AlanH

Many thanks to all who have responded so quickly (maybe we're all spending more time in front of our computers at the moment!) GarryP - thanks - I'm familiar with flood fill, but in this case, I'm doing a freehand layer below the black artwork. (Cool graphic!) Old Bruce - thanks - that was what I had set and it still wasn't working for me... Walt - thanks - that sorted it! I guess I didn't understand what 'wet edges' meant in AP. So: With wet edges ON, then each new stroke starts off at ~25% opacity and subsequent overlapping ones add another 25%, until it reaches full target colour. With wet edges OFF, it just paints solid colour at the target level, as you describe - and as I was looking for. I have seen 'wet edges' in other painting apps, but it behaved much differently there, i.e. like a dynamic watercolour bleed, which made more sense to me descriptively. It looks like I had fallen foul of nomenclature - always a problem when switching from one maker's app to another. Hooray - problem solved - thanks once again, all! Alan

I am trying to make AP my sole image editing tool, but yet again I am failing to achieve something that Paintshop Pro 9 (yes it still works in Windows 10) does natively. All I want to do is a "painting-by-numbers" style fill with a completely flat brush, under a scanned ink drawing - with no buildup from stroke to stroke; just set a target colour and go. Is that called a 'wash'? How do I achieve this with AP? Despite its myriad of brush adjustments, I can't find a single one of them that suppresses the colour buildup. There is discussion about something like this problem in another thread, but it gets into all manner of esoteric settings, comparisons with Photoshop and suggestions of yet more third party apps, none of which helps me achieve this simple task in AP. So am I just using the wrong painting tool, or am I failing to understand something fundamental in the AP approach? It's quite possible I have missed something in the help file and/or tutorial videos, and if I have, please forgive me and point me to the relevant reference! Cheers, Alan

Thanks - phew!

I did a Blurb trade paperback quite successfully a while ago, but using their own software. I'm now keen to do some books using Publisher, and thought I'd got the hang of their specs, but this thread has made me wary! As far as I could make out from the Blub specs (and as implied in the quote above), the cover and the body of the book are two completely distinct PDFs that are uploaded as separate files, so there should be no need to struggle to produce them from a common Publisher document, or to stitch two PDF files together before uploading. So am I missing something here?

Hi I had brought this up in a Designer forum, but nothing happened. It matters even more in Publisher, hence this request. I am being required to submit a PDF for web viewing (iTunes Digital Booklet) that has its Initial View options set for Full Screen. Although I can set other initial view options (zoom, facing pages etc.) in my third party reader, it seems that the Full Screen option is elusive. I cannot find any freeware app that will set Initial View to Full Screen, and It seems wasteful to buy a full-blown copy of Acrobat just to do that one thing. Please could you add a full set of Initial View options to the PDF export dialogue. It would be a valuable - and logical - addition to the program. Thanks, Alan

Many thanks for that, Tantedante - I spotted it earlier - that's fixed it - phew! I guess it'll become a formal release pretty soon. Alan

This is a real problem for me. I create multiple (30 or more) title boards as artboards on a common Designer document for my video productions, and export them to individually named jpegs in one fell swoop using slices in the Export persona. I now have to export each board singly (manually renaming each one) direct from the Designer persona. This is painful. Copying content into a new document as recommended above does not change the problem. All the documents I have created so far trigger this bug. (edit after downgrading) I have just downgraded to 1.7.1.404 (you have to uninstall 1.7.2 first). The file created in 1.7.2 crashes 1.7.1. BUT if I now make a new document and copy the artboards from the new version and save that, I can get into Export>Slices. So it looks like there's something in the 1.7.2 container that causes the crash, not the 1.7.2 program environment or the file's artwork content. Please advise me where to find the 1.7.3 beta when it is released - if it fixes this bug. Thanks - Alan

It would be useful to be able to set the Initial View options for PDF exports from Designer (and other Affinity apps). I prefer to give people files that open in Single Page/Fit Page view, which is seldom the reader default. Cheers!

Thanks, I'll put in a feature request!

I like to export PDFs that are set for initial view of Single Page & Fit Page. Is there any way of setting that option directly in Affinity Designer (Windows)? Thanks!

Just doing a test document with several images. I pull them in, and as explained in the tutorial, by default they are embedded. The afpub file when saved is ~45MB. Following the tutorial instructions, I then set each image file to linked in the Resource Manager (multiple select not working - mentioned elsewhere). I then save the afpub file again and surprised to see it's still 45MB. Do a Save As with another file name, but afpub still 45MB. I then delete all images from the document and resave, this time it's 15kB. Looks like the embedded files are being cached in the document somehow, even though marked Linked in Resource Manager.

Thanks, Owen & Mike - I think I understand it now! The key to it all was my having selected Blurb CMYK profile in the Preferences at some time in the past. As Mike points out, that adds about 2.3MB of code to the project file and, by default, embeds the same amount of code in the PDF output, hence the large file sizes. Selecting 'no embedding of profile' on export restores the small PDF size regardless of the project default. This explains why, when I tried Owen's copy and 'new from clipboard' trick, my project file size stayed big - until I changed my Blurb default profile to something else. I did try Allow advanced features on and off, but didn't see much difference in PDF output filesize. So, problem solved - thanks once again, chaps! Alan

Hi Alfred - sorry, I should have given an example. Looking again at the project document settings, it was originally set to CMYK/8 colour space, and the export for Print was huge, Web was small. Changing the project to RGB/8 colour space exported small PDF files for Print and Web, but the source project file has stayed big. I have purged some of the text, which has not affected file sizes, and attach examples of the two colour-space project files and the four PDF exports. Is AD incorporating some form of preview bitmap into the CMYK Print version of the PDF - which is big due to the A3 paper size - and not in the web version? Any ideas would help. In the meantime, I'll do my designs in RGB/8, overriding to CMYK/8 only for print-specific jobs. Alan PDF-Size-Test_CMYK.afdesign PDF-Size-Test_RGB.afdesign PDF-Size-Test_PRINT_CMYK.pdf PDF-Size-Test_PRINT_RGB.pdf PDF-Size-Test_WEB_CMYK.pdf PDF-Size-Test_WEB_RGB.pdf

Could someone enlighten me about the size of PDF files produced by AD, please? I have created a simple A3 family tree using only text (Arial), vector lines and vector boxes. For some reason the AD project file is 2,412kB, and although I don't understand that, I'm not particularly bothered about it. However, when I export a PDF (rasterizing nothing) in any format except 'For Web', the PDF is around 2,343kB. But if I export for web, it is a tiny 7kB! Both file sizes look identical when viewed. I know storage space is cheap, but nonetheless this is a massive difference, and seemingly unnecessary. When I look at the bigger PDFs in Notepad, there's a massive amount of unreadable gobbledeygook there. Any idea what's going on? Alan

Please, please provide an option to show visible tab indications in the text boxes. I lay out CD inlays with Designer and rely heavily on tab settings to do track lists and other things. The Designer tab setting scheme is hostile enough without having to guess where tabs are falling. This has been a function of all word processing and text/page layout programs for over 20 years, and the lack of it here is driving me to my wits' end. I'd be losing my hair over this problem if I had any left to lose...