Sideshowlol

An "Add as preset" for any page size would work for me. 🙂

I'll add my vote for column in text-boxes. I hope it's incorporated into Designer in a future release. It seems counter-intuitive to me that Designer only allows one to work with columns at multi-sized art-board level, whereas Publisher, which is a tool primarily aimed at same-sized, multi-page document design and layout, offers control over columns at text-box level. Being able to incorporate text-boxes with more than a single column of text into a design is important to me. Over the years, I have needed to create designs that are nothing to do with same-sized, multi-page documents (such as magazine or brochure layouts) but that do require text-boxes with multiple columns. Having to create a text box in Publisher and then copy/paste it into Designer isn't convenient when Designer is evidently quite happy to receive the pasted text-box with columns. Designer also adds a "Remove Columns" button to the tool bar when a multi-column text-box is pasted in. So it can remove them but not add them. My hope is that the guys making the decisions at Serif, on what functionality to include in each Affinity app, will see how useful it is to be able to add columns to text-boxes in Designer. As the OP stated: this functionality was available in Freehand 25 years ago! It was very, very cool to have so much fine-grained control over text and have access to artboards with pages of various sizes in one document. Back then, it was mainly for print but now it would be ideal for a web design project—eg. for when a design has to be repurposed for multi-sized social media ads. Laying out multi-sized, multi-page projects in Designer is fantastic. Text-box column control would add another killer feature to this already great app.

Thank you to all for the answers to Sascha Leib's question re hanging punctuation. I hoped I would find it somewhere. Optical alignment is a very powerful and useful feature in Publisher. Thank you Affinity for continuing to develop this great app in conjunction with Designer and Photo. 🙏

Thanks for the acknowledgement Sean P. Designer is quitting unexpectedly for me on attempting to print any artboard from an AD file containing several artboards. Same file printed just fine in 1.8.6. Eventually managed to get a page to print from 1.9 by painstakingly rebuilding the page in a fresh document but it doesn't always work. The page contains some symbols. Exporting to pdf and printing from Preview app is the best workaround for me right now. Hoping for a fix soon. Many thanks to the devs for all their hard work in getting these bugs squished.

Well, it wasn’t to be. Maybe 2021? Still hoping...

Old thread, I know, but I'm wondering if the reason we can't easily use a g/s image as a layer mask, as we can so easily do in PS, is because, under the hood, AP isn't working in absolute pixels but a kind of res-independent format. That's my guess. So there has to be an extra rasterisation process to fix the resolution for use as a mask. Maybe? I'm sure someone here who is a lot more knowledgable about the inner-workings of AP will know.

Thanks for your thoughts, Walt. I get that. I assume it text column editing will appear in a future pleaser of Designer. I have been in this game for a few years now. To date, Designer still lacks a lot of the functionality of apps from the dim and distant past, such as Freehand (which I've already mentioned and which was also ahead of Illustrator in terms of multi-page layouts and text editing functionality). If I could have Freehand's text editing features with all the modern benefits of Affinity Designer and a modern Mac, I would be a happy bunny. I live in hope as Serif have done a great job to date.

Interestingly, I can copy a text frame with columns from Publisher and paste it into Designer and the columns remain intact. So that's something. There are obviously no column-editing features in Designer yet though.

I agree about the hassle aspect of switching apps to add columns to a text block in Designer. Freehand was brilliant at this back in the day. Hope this functionality makes its way into Designer.

Still happening for me too. Been driving me nuts as I'm working to a deadline. Is it to do with the fact that there's a system-wide keyboard shortcut for Emoji's and Symbols at the bottom of the Edit menu? It set by default to control-command-space. I have just made a new shortcut for it using Keyboard>Shortcuts in System Prefs. It's now shift-F12 which was as far away as I could send it! Will report back if it helps with the sticking hand-tool issue.

Tools to enable the setting of “black”, “white” and “mid-grey” points for an image are hugely important for so many reasons. In PS it is possible to preset the colour values for each of these points and then a single targeted click on the image being corrected for each point will remap all the colour values. Some people use the tool in PS to simply set 100% white and black values, and to remove a colour cast from an image by choosing a mid-grey for the gamma. But it is very much more powerful than that and a fantastically useful tool in the PS tool set. Has AF any tool to match PS in this department yet? If so, please can someone tell me where it is? I have to keep my copy of PS 7 on an older Mac to allow me to do this one thing for my images. I appreciate very much what Serif have created with their suite of apps for designers. However, there are certain tools still missing from AF and AD that make a huge difference to my workflow. An easy way to remap colours in an image through an “eye-dropper” type of tool would be tremendously helpful. PS had this ability since at least version 2, when I first used it, and so I find it hard to understand why something similar hasn’t yet been implemented in AF, especially considering the other fancy things it can do. It’s mid-2020 now. I am hoping that this will be the year of the white-point, black-point & gamma setting tool!