R C-R

I'm just a Trial user at this point, but after a couple of hours I would say the whole area of managing the visibility of layers is still a weak point in the UI. The functionality is there, it's just not as accessible as it could be, and there are some good reasons to fix this.
 
I found an old post from 2014 with a developer response that suggested some of these issues would be addressed promptly, but it doesn't look like anything has actually changed. In brief, my question is will this issue get higher priority?
 
Below I describe why this matters to me as a potential customer. I am a reasonably experienced Illustrator user, and I don't think I'm making any unusual requests here. Like many of your users, I'm ready to step away from Illustrator because, as an individual user and consumer, I don't want to support the subscription software model. That said, the distinguishing factor for most Adobe products is their absurd level of attention to the UI and its impact on "productivity". We are all spoiled with the benefits of a highly mature UI, so any replacement must play a hard game of catch-up in every aspect of usability.
 
To start with, the right-click menu for objects does not have a "Hide" function.  It should, because the only alternative is very cumbersome.  The only way to hide an arbitrary layer in a reasonably complicated drawing is:
Right-click the object. Select "Find in Layers Panel" at the bottom of the popup menu. Click on the Hide/Show checkmark over in the Layers panel. If I open a PDF with a large number (approx. 8,000) of tiny, ungrouped vector items, e.g. an exported architectural drawing, and I want to hide a few objects, I must go through a tedious series of mouse-based operations for every single teensy line and shape.
 
There are no keyboard shortcuts for the "Find in Layers Panel" function, nor for the "Hide/Show" toggle (they are not even available for customization in the Keyboard Shortcuts Preference).
 
If I select more than one object, then the "Find in Layers Panel" function is disabled. Arghh!  IMHO, it should reveal the first/topmost selected item in the Layers panel. Clicking the Hide/Show checkmark for any item in a selection (assuming you can find it in the Layers panel) toggles all of them.  Of course, just right-clicking and selecting a "Hide" menu item would be preferable.
 
After I'm done working on the unhidden layers, I will want to un-Hide all the hidden layers. What now?
 
There is no "Reveal All Hidden Layers" function. Again, the only way to Show a hidden layer is to click its Hide/Show checkmark in the Layers panel. This is not a practical option if I have to crawl through 8,000 layers. I need a way to do this as a batch, but the "Select All" function will not select hidden items. Sigh... I thought I knew the definition of "All".
 
Instead, I must manually select all layers by first clicking the topmost item in the Layers panel, then scrolling to the bottom of the Layers list and shift-clicking on the last item. Now every layer is really selected, and I can click on any of the Hide/Show check boxes, which hides everything, and then click it again to show everything. Functional, but very tedious.
 
Ideally, I would add a mode to the Layers panel that always brings at least one of the selected items into view automatically whenever the selection is updated.
 
I might also add a couple of filter toggles to the Layers panel that prune the list contents to only visible layers, or only hidden layers.
 
Some of this probably seems like overkill for drawings created in AD, where one would hopefully keep items logically grouped, but that is not always an option, and any large drawing is going to be difficult to manage without more powerful batch visibility functions.
 
For an interesting contrast in UI design, take a look at SketchUp's object hiding functionality, which is very easy to use, and without which it would be nearly impossible to work on complicated 3D objects. SketchUp includes a keyboard shortcut to "Hide" the current selection, and a "Reveal Last Hidden" function to quickly toggle a single object's visibility. It also has a "Show Hidden Geometry" function to make hidden objects semi-visible, which is very handy at times. Naturally, it has a "Reveal All" function to easily restore everything back to normal.
 
FWIW, all of this applies equally to the Lock/Unlock functionality.

David,
 
I'm guessing that you've (accidentally most likely) rotated your canvas by a teeny tiny amount. (You're using a trackpad right  B)?)  
This will throw the rulers into multiple decimal mode.
 
Try going to the View Dropdown and selecting Reset Rotation. 
 
:)

Glad you all like it.
 
A-B-C: Thar she blows!!  :D
 
R C-R: re: all of the above....
You aren't doing anything wrong, and yes I have seen this behavior. I believe a couple things are going on... neither of which are good. 
 
Extra nodes: Baking, I believe, is part and parcel with Expand Stroke.... which, sadly, we all know is very, um, troubled... (big problem #1). This is opposed to Convert to Curves command, which seems to be fine. Go figure. I think it might have something to do with the angle of the square when using the corner tool and or baking.... but I can't recreate reliably.
 
But it gets worse.....
 
Try making a perfect/level square. Do the corner tool maneuver. You end up with a perfect circle with four nodes right? Wrong. You get eight nodes.... pairs on top of each other. This actually kind of makes sense if you think about what the tool is doing. But at the point where the moving corners have reached their max shouldn't they become one? Maybe , maybe not.
 
But this brings us to big problem #2. Coincident points in AD. Okay, so what do you do? There is nothing.
Try deleting one.... the curve distorts. They're already on the same curve so neither of the "join" options do anything. So you might say... pull them apart add a node, break that node shift click select those, delete... grab an end point and drag snap to the other and that will join the curves (or any variation of all that). First of all that is the most insane workflow ever, and the result still distorts the curve.
This desperately needs to be addressed. 
I would prefer an automatic join if two points are dragged on top of each other... (but I can understand that this may not always be desired either. And that special circumstances could make that action a messy prospect..... a "T" junction for example). At the very least there needs to be an option to merge coincident points... by selection or globally.
 
Sorry to say, these two issues alone really make it hard for me to take Designer all that seriously (there's a big rant just under the surface here  :o, but for now I'll just stuff it back down....  ^_^).
 
Another (semi-related) TIP:
A GREAT way to get an individual circle with multiple (more than 4) equally spaced nodes is to use the polygon tool. Use "X" number of sides and push the curve setting out to 100%, expand. 
The same sort of thinking can be used to get perfect midpoints on other shapes too.... Use the star tool with no indent etc....
Experiment!
 
Cheers.

There is a short video tutorial for this at Affinity Designer - Layers Panel Drop Zones. For some reason, I don't see it mentioned in the Tutorials > In-house Affinity Designer Video Tutorials topic, but it was posted to Vimeo about a year ago.

Hey all,
 
So sort of two different topics here right. 
1) place an (odd) number of circles evenly around in a circle.
2) evenly distribute objects along a path that's not so friendly. Could be a spiral, free-form curve.... whatever.
 
A more robust distribute toolset, which we obviously need (and I believe is in the works?), could of course address both issues in one tool.
 
But for now....
 
1) I have a different option other than CMD-J worth mentioning (imho). CMD J is very powerful, but for a large number of objects it can get a bit.... tedious. Even if you're CMD-Jing just a few elements, grouping, doing another transform, CMD-Jing, grouping etc....
This method takes about a minute (if I'm not talking trying to describe what I'm doing  ;)) .
And that's a minute if you're doing 9 objects or 999 objects.
Video (sorry about the clickety-clack... I come down hard on my keys).
 
2) That's a tougher one. Could be done.... but very labour intensive, and relying a little too much on eyeballing etc.
I would use the tape measure concept discussed in an earlier thread (can't find it at the moment) to place nodes and divide the path in order to snap objects to end points. Like I said, PITA.
EDIT (smacks forehead): Of course ;)  you can just use a copy of the curve as a Text path and use a bullet character (circle, square, or something more ornate) tabbed at even distances (or just use letter spacing). Then convert to curves. 
If you know how to make your own font it could be anything  :) .
 
 

All I'm saying is sometimes it is not easy to determine centers or sizes accurately enough to get acceptable results with Power Duplicate based methods. ChadStyle did say he was looking for a technique he could use on a regular basis, & with some designs that not infrequently does complicate things enough that one has to resort to other, more tedious & less precise methods like tracing over the original.

That method is an excellent one if you are starting from scratch but there are some things to be aware of if you are trying to clean up/repair an existing design that opened up in Affinity with some irregularities like the misshapen circles in the example from the first post.
 
The most obvious one is if the imported design is not symmetrical, it may be difficult to determine where to place the guidelines the bottom edge of the first rectangle is snapped to.
 
The other is that if the circles (or whatever other set of circumferential shapes you need to duplicate) are not touching in the original design, you will need to add a step after creating the first rectangle to resize the shape from its center to reduce its size to match the original's dimensions before grouping & duplicating anything. If you don't get that right, you would have to either start over or resize each duplicate individually, which would be tedious.
 
This would be much easier if the Transform panel honored offset center points for entering rotational values, although determining the exact offset center point for the rotations still could be problematic.

Hi evtonic3,
When you are hovering the rectangle make sure your mouse cursor is over the rectangle. If the rectangle you are dragging is hovering the rectangle you want to snap to, but the mouse cursor is not (you may have picked it from the opposite side that is hovering the rectangle), the snapping will not work.
Also, do you have Snap to bounding boxes or Snap to shape key points checked in the Snapping Manager (menu View ▸ Snapping Manager...)?

That method is an excellent one if you are starting from scratch but there are some things to be aware of if you are trying to clean up/repair an existing design that opened up in Affinity with some irregularities like the misshapen circles in the example from the first post.
 
The most obvious one is if the imported design is not symmetrical, it may be difficult to determine where to place the guidelines the bottom edge of the first rectangle is snapped to.
 
The other is that if the circles (or whatever other set of circumferential shapes you need to duplicate) are not touching in the original design, you will need to add a step after creating the first rectangle to resize the shape from its center to reduce its size to match the original's dimensions before grouping & duplicating anything. If you don't get that right, you would have to either start over or resize each duplicate individually, which would be tedious.
 
This would be much easier if the Transform panel honored offset center points for entering rotational values, although determining the exact offset center point for the rotations still could be problematic.

There is currently only one way of dealing with an odd number of items to duplicate using the CMD-J Power Duplicate method similar to what Signguy suggested that I am aware of, & it is neither very easy or elegant.
 
The basic idea is to use the "Show Rotation Center" option to offset the rotation center of the first item to duplicate to the desired center point of all the items. Depending on the symmetry of the design, this center point can be determined by selecting the group that includes all the items in the imported file or by adding a shape snapped to its edges (or if necessary by eye) & noting the x/y coordinates of that center point in the transform panel. If needed, create a new shape & using the Transform panel, move its center to that possession. Use its shown center point as a guide for where to place the offset center point of the first item to duplicate.
 
That is not very easy to do to accurately to begin with, but the next step is even harder. As with Signguy's method, figure out the needed angle between two items (the easy part) & then (since the Transform panel does not honor offset center points) you have to drag the rotation of the first duplicate to that angle using the rotation handle in the workspace (the hard part). It can be done with reasonably high accuracy, but it may require zooming out and moving the pointer very far from the initial click location to get fine enough control over the angle.
 
Once that is accomplished, it is easy to use Power Duplicate to add the remaining items, but don't be surprised if it takes several tries to get this right.
 
Assuming they add offset rotation center support to the Transform panel in the future, this should be much easier to do but for now it is the only way I know to do what you want, other than with the various totally by eye approximations you probably already know about.

Error logs are eventually purged to keep them from using up too much file space, but unless the crash occurred at least a week ago (& sometimes much longer than that) it should be there, at least if the app actually crashed & it occurred in some way that the OS could detect it. That usually involves an 'uncaught exception' like the app calling an invalid address or it not responding to system calls.
 
When that kind of event occurs, the OS should display a message that the app quit unexpectedly. If it did not, it is possible that a system level error occurred (as opposed to an application level error) but that doesn't seem very likely unless you have been seeing other unusual behavior not directly related to Affinity or any other specific app.
 
That said, one time "glitches" can occasionally occur for various reasons. Not to belabor a point you are already all too painfully aware of, because of that possibility it is important not just to save your work frequently but also to back it up as often as is needed to guard against system crashes, hardware failures, & the unfailing application of Murphy's Law at the worst possible time.
 
One way to do this is with Time Machine. With one (or more) TM backup drives attached to your Mac, you can get automatic backups of every change to your files made on an hourly basis, but you can also use the Time Machine menu bar "Back Up Now" item to force a backup at any time. Since Time Machine only adds changed files to each new time-stamped backup (even though it doesn't look that way in Finder), doing this will not eat up much backup disk space, & it is cheap insurance against disasters ... as long as you remember to do it.

I don't know why the recovered file did not have more of your work in it, but for the above the feature is not an auto-save in the conventional sense -- it just keeps a temporary backup file that is only available if the application crashes. So you won't see anything obvious happening, & unless the app crashes, that file will be deleted when the document is closed, whether or not any changes to it has been saved by the user.
 
The temporary file is stored in the /Users/{your user name}/Library/Containers/com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner/Data/Library/Application Support/autosave folder (or the correspondingly named folder for Affinity Photo or for the betas if you are using them). If you open a Finder window to that folder, you should see the file in it while you are working on a document, & it vanishing when you close that document. (It will have a long numeric name & an ".autosave" extension.)

As I understand it, you do not need to save the file (or changes to an existing one). But it only works if the application crashes; in other words if it quits abnormally before it can delete the .autosave file.
 
If the app crashes, there should be a file created in the /Users/{your user name}/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports folder. You can easily find & view this file using the Console app (in the Applications/Utilities folder). Look for it in the sidebar of that app in the "User Diagnostic Reports" subheading of the "DIAGNOSTICS AND USAGE INFORMATION" section. It will be obvious which one it is from the file's name, which will include the app name & a date-time stamp.
 
The Console app includes in its menu bar "Reveal in Finder" & "Mail" options for the individual logs it displays, making it easy to attach the crash log file to an email or open it with another app like say TextEdit if you want to copy just a part of it to a post.

There is a short video tutorial for this at Affinity Designer - Layers Panel Drop Zones. For some reason, I don't see it mentioned in the Tutorials > In-house Affinity Designer Video Tutorials topic, but it was posted to Vimeo about a year ago.

Actually, the Mac App Store licensing terms specify that for non-commercial use you can install application purchases on an unlimited number of Macs that you own or control. For commercial use, one purchase covers either a single Mac shared by several workers or every Mac used by a single worker. Also, Affinity Mac products qualify for family sharing, so included family members can download their own copy for their Macs using their own Apple ID's.
 
The 5 device limit applies to "Eligible Content" (like music tracks) & only to iTunes-authorized computers (Mac or PC). Specifically, for this there is a 10 "Associated Devices" limit, no more than 5 of which can be iTunes-authorized computers.
 
EDIT: I should mention that this is what the U.S. T&C specifies. The T&C for other countries may be different.

Could you clarify what you mean by that? Was the file identified as a jpeg in Finder or as some other type? How exactly did you open it in Affinity?
 
Regarding opening saved jpeg files, if you right-click on one of them in Finder, what are the choices shown in the popup menu for "Open with..."? What app were you opening them with before? Is it still shown as a choice on the Open With menu?
 
You should be able to open jpegs with at least Preview or either of the Affinity apps using the right-click method, or by dragging & dropping the file on any app's icon that can open jpegs. To change the default app (the one that opens the file if you just double-click on it), in Finder do a 'Get Info' on one of your jpeg files, & in the "Open With:" section set it to whatever app you want from the pop-up list. Then click the "Change All" button to apply that to all files of that type.
 
This sounds like a separate issue. What happens when you try?

MrBlank,
 
You may find Apple's Technical Note TN2220, Color Management in Safari, of interest. According to that, if you are not going to include color profiles with your images, for the most consistent results across all platforms & browser apps, you should be working in the sRGB color space.
 
Basically, there is never any guarantee that every browser will display everything as intended.

One of the advantages of something like Anime Studio for 2D animation of vector objects is you can animate their individual nodes & stroke thicknesses, which can produce much smoother & more flexible keyframe based transitions than what can be done with rasterized bitmaps. That isn't always necessary -- for example, if you just want to reveal, move, and/or maybe squish something, a transparent bitmap may be all you need, particularly if it has a higher resolution than the size it will be displayed at anywhere in the animation.
 
You can also often use animated mask layers & switches to hide or turn on & off bitmaps or parts of them.
 
So for something like your 'dots' animation, you might be able to reduce your 400 vector shapes to a much smaller number, export each set as a bitmap at sufficiently high resolution, & import each of them into Anime. In fact, if that will meet your needs, you could use the much cheaper "Debut" version, which lacks vector import capabilities but supports importing bitmap images in most common formats.

That sounds like the same behavior I get with the older 9.2 version -- svg files are imported with all their layers collapsed into one complex vector object with no way to separate them into separate curves except by duplication & deletion of all but one curve in each duplicate. That's OK for files with just a few layers but obviously it isn't practical if there are lots of curves.

Actually, the Mac App Store licensing terms specify that for non-commercial use you can install application purchases on an unlimited number of Macs that you own or control. For commercial use, one purchase covers either a single Mac shared by several workers or every Mac used by a single worker. Also, Affinity Mac products qualify for family sharing, so included family members can download their own copy for their Macs using their own Apple ID's.
 
The 5 device limit applies to "Eligible Content" (like music tracks) & only to iTunes-authorized computers (Mac or PC). Specifically, for this there is a 10 "Associated Devices" limit, no more than 5 of which can be iTunes-authorized computers.
 
EDIT: I should mention that this is what the U.S. T&C specifies. The T&C for other countries may be different.

The example files you can download from the Welcome screen are stored in a subfolder in /private/var/folders/. "var" is the location the system uses for variables, which means items stored there are managed by the OS & may be deleted as needed, for example on restarting the computer.
 
If you want to save any of these files to a more permanent location, use Save As after opening them & choose some location in your user domain.
 
Tip: to see where any file open in Affinity is stored, choose "Reveal in Finder" from the file menu.

I'm not sure exactly which post in that 5 page topic you mean, & I quickly decided it wasn't worth wading through the entire thing to separate the "wheat from the chaff" (to put it as kindly as I can!), but regarding why pricing varies from country to country, there is more to it than just currency conversion rates.
 
A major factor often overlooked is the costs of doing business in different countries (& even different regions within a single country) are not the same. For example, almost every government imposes certain regulations on companies doing business within their jurisdiction, potentially including everything from record keeping for local tax & tariff purposes to complying with consumer rights laws, & even to various forms of protectionism designed to favor local businesses over foreign ones.
 
Because the costs associated with meeting these requirements are in part dependent on sales volume, the result is usually that the price is lower in countries with higher sales than currency rates alone would suggest.

I mostly see this with pdf product manuals I have downloaded from the web, most recently for a Samsung laser printer.

This has been discussed extensively in these forums. The two product ranges do not share a common "native" file format, nor do they have the same feature set or code base.
 
So basically, what that means is you will need to export plus formatted files using the plus app to some more standardized format (like PDF, SVG, etc.) to work on them in Affinity. This is essentially the same thing that has to be done when leaving the Adobe world for the Affinity one or whatever -- in other words, the only way to "future-proof" your stuff is to maintain a copy in one of the non-proprietary graphics file formats.
 
This remains an imperfect solution, since almost invariably the proprietary formats include features that do not export well or at all to the non-proprietary ones. And like you said, eventually the app that created the original document will become so outdated that it won't run on any OS that will run on the latest computer hardware, so either you keep some old computer around just to be able to export old documents (& pray that it keeps working) or diligently export everything ASAP while you still can.
 
Personally, I have been dealing with this for about 30 years, & I'm a Mac only user. All my stuff originally was in MacDraw or Claris/Appleworks formats. I upgraded first to Deneba Canvas, & then to Aldus Freehand, so I had to spend considerable time trying (not always successfully) to export & fix the issues that caused.

A technique I sometime use for physically small objects like this is to use a photo of the real object as a tracing guide. Take the photo from far enough away from the object that it will not be distorted too much by the wide angle (fisheye) effect & from as directly above it as possible to eliminate perspective effects. Then import it into Affinity as a layer above the working one set to about 25 to 40 % opacity so you can see what you are doing on the working layer.
 
It works well for me because I am a terrible freehand artist.  :wacko:
 
Another approach might be to draw one of the curved outer rails as a separate curved line object, using the stroke width to set its width, then duplicate it & scale it down to create the inner one. Do this to create ½ of the curved rail section, group the two rails together, then duplicate & reverse the duplicate to finish off the curve.