for the four JPEG presets or for the Edit Export Options for selected slices. There is no white rectangular swatch with a diagonal red line in the Matte choices when the JPEG export format is selected. It defaults to white, but it can be set to any color using the HSL color wheel or any of the other popup color pickers available when I click on the Matte rectangle. There is always a way in each of those pickers to change the color back to white, for example by moving the selection dot on the color wheel to the white tip of the triangle, moving sliders to the appropriate values, or just clicking on the tiny white dot next to the eyedropper icon. But none of these pickers has a "no color" option unless I change to a format that supports transparency. I am not sure what you mean about the canvas background. It is not a layer nor is it available to draw on; it is a property of the document itself. There must be some way to show the difference between a transparent & non-transparent document, for example when importing a PNG which many or may not have a transparent background. I do not know if you are irritated by the difference in the display of the background of the canvas & the background of a partially transparent layer's thumbnail. I suppose the thumbnail could mimic the checkerboard pattern for the transparent parts, but it is so small that isn't very practical.

That is the point. It is a set of structures any app can use for any purpose. It does not matter what it was meant for when Adobe owned it. By the time it became an open ISO standard with a well defined structure, it had already become much more than just a fixed format for presentation. This is not just theory. I have literally thousands of files containing data extracted from PDFs by various apps, which I use in different ways, many having nothing to do with presentation, printing, or display. Data is data. As long as its structure can be parsed, there are no limits on how it can be used. It is just information.

Actually, Affinity seems to remember only the last directory accessed, so for example if you have two files open, Save As will default to the directory of the file last opened for either of them. If you then change to any other directory that becomes the default for the next Save As, Open, or Export, & so on. Even if you just open a file & close it without saving, its directory becomes the default. There have been feature requests for better behavior but so far that has not been implemented.

In these forums it seems best to avoid trying to embed videos in replies & instead use clickable links like the one Alfred included in the last sentence of his post. Not only is it more reliable, it also allows users to open the video in a different browser window or tab that can be set to a full screen display, or for YouTube in "Theater mode," or whatever else their browser supports that offers a better view than the often too tiny embedded videos we see here.

??? The PDF file format provides a highly structured way to encode text, graphics, & other data objects independently of application software, hardware, or operating systems. It is defined by the ISO 32000-1 standard, which intentionally does not specify any specific methods of rendering PDF documents, nor does it limit its use to presentations or place any restrictions on how software may interpret or use the structured data contained in the files. It is this standardized structure that makes it so portable & usable by so many different apps as an interchange file format. 1. Importers, at least useful ones, are not merely "filters." 2. What makes you so sure Serif will attempt to build an importer for InDesign documents, or if it does that would have any bearing on the feasibility of building a PP importer? 3. We currently know nothing about Publisher's capabilities, but it is a safe bet that the developers want to preserve cross-platform & native Affinity file format compatibility with Photo & Designer. Among other things, that means not relying on anything not supported by both Windows & Apple's OS's. It also means feature development must be at least partially tied to the capabilities of all three apps (& the DAM, whenever that finally is released), which in turn will have a direct bearing on import capabilities. I don't think any of us have any idea how they will accomplish this, so any "guarantees" are really nothing more than conjecture.

Importing is not just about 'pulling apart' a file's format. That is only a small part of the process. It is mostly about what to do with the data after that is done. When there is no corresponding or equivalent data structure there isn't much that can be done other than ignore it & try to fit the raw data into an existing structure. When there is no good fit, there may be no viable alternative other than to discard the data, particularly if it pertains to or is dependent on procedures that no feature of the importing app supports. This is why the differences in code bases really do matter, & why interchange formats like PDF were invented in the first place.

Do you mean the thumbnail of the new pixel layer? If so, that is just because it is empty so there is nothing for the layer's thumbnail to show. Draw something on it & the thumbnail should update to show that. The canvas background (not to be confused with a layer named "Background") is not a layer & has no color of its own. Since there is no way to show that, if the document is set to use a transparent background the characteristic checkerboard pattern is shown; otherwise a default while background is used. Neither one is part of the document; they are just visual aids. When exporting to formats that do not support or use transparency, you have the option to set the document background color -- this is available in the "Matte:" color rectangular swatch of the File menu > Export > More settings & in the Export Persona > Export Options tab. Just click on the color swatch to pop up a color picker if you want to set that to something other than the default. A white swatch with a diagonal red line through it is the "no color" indicator; in the picker it is represented by a tiny white circle with the red line, the same as in the Color Studio panel & elsewhere in the UI.

Hi Chrisl & welcome to the forms. I admit I got a bit lost following your workflow description, but I think what might work for you is the Edit menu > Paste style item. If you select one shape with the RGBA values you want to apply to others & copy that, selecting one or more other shapes & using the Paste Style Edit menu item will paste the RGBA values to it (along with stroke & noise attributes, which may not be what you want).

Has it occurred to anyone else that it is because they know the file format (& code base) of the Plus apps so intimately, they know better than anyone else how good an Affinity importer actually would be vs. exporting to PDF in the Plus app? Regarding an IDML importer, from section 5 of Adobe's own IDML File Format Specification pdf document: In general, importers are no better than interchange file formats when feature parity does not exist. If the underlying data structures of two apps are not compatible to begin with, there is no way to make them so without changing the code base of one or both of them. Importers alone cannot do this.

Do you mean the Mac App Store app does not open or that the entries for the two Affinity apps won't open or can't be found?

No, you cannot transfer the license. You will need to buy a separate license for Windows from the Affinity store. The Mac versions are sold only through the Mac App Store run by Apple & tied to your Apple ID. The Windows versions require activation with a code Affinity emails to you when you buy through their store.

??? The Crop Tool in the Mac beta has a big blue "Apply" button in the context toolbar, the same as it does in the current retail version.

Something to consider is that in Affinity Photo the Crop Tool is non-destructive -- the rest of the image is still there. It can be revealed by using the Document menu > Unclip Canvas item. More to the point, after applying a crop if you click on the image with the Move Tool you can still move or scale it. So instead of tediously drawing out the crop box to the area you want to crop the image to using the Crop Tool, just apply your 820x340 preset without moving or scaling anything. Then use the Move Tool to position & scale the crop to whatever you want. You may have to zoom out some to see the bounding box handles but you have complete freedom to scale proportionally or not, to rotate, & to move the image around to show any part of it interactively & non-destructively. If you are exporting the document to a raster format like JPEG or PNG, do that in the normal way & only the cropped part of the image will be exported. Save the file in the native .afphoto format & you can open it again at any time in the future & change the scale, position, etc. & repeat the process. If you don't care about that but do care how much file space the "extra" part of the image will use while saved in the native format, you can right-click on the layer in the Layers panel, choose "Rasterize" from the popup menu, which will destructively remove the cropped part of the image. Use Save or Save as to retain the native file format.

Thanks for the suggestion but I don't really use GC9 very often -- I bought it as part of a discount bundle of 6 apps for less than the retail price of GC alone, so I am not very motivated to spend anything on the upgrade to v10. Mostly, I am just curious why only some .afphoto files displayed a preview in its browser.

The problem is in figuring out why the app is not stable for some users. There are many possible reasons for this, & it is not necessarily true that it will be the same reason for all of them. So far, there isn't much data to draw any conclusions from. Often, it isn't clear which Windows version is installed, how it is configured, or much besides the bare minimum hardware specs like the CPU, GPU, & amount of memory installed (if that). It isn't like for Macs -- a succinct summary like the second line of my sig identifies the hardware & OS version unambiguously. There is no need to guess about which motherboard I have, how the BIOS is configured, if I am overclocking anything, what drivers I am using, or anything like that. It is immediately obvious that it is not a DIY computer I built using parts from various vendors & that it has exactly the same cooling system, ports, busses, & system architecture as every other 27 inch iMac "Late 2012" model on the planet. Obviously, PC's are not like that. Thousands of PC's can have the same basic hardware specs yet be sufficiently different that there is no way to know if or to what extent those differences might contribute to stability issues with Affinity Photo, even if no other app has the same issues. It would greatly simplify things for everybody if that was not true, but unfortunately almost any app can perform sequences of operations that no other app performs, or performs so rarely that most users would never trigger them, & it is quite possible that this could expose an obscure bug that only affects a relatively small number of systems configured in a specific way. So, as I have suggested in several other topics, it would benefit all concerned if those having stability issues (& those who are not) would take the time to go into more detail about their systems, particularly if they are not 'out-of-the-box stock' branded models from one of the major PC vendors.

Andrew, which Affinity app do you have, Affinity Photo or Affinity Designer? Only Affinity Photo has an inpainting tool.

What I said was that not everybody is equally interested in stability vs. feature improvements. That is not the same thing as saying not everyone wants a stable app. But it is pretty obvious from various posts that the Windows version is stable for some but not all users. There are several possible reasons for that (including I suppose whatever you mean by "commercial reason") but the point here is for Windows users not experiencing stability issues, feature improvements are what they usually say they want the developers focus on.