osang

Hi aitte,
 
The thumbnail feature you speak of has already been implemented ;)
 
Trouble is, it cannot be released in this set of beta builds - these are strictly bug fixes to the MAS version - no new features.
 
Matt was a bit naughty when he added the "Clip To Canvas" feature - but it only required a single string to be translated, so it was fine :)
 
Even better news - we'll be submitting this branch to the store on Monday - which means after it's all released we can start to release beta builds with new features in again :D
 
Thanks,
 
Andy.

Cool! Pasteboard in single page. I wonder this should be enabled in the first place?

Hi, I have hears really good things about affinity and I like it a lot so far, but the one thing which is making it hard to use is the lack of a smoothing tool. I can imagine that no auto trace will become an issue too. The smoothing tool for any intuitive drawing is imperative as it saves so much time. These are perhaps small things but will stop me being able to use it as a replacement for Illustrator. Hope you can make one soon!
Thanks

It would be great to output bleeds to formats other than pdf, like tiff. And bleed size per artboard please.
A great time saver.

Hi Anne,
 
Hopefully this helps, it's a very simple snowflake in a few steps. I haven't written every single step but you should hopefully be able to follow along from the screenshots. There are many ways this could be achieved and variations, play around with it and share your results.
 
​1- Use a star shape and adjust the settings as in screenshot 
 

 
2- Use the rounded rectangle tool to create a line that will go down the middle (adjust settings)
 

 
3- Duplicate shapes (CMD + J) and rotate into place
 

 
4- Again duplicate one of those lines and make them smaller and move in to place
 

 
5- Repeat and move shapes into place and then groups these together in the layers panel (CMD + G)
 

 
6- Duplicate this group and rate and put in place. There you are a simple snowflake
 

 
 
 
Allan
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Yes, bleed previews for both normal documents and artboard documents are on the way... :)

Just to confirm what Miguel is saying, bleed is currently not working for artboards... I have a version which does work but it is more than a small change and would be too risky to enable at this stage - but I'll put it in after we launch the update. It interacts with a few things and needs a different shader to make it draw to the screen, so it would invalidate a lot of testing and we wouldn't know the safety of the change until it was too late. It's coming soon though :)
 
Thanks,
Matt

I'm guessing there must be a way to retain print settings that I am missing.  
For example, if I set a scaling factor when printing a document, it is not retained if I go to print it again!
I have wasted so much paper and ink by forgetting that this happens, that I am pulling my hair out.

Yes... kind of... Margins are also 'per-artboard' now but I haven't yet worked out what a margin means on a non-rectangular artboard! In the future, when you make your first artboard, all the guides, margins and snapping grid options from your document will be moved onto the first artboard, but right now they are just removed, sorry... :(
 
I'm just still working my way through a few things with artboards (and there's a constant discussion in the office about what should happen in different scenarios) - so it's very 'work-in-progress' but we'll get there quickly now :)
 
Thanks!
Matt

Purpose: Features / Improvements / Fixes 
Status: Beta
Requirements: Purchased Affinity Designer
Mac App Store: Not Submitted
Download: Here
 
To use this beta, simply download the file from the link given above and double-click on the file to open the installer. Follow the instructions to install the beta version. The beta sits alongside the Mac App Store version and will not interfere with it.
 
 
Notable changes:
- Artboards. These are still work-in-progress and you can expect a few niggles, but at least you can see the direction we're heading. At present we still need to add auto-slice creation to Export Persona for artboards and we also show an occasional flicker when adding artboards: these will be fixed before the next update. We also need to move guide, grid and rulers to work per-artboard, so these are currently not as they will be in the final release and will be fixed asap.
- Global colours.
- Full support for P3 panels found in the new 5k iMac and 4k iMac. If you have one of these you can try making a new RGB8 document with ProPhoto profile and choosing RGB(255,0,0) or RGB(0,255,0) as the colour of your objects - they should look richer and more vivid than you are used to seeing.
- View points added to the Navigator. The Navigator has an advanced mode that lets you choose to create and swap between specific view zoom/position saved points.
- Font fixes. Specifically, a number of font-related crashes have been addressed
- Export/Import improvements - particularly PDF.
- Fix for Text tool failing to accept certain characters (those that were mapped to other shortcuts!)
- Snapping improved for Rotation Centre. Rotation Centre is available from the Move Tool's context toolbar.
- Pantone/named colour/tint improvements. Selecting an object which has a Pantone colour will automatically choose the tint options in the colour panel.
- Canvas rotation. The canvas can be rotated by using the touchpad's rotate gesture or by using the View menu items 'Rotate Left', 'Rotate Right' or 'Reset Rotation'.
- Fix for colour conversion issues exhibited with HSL colours in RGB document formats.
- Character & Paragraph panel improvements.
- Typography panel show visually the effects of different OpenType features. Select some text and go to the Typography panel - this will show you the available options for your current font and text selection. Try changing fonts for more options.
- Printer’s marks and bleed available for output. The export options for PDF now include these additional options, as does the Print dialog.
- Smart Tap feature. Toggle between the current zoom and 100% by double-tapping with two fingers on the trackpad. This is useful for designing up close and being able to easily refer to a 100% view and then back again.
- Updated splash screens. These are necessary as we need to include Pantone licensing information.
- Added Split-toning adjustment. This is available from the Layers panel's adjustments menu and the main Layers->Adjustments menu.
- Snapshots panel. This panel (disabled by default) allows you to take a snapshot of the document in the current state and refer back to it at later points.
- Added shortcuts for the different Personas. These can be customised by the user as desired.

Yup, a bug. This is fixed for the next beta release. Sorry about that.

-Bug Report-
 
Single Shortcuts work while typing.
On default preset shortcuts, you cannot type "," because it stands for "Split View".

There will be an even more fantastic Designer beta in a few weeks too ;)
 
A

I'm fine with the new look. I like it.

There is something weird going on with the character panel font size text field. The first time I click it it doesn’t let me type in it.
 
Also sometimes when using the font list and clicking on one font family it auto-scrolls or something and selects something completely different. Often it changes the size as well for some reason.
 
Overall I think that panel is buggy and I try to avoid it.

Hey guys, an important observation: when in outline view, regular editable text is displayed as outlines. This is hopefully an oversight, definitely not a ideal in a production environment. Editable text should be displayed as solid black text, or another non-outline style — outlines should only be used for text when the Convert to Outlines command has been applied to it — for the following reason: oftentimes, we provide files with all fonts converted to outlines. The easiest way to check whether a file's text has already been converted to outlines is, believe it or not, switching to Outline View! The way in which AD currently behaves, there is no way to know if text is converted to outlines or not...
 
Thanks for all you do. I hope this can make it on the next beta!

Goody, goody! Gonna explore the changes on the latest beta.

Rest assured, we are reading all the posts, we are taking on board everything that is being said and we do care an awful lot about how you feel about the program and about the direction we're going in.
 
We've tried to be very honest and upfront at all times about what's coming - the only thing that we can't do is put set dates on things because as soon as we start saying 'before Christmas' for features (for example) then it starts down a road of problems:
 
- If the feature is definitely not going to be ready, then the user gets let down and feels disappointed that their expectations were not met, especially if they see some other feature they felt wasn't as important getting finished.
- If the feature is nearly ready but not quite then the developer feels under pressure to release within the time frame given and then we get a suboptimal version of the feature or tool, which is not what we want to release to you, and is not what you wanted to receive either!
 
We've got so many ideas in addition to those on the roadmap document and all of them will come over time - and we'll be trying to make them all reality as fast as we can :)  As Miguel correctly says, some features actually rely on others, some require one piece of technology to be in and working before work can start on them. Sometimes you may be surprised about the order that features appear in, but there's usually a very good reason behind them - and it's not that we've picked some crazy order, it's just that they were dependent on each other. For example, in order to get multiple pages/artboards to draw on screen we need to do many things, but one of them is that I need to make some changes to the OpenGL presentation layer that gets the rendered document image to appear on the screen and in doing so, I will end up with a working canvas rotation feature as a by-product. You may well find therefore that canvas rotation will appear in a beta version before artboards appear, but that doesn't mean we prioritised it - it's that the order of things is not always as clear as it may seem. My personal list of things I'd like to see next is: Corner Tool, Artboards, Symbols, Distances and Snapping improvements, SVG slice export, Mesh Fills... so yes, they're very high on my own list...
 
Thanks,
Matt