robinp

Of course we are not producing drawings in Publisher. We produce design reports which are typically A3 documents. We also produce numerous drawings which are stand alone. The reports serve to provide background and explanation to the design. Therefore placing of scale drawings is essential. It is simply bad practice to not place drawings at a known scalable scale. For example, a 1:50 drawing @ A1 would be 1:100 @ A3. Often you might just want to place part of a drawing, so it is cropped, which would be done in the DTP app. You therefore can’t rely on snapping to page boundary. At least, you can’t once you start cropping. Our drawings are typically ‘printed’ to PDF for issuing to clients / contractors / others. The last thing you want is to also have to export to a particular DPI raster. For numerous reasons, but primarily because it wouldn’t actually solve the problem.

Personally I’d put accurate and precise control of elements as one of the most important requirements for a page layout application. In truth, the image frame controls are generally imprecise and need a pretty major rethink. I have no idea of relative sizes of market, but I’m pretty sure there are hundreds of thousands of people in the construction industry or other technical design areas where exact image sizing placement is essential. Almost all of the things you describe I’m pretty sure are nice to haves for almost anyone and maybe only essential to a few people. Construction is, or should be, a major target market for Affinity’s apps. We don’t use such apps enough to really justify the huge costs of Adobe, but we need a suite of apps, pretty much like Affinity’s. Perfect, they are so affordable by comparison. They just have to tick a few boxes and being able to accurately and precisely scale drawings is about as fundamental as you can get in our industry.

Having restarted Publisher, the replace document option has reappeared. The resource manager is slightly better too but still not great. Having replaced the drawings by selecting via the layer panel, choosing 'replace document', the files are then embedded. While they are named correctly in the layer panel, the resource manager thinks they are anonymous TIFF files (they are actually vector PDFs). However, if I think click 'make linked' in the resource manager, they now retain the correct scale. Also, having restarted Publisher, the 'Replace...' option is now working again in the Resource Manager. However, replacing a linked file results in an embedded file but it does now work as per my previous work around aside from that.

OMG now when I select the images from the layer panel, I can no longer see the 'replace document' option in the tool bar. This is all so inconsistent.

I have found a different work around. Select the image frame in the layers panel, expand and then select the "(linked document)". Then there's an option to replace the document. Doing this retains the positioning and scale of the original document with the replaced one. It is only a partial work around in that there is still no way of knowing the actual scale. And doing it this way has resulted in the file being Embedded instead of Linked despite my preferences being CLEARLY set to link not embed. Come on!!! Oh, and the Resource Manager is definitely broken. It doesn't show these files properly, so it isn't possible to even change this now embedded file into a linked file.

Thanks, that's helpful. I must admit, I miss not having a 'merge selected layers' option. That's another to go on the list!

Unless I'm missing something, I'm surprised that there is still no way of interrogating and manipulating a placed images scale. We are Architects. It is VITAL that we know what scale an image / drawing is placed at. It is VITAL that we can easily control the scale of a placed image. This is really basic stuff. I don't know why this still hasn't been addressed. It is concerning that after several months of asking for this and explaining why it is important, nothing has been done about it. So, given the above, I'm forced to find work arounds. Such as scaling a placed image to a full sheet so that I know how big it is and then manipulating it from there. OK when you first do it, but terrible if you want to come back and edit it later because you have no way of knowing what the current scale is of the image and then you have to start again. Pretty crap. To top it off, when replacing an image in a frame, all scaling and position information is lost. It's like that was attached to the placed image rather than the image frame. This is really bad. For example, we often want to place several drawings that are positioned and scaled identically to each other. For example, if we have several design options, we want to show all of them next to each other with the same scaling and position relative to the frame and page. A work around to this used to be to go to the Resource Manager and replace the image from there. Currently, there seems to be a bug with the Resource Manager where not all instances of a placed image are shown. This breaks the work around. I'm sorry to sound fed up, but it is because I am. These are really basic things that are essential to a sensible workflow for anyone that needs confidence over the scale of placed images. Are there any other work arounds? When are all of the above going to be fixed?

I have recently started using the Beta. I was finding the current release (non beta) version repeatedly crashed when opening some PDFs, I had also been finding the Lasso tool / marquee tool unwieldy. Anyway, on to the beta. I have found there are several issues currently and sorry if these have been reported previously. Lasso - No way of using shift to lock angle when using the polygon lasso tool. Holding shift changed the tool to the magnet option temporarily. I've tried numerous other key combos but none seem to do it. Flood select no way of using all layers to create selection I'm not sure what the tolerance setting is supposed to do but currently it appears to do nothing. I assumed it would be like the threshold setting in photoshop. Flood fill / gradient tool are both currently very frustrating to use. Flood fill - Colour settings are lost each time you move to a different tool. This is bad if you have to adjust a selection for example Gradient tool - similar to above. However, it also reverts to defaults all of the tool settings. This means you can have a gradient set up just how you want it (colour, opacity, type etc) and then adjust a selection to go back and it has reverted to the defaults. I also find that sometimes when using this tool it changes the active layer, for example, click on the image to start a gradient and for some reason Photo changes the active layer. This is awful because it not only means you end up with the gradient on the wrong layer, you then have to correct it and set up all the settings for the gradient all over again. Generally, I would much rather have a different quick key for each of these tools. Generally, I want flood fill to be able to flood to a region that is composited from all visible layers (like photoshop). Having to create a manual selection with marquee / lasso is laborious. Colour settings generally - Similar to above, colour settings seem to revert to defaults regularly Layer thumbnails regularly show thumbnail for other layers Image transformation - I would expect to be able to distort and image with the black arrow tool and holding down of modifier keys. For example, hold Alt and drag a corner control point to distort the image. The Perspective tool and mesh warp tools are powerful but not as flexible / quick as just manually adjusting things as I have described. I think a better interface to indicate which adjustment layers are working with which layers would be helpful. Photoshop as the return arrow like symbol to show when an adjustment layer is automatically masked to a specific layer. I appreciate there is the whole layer hierarchy system but sometimes it just looks like a sea of layers and at a glance, identifying what adjust what can be trickier. I had a long debate previously with @MEB about delete and whether it should delete layers. He pointed out that it is the same in Photoshop. I think the issue I have with the affinity apps is that often objects are in fact layers. I find accidentally selecting different layers happens far too often just by clicking on the canvas somewhere. In photoshop the typical behaviour is that the only way to change active layers is with the layer panel. With Photo I am finding that I often end up with a different layer active to the one I had originally selected. This is linked to the gradient fill issue described above, where you end up with a gradient added to the wrong layer. Maybe I am just using it wrong, but it doesn't seem as robust as it might. Thanks, and happy to provide more detail on any of the above.

Is there any plan to enable the flood select and flood fill tools to sample all visible layers? It is a major limitation currently that they only respect what is on the current active layer rather than what is visible. It should be a tool option, both ways are valid and useful.

It's interesting because I've never noticed it being a problem in Photoshop etc. I wonder if there is something different about the way it works? Maybe it's just because I was hitting delete so much trying to get the contents of the lasso tool to delete. Anyway, my point about the keyboard shortcut being the same for deleting the contents of a lasso / marquee and for deleting a layer being peculiar seems valid still. If we are going to have control over shortcuts (which is great) it would seem sensible that two different actions could be controlled with different shortcuts (or disabled individually).

I don't think so. I must admit, I've not come across the symbols panel but having just had a look at it, it doesn't seem like it would do what I'm talking about but that might just be that I don't understand what Symbols are.

I find having to use the wand and then flood fill pretty time consuming if you've got a complicated file. Having the flood fill tool sample all layers would be MUCH better. Also, with pixel persona in designer, or a flood fill type tool in 'draw' persona. Basically, I want to add colour between vector lines. The file is VERY big and complex so turning all the individual lines into closed shapes for filling using the standard colour tools is impractical.

Great that the lasso bug has been picked up. I really really don’t like deleting the layer via backspace / delete key. It is horribly dangerous. At the very least, can we make it so that the shortcuts are controlled separately. It seems to me that conceptually deleting the contents of a selection is very different to deleting a layer. That they are controlled with the same shortcut just seems wrong.

Fair enough, I call it backspace to differentiate from the delete key but whatever. Your point is interesting and yes, switching to marquee having created the lasso selection does indeed enable the contents to be deleted.

Good spot, a decent work around for the short term but these two things really do need fixing. Lasso selection should be deletable using backspace (currently it deletes the selection) It should be possible to disable backspace to delete layer without it stopping deleting the contents of a marquee / lasso

Yes, they appear to be 2 different but similar problems.

Nope, I'm on Mac.

Drawing a lasso it is never possible to delete the contents

OK, I've figured out what is going on. It's not great. I disable using backspace as a shortcut for deleting a layer. I never ever would want this to be the case. You just risk deleting a layer without realising. In no way should backspace = delete layer. Disabling this shortcut disables backspace for deleting the contents of a marquee. It is really weird and horrible that these two commands are linked with the same shortcut controls.

Here's a video of it. Rest assured, I'm hitting backspace repeatedly during this video. Screen Recording 2018-12-18 at 19.16.01.mov

Thanks, I had done that but having restarted Photo it does now appear to be working. I'm quite familiar with working with Photoshop so I had checked that the correct layer was selected etc but nothing would make it work. It was very strange indeed and driving me crazy. Edit: @MEBIt has now started happening again. Definitely a bug.

Hi @MEB Thanks, but that’s not how it’s working for me. I’m using pixel layers and it’s driving me nuts. I’m having to use cut instead and that obviously causes problems if you are in the middle of copy and pasting something. Robin

Yeah, this is stupidly clunky UI. Come on. Draw marquee, hit backspace should delete the contents of the marquee. Why on earth wouldn't it?

In InDesign you can alt+command click (I think that's the combo, I just do it without thinking) to activate master page items on specific pages. You can then edit / delete as required. You can then reapply the master to the page if you want the elements back. There is also a general command by page where you can activate all master page elements. Either would be OK. Both would be great. I can see that with the way master items appear as a layer, that a different interface could be developed that achieves the same things and that could be OK too.

I've had some IT problems and had to uninstall Publisher for a while but I'm now back using it again for the first time in a month or so and I'm surprised that it still appears not to be possible to override master page items on a page by page basis. Am I missing something?