jasonhuck

Thanks Matt! Glad to hear it's just a temporary bug and not a permanent change in behavior.

I opened a multi-page PDF in Designer. It created an artboard for every page. I tried to drag across a selection of elements on one of the artboards, starting from an empty area outside the artboard. (I was trying to select all the parts of a vector logo that had been broken up into separate elements on import so I could re-group them.) This is something I do all the time in the shipping version, but the behavior is different in the current beta. If I start to drag from outside the artboard, I can only select the entire artboard, not individual objects within it. Today was the first I had noticed it. I don't know if it's a feature change or a bug, but I most definitely prefer the previous behavior. I looked for a preference. The closest thing I could find was this: ...which I also prefer (old Freehand-style selection behavior), but it doesn't help with this issue. Am I missing something? Thanks, Jason

Fantastic, thank you!

I really wish I could drag PDFs onto the Publisher app icon to open them. I assumed at first that this feature was perhaps disabled on purpose in the beta, but then noticed that it works as expected with the Designer and Photo betas. Has this just not been implemented yet for Publisher? It's the fastest and most convenient way for me to open a document in Publisher, vs. File->Open from within the app, or right-clicking the document and choosing Publisher from the "Open with..." contextual menu. Especially for PDFs, since they can be opened by a large number of apps.

That might keep it from happening, but if so, there's still a problem, because it's Capitalizing every few words right in the Middle of sentences for no Obvious reason that I can see.

I can confirm this has been happening to me the last few days. The document I'm working on contains a lot of objects imported from other sources. Mostly PDFs generated from Sketch, in case that's a clue.

So far, the only way I can find to move pages is to drag and drop them one at a time. Am I missing something? I would like to be able to select one or more contiguous pages in the sidebar and choose a new place to insert them in the document, e.g., a contextual menu "Move..." with a dialog to specify a target page and whether to insert the currently selected pages before or after the target. I thought perhaps I could define a set of pages as a section and then move the sections around, but that doesn't seem to be how that feature works. It would be great if you could drag and drop the sections to reorder them. Thanks, Jason

I don't actually miss the triangle/"A" shape of the old icons, but my initial reaction to the new square one was that it felt washed out. Most of the icons in my dock (including Designer and Photo) are much more saturated and contrasty by comparison. Aside from that, I do prefer the clean, minimalistic look of the new splash screen. The old ones were a bit gawdy and over-designed IMO. A little too "hey, look at me, I'm fancy" vs. "I am a professional tool, part of a professional suite, and in it for the long run." So, overall, moving in the right direction. The icon is part of the public beta, too, right?

Publisher 1.7.162 on Mojave. I created a new table in a document started in a previous build. Deleting characters in the table didn't work -- pressing the delete key would just insert a space. Deleted the table, and after that, ALL text boxes in the document displayed this behavior. Delete key inserted a space. Also, I could not change the color of individual sections of text within a box. Only all the text at once (when the object was selected with the pointer tool). I saved and closed the document, then re-opened it, and it was fine. Haven't tried to reproduce.

A few operations that would be handy when working with tables, perhaps for some future version: - Create a table from a selection of objects. (e.g., You have a nicely aligned grid of text frames, and you would like to convert them into a true table.) - An option in the column & row headers to duplicate that column or row, preserving formatting. (I do see that you can copy/paste an entire row or column into another one.) - Optionally paste tab-delimited content into a table and have each item populate a separate cell. - Dynamically link a table to an external spreadsheet or CSV file as the content source.

Congrats on the launch! Immediately purchased a copy in support of your efforts. Bring on the Publisher beta!

+1 for .idml support (import AND export), especially if a spec has been published. I'm sure this has been discussed ad nauseum already, but very few users of this suite will have the luxury of operating in a vaccuum where they do not have to share files with other agencies, service bureaus, and clients. In order to gain traction as an alternative in an Adobe-dominated world, it has to be easy for new users to pick right up where they left off with existing files, and collaborate with other people using Adobe software. It can't be a hassle or a special request for different formats every time files need to be exchanged. It's bad enough if you're on an older version of Creative Suite and have to ask someone to save back from Creative Cloud to an older format just so you can open their files. - jason

Very interesting points about not copying Adobe yet splitting the roles up along the exact sames lines as Adobe's products. Our shop primarily uses Illustrator to produce web layouts. It's currently our best option because we can keep related layouts together in a single file with multiple artboards/pages, but still have complete drawing capabilities and more freedom to move things around than in InDesign. We don't want a tool just for making single illustrations, and we don't want a tool just for publishing long documents with master pages and text flowing. We want a tool we can do layout and design in. We own Sketch, and have used it, but the lack of print support is a serious drawback -- designers don't want to have to move assets between two similar but different tools. There aren't any other current, viable options that support multiple artboards/pages (one of many features that Freehand nailed so many years ago). Gravit might become an option at some point, though it needs to gain a lot more traction, and I'm disappointed that they are dropping the dedicated desktop version in favor of a purely browser-based cloud service. Or maybe iDraw will step up and add this feature. I am hopeful that once development of Affinity Publisher is underway in earnest, Designer will gain support for multiple artboards/pages without the need to switch back and forth to another app. If that's not going to happen, and the only way to use multiple pages in this suite is to flip back and forth between Designer and Publisher, quite frankly we will never switch to it.

Oh, of course. I understand that, and my comment wasn't meant to come across as a complaint or demand. Just registering my "vote" for this feature and explaining the reality that it is a significant barrier to full adoption for us. Obviously that won't be the case for everyone.

This is easily my number one feature request, and yet another area where Freehand nailed it so many years ago. Illustrator's implementation is awful, but at least it's there. It's a key feature that sets Sketch above other "alternative" but otherwise reasonably capable apps like iDraw. I purchased AD and am very optimistic about its future, but it simply can't replace Illustrator or Sketch for us without support for multiple pages. I keep hoping that this feature from Publisher will show up early in one of the betas.

Great to hear, thanks!

Just for the sake of comparison: - Pixelmator only has a dropdown menu, but it renders instantly on the first use, including previews. - iDraw only has a dropdown menu, but it renders instantly on the first use, by first displaying all of the choices in the system font, and then replacing them with previews. - Sketch has a popup with a list in a scrolling window, including previews, with the ability to filter the list. There's a very slight, but noticeable, delay when it loads, and scrolling the list does get slightly jittery, but it's not bad. - OmniGraffle uses a combo box. The left side launches the standard OS X font dialog, The right side reveals a multi-level flyout menu with the same categorization system as the font dialog. It's fast, but there are no previews unless you use the font dialog and explicitly enable previews there. - Illustrator (CS5, anyway) uses a combo-box as I described in my original post, although without previews. Based on that quick review, it seems like Pixelmator, iDraw, and Sketch have all found different solutions to optimize the drawing of the font menu with previews. Perhaps you'll be able to optimize the performance here? For quickly getting to a specific font by name, being able to quickly click into a text input, start typing, and see what you're typing -- the way Sketch and Illustrator do it -- feels the fastest and provides the best feedback to the user, IMO. Sketch gets bonus points for also providing font previews to browse fonts visually.

On a mid-2011 MacBook Pro w/8GB of RAM and 421 fonts installed, rendering the font dropdown with previews takes about 11 seconds the first time. That's a lot more fonts than I thought I had installed, but I bet a lot of your prospective users have that many or more, and not everyone uses font management software to disable seldom used fonts. Once the menu is rendered, you can start typing the name of the font you want and skip directly to it, rather than scrolling through the menu, which is nice, but there's no way to start typing without invoking the dropdown. If you do decide to scroll through the list, the scrolling is a bit jittery, even after the previews have been cached. A couple suggestions: 1) Add a preference to disable the font previews. It's a great feature, but one you might not always need, and I'm sure that menu would render a lot faster if it didn't have to create all of those previews. 2) Change the font dropdown to a "combo box" control (e.g., http://dev.sencha.com/ext/5.0.1/examples/kitchensink/#form-combos), and only render previews when the user clicks the disclosure triangle side to open the dropdown. Otherwise, when typing directly in the text input side of the combo box, render an autocomplete menu in plain text.

Will Affinity Designer include the ability to search/replace text and fonts within a document?

+1 for command-D to duplicate. While I definitely appreciate the notion of keeping shortcuts the same as the Adobe apps to reduce the learning curve, if it's a case of Adobe (non-standard) vs. Apple (standard), I'd defer to the Apple standard, personally. At the same time, I'd prefer option be the modifier for scale from center. Illustrator, Freehand, Sketch, iDraw, and OmniGraffle all follow this convention. What's the point of being different?

I was confused by this as well, though I am glad the preference exists. It'd be nice if it extended to the size of the cursor, too.

Andy, Believe me, I get that. Looking forward to it! Thanks, Jason

It's great to see new betas coming out on a regular basis. If you'd like to get more feedback from your testers, I'd suggest putting import features at the top of your roadmap. My understanding is that you plan to support opening Illustrator and Freehand (yay!!) files directly. The ability to open a multi-page document from either of those apps without converting them to PDF/SVG/EPS first (or even just changing the file extension from .ai to .pdf, which often works for Sketch) I think would really increase the likelihood that someone would give the beta a try to make quick edits in the middle of their daily workflow. Otherwise, it's a matter of setting aside separate time and/or committing to starting a new project from scratch in a pre-release app. Affinity has the potential to be the modern equivalent of Freehand that I and many others have been waiting for for many years. Looking forward to the next beta!