nonresidentalien

Before this change, the tool was remembering the previous selection, so one could do several consecutive alignments to key objects without having to re-select the method of choice. Now, one has to select it again for every alignment. Yet another random decision made workflows much more tedious, it drives me up the walls. 
If only the development efforts would have been used to make the tool easier to use, rather than more tedious. 

Hi y'all,
When expanding or combiningg curves or shapes, one often ends up with objects that contain multiple curves. Is there a simpler way to separate them, other than duplicating the object and deleting the unwanted nodes?
Thanks,
Lars

Assets provide a great way to use the same graphic elements in multiple documents but unlike symbols they are not linked, so changing one instance of an asset placed in one document does not change any other instance, either in that document or in any others that use the same asset.

Since one of the most recent updates there is a lot of unnecessary low-res rendering going on when Affinity Designer vector objects are copied. Earlier, some of these issues could be fixed by pasting into Preview and copying from there but now there is no fix other than exporting to a bitmap.
Please fix soon, this is incredibly annoying. 

Some thing appears to be broke with 1.9 clipboard which was reported earlier in the year, I'm guessing it should be fixed soon - not sure what the problem is but for me, copy pasting from affinity to illustrator or VectorStyler now converts CMYK to RGB which always worked great in past versions and kept CMYK percentages, providing you had the same colour profile set - fingers crossed for the next round of betas as I have a big job coming up which needs a lot of vector distortions and this bug will cause a ton of grief

Why fixing something that was not broken in the first place?
Aligning to key objects make up about 70% of my alignments, and this change of behavior does not improve anything. I would have preferred it if the development efforts would have been used for an actual improvement, e.g. the ability to select a key object with the mouse, rather than having to navigate  through a pop-up menu over and over again. 
 
 

Dear developer team,
Thanks for implementing so many feature request! Besides the now implemented 'align to key object', which I very frequently use, I am missing a very basic selection tool that would make my live so much easier. It would be great if there was an option to select all objects that share the same line for fill color, line thickness, font property etc.. I often work with figures coming from different scientific programs and cleaning and unifying those up takes a lot of work as one has to chase all instances of a certain color, line thickness etc by hand... I am also sure that every graphical designer who change their mind mid-design would be grateful for this feature.
Thanks for considering,
Lars

Thanks. In general, I would really love to see the align to key object function to be less cumbersome. Most scientific or technical artwork requires A LOT of alignments to key-objects. It would be nice if one could select the key object by mouse (or keyboard mouse combo), or have dedicated buttons for placement in the toolbar; the buttons behavior (align to first/last) could be set via the application preferences, I assume most people are settling for one or the other for their workflow and have no need to pick it for each alignment...

Before this change, the tool was remembering the previous selection, so one could do several consecutive alignments to key objects without having to re-select the method of choice. Now, one has to select it again for every alignment. Yet another random decision made workflows much more tedious, it drives me up the walls. 
If only the development efforts would have been used to make the tool easier to use, rather than more tedious. 

Why fixing something that was not broken in the first place?
Aligning to key objects make up about 70% of my alignments, and this change of behavior does not improve anything. I would have preferred it if the development efforts would have been used for an actual improvement, e.g. the ability to select a key object with the mouse, rather than having to navigate  through a pop-up menu over and over again. 
 
 

Issue logged

It would be really nice if there was a way to perform key-object alignments without having to navigate over and over trough a menubar pop-up. I would love to see either the 'align to first/last' s functions directly in the toolbar (not in a pop-up) or even better, a way to select the key object for the alignment by mouse (e.g. second click on selected object, or modifier-key click to make key)
Thanks for your consideration,
Lars

Haha I feel dumb now lol.
 
You want to click on the icon that looks like a crosshair it's tooltip should say "Show Rotation Center".
 
Then you can drag that control point wherever you want to adjust the rotation handle

For Mac, got to 
PC betas can be found here:
If you read up in the respective beta fora, you will get an idea about the existing issues and fixes.
 
 

Hi y'all,
Again, probably a niche issue but when working with small artistic text labels, it happens that text may not contain ascenders or descenders. Aligning these texts is tricky as Designer will take the borders and is not aware of the base line of the font.
Here are the same texts aligned middle,  top and bottom:
 

Why fixing something that was not broken in the first place?
Aligning to key objects make up about 70% of my alignments, and this change of behavior does not improve anything. I would have preferred it if the development efforts would have been used for an actual improvement, e.g. the ability to select a key object with the mouse, rather than having to navigate  through a pop-up menu over and over again. 
 
 

Why fixing something that was not broken in the first place?
Aligning to key objects make up about 70% of my alignments, and this change of behavior does not improve anything. I would have preferred it if the development efforts would have been used for an actual improvement, e.g. the ability to select a key object with the mouse, rather than having to navigate  through a pop-up menu over and over again. 
 
 

Hi techfips,
The text being imported as a text frame in v1.8 was an intentional change however this is causing issues for some users working with scientific illustrations/graphs/etc. The issue was logged/passed to the dev team and it's currently being looked into.

For Mac, got to 
PC betas can be found here:
If you read up in the respective beta fora, you will get an idea about the existing issues and fixes.
 
 

Here is a thread that deals with the issue in detail.
 

Thank you all for offering information and your opinions.
Well, of course I am aware of the fact that Affinity does not make the rules of the respective app stores but this said, it makes it even more important that applications are only released when they are ready for it. Unfortunately, once purchased, one is locked in that ecosystem, and Serif so far has not offered to lend a hand to get out of it (e.g. making a non-Appstore license for a legacy version available to me).
I am a beta tester for many applications, in particular programs that are crucial for my research and that have a history of rolling out buggy updates. This is very time-consuming (if done right), and I do this not only to contribute to the development but also to be aware of potential shortcomings/changes of upcoming updates. Till recently, Serif has done a great job, was very responsive to user suggestions so I saw no need to get involved. Times seem to have changed, and beta testing it is..
Again, I am highly supportive of Serif (I initiated the switch to Affinity products for the whole research group after all (i.e. over 15 seats)) and I think it is important to have them around, developing great products. I also do not go on a rant over the occasional bug. Yet, I think it is important to make it known, when the development decisions and/or the quality assurance standards are not meeting the needs of the customers anymore. 
Cheers,
L.

I would like to add support to having text imported from PDF as artistic text instead of (the current state) as oversized frames; this is indeed a major nuisance for our workflows as well.

Also along the line of my severe struggling with the new treatment of the text imports: Would it at least be possible to have text boxes of a size that corresponds to the box's content, and are not ridiculously/randomly oversized? Trying to equally distribute multi panel graphs virtually impossible. Also all kinds of other alignment task (e.g. changing the text alignment) are just painful due to the oversized textboxes:
Try to distribute these graphs evenly. It used to be a matter of one click... 
 
 

Hi guys,
Just checking in on any progress on the matter. After having spent yet another 2 hours converting text boxes into artistic text and I am at the point where I am starting to consider using a different vector graphics software. 
An update would be great.
Thanks,
Lars
 
 

I'd like to add to this as well. When pasting in pdf illustrations (in my case UI-mockups with lots of little text labels into storyboard documents) it's very annoying that each text element in the illustrations gets made into a text box with a visible blue box around it. It would be good if there was an option to import text in graphics as artistic text.
Also, I can't find any way to convert text boxes back to artistic text (preferably for all selected objects)? Is there a way to do this? Maybe that's a way that we can get around this problem until a preference is added.