TonyB

The betas of Designer and Photo 1.7 updates should start in a couple of weeks.

We have confirmed that switching off "Parallel Processing" will workaround your batch issues on Mojave. We should hopefully have a beta of 1.7 available soon.

Earlio, did you try switching off "Parallel Processing" in the batch panel?

To be fair to Apple they are usually better than Microsoft as they break our Apps regularly. Fixing up applications after OS updates with workarounds is something we all in the industry except and companies that charge for updates also make a lot of money from it. We don't charge for updates or support and I hope we don't need to. On the Windows store we get 1 star reviews for the store not working correctly and that is completely out of our control and causes us great pain. As for your ongoing batch problems then please try adding the Global permission as I still can't reproduce the problem here.

Earlio, one simple thing to try with batch convert is to rule out any permissions problems that may be new to Mojave. If you could go to preferences->Photoshop Plugins and click the Authorise Global and pick the drive you have you files on then that would be a good test. Giving permission for Plugins also gives Affinity general access for opening files for other operations.

We found about about the Metal bug when they released iOS 12 as it has the same bug. We did issue a patch for that as there isn't a workaround as you can't switch Metal off. We were hoping Apple would fix the issue before Mojave shipped just like they do with many other bugs/issues that get introduced in a new OS. As we had a simple workaround for Mojave we thought that would work around the bug and also release 1.7 with many other fixes as soon as we can. It takes so much time for us to release an update and didn't want to push 1.7 even further away because of it. A beta of 1.7 is only few weeks away so you could enable Metal when that comes out. I'm sorry about your batch problem but I haven't received any information from our QA department about it yet but hopefully we can find a solution when we get more information.

The same valid Metal kernel compiled fine before Mojave but doesn't with Mojave. We can work around the bug by rewriting the Metal kernel but that won't ship until Affinity 1.7. You can workaround the problem by switching Metal Compute off. Assuming you have switched Metal compute off and restated the App then any issues you are having with batch will not be related. Can anyone else replicate your batch issues?

This is due to a bug in the Apple LLVM GPU compiler shipped with Mojave. There is a code workaround so it's very unlikely they will fix it.

Hyperlinks are on our internal roadmap, unfortunately like most of the other great suggestions we just don't have a date for when it will be implemented.

If you pick one the the Prepress PDF standards like PDF/X-1a:2003 then and RGB images will be converted to CMYK for you. We do need to add preflight check for other items in the future but source image colourspace shouldn't be one of them.

The cost of Publisher would have to be close to the cost of Quark. We would also need to rewrite the whole PDF pipeline causing a delay of probably a year.

Embedded font support will be added for PDFs.

There isn't any reason we couldn't be better the Infix. The only problem is being as good as Adobe.

Thanks for the Quark 2018 info. I believe they started with Adobe tech then used Jaws and now look like they have changed again. The problems for Affinity are still the same though. I believe the best way forward is to improve our PDF rendering and therefore our editing.

Implementing pdf-passthrough has two problems. The first is we still need to draw something so we read and render the PDF exactly the same way as we edit them. The second is the pdf-passthrough usually fails because the PDF is not a press-ready PDF with the exact spec version, colour space, transparency flattening, compression, bleed etc. as the destination PDF. The only way to correct these is to read the PDF file and interpret the contents the exact way we do to edit them. Adobe do the same but are just better at it than us as they created the spec and even sell the tech. You can even licence the tech from Adobe but the cost per copy would be n-times the cost of Publisher. I believe Quark licensed from Adobe but also use another RIP with varied results.