ubiquity

As a fall-back you could simply uninstall and reinstall since the beta is free

It seems Affinity is making inroads into Adobe's hold on the "in industry" market - despite being excellent products GIMP and Inkscape still don't have the industry acceptance that Affinity has developed in a remarkably short time. Unfortunately I think Affinity development resources are probably spread to thin to support porting to Linux in the near future.

Hope you managed to get a satisfactory result

Did you close, then reopen Affinity Photo for the second image? I realise one should not have to do so but it might be useful to know if it persists.

Thanks MickRose - I hadn't investigated a solution for Artistic Text - will make a note of it.

Carl123's solution is better and yes the more time you spend the better your results will be. I suggest you avoid using regular shapes if you are going to clone the background.

You can also try the haze removal filter. I just put a rectangular marquee around the whitish area to apply the haze filter once, but you may need to apply adjustments more than once and, of course the image you have is far better as a starting point than just working on a quick screen copy like I did. Do you want to keep the notice board in the background? You might play around with the wall texture from the left hand side to eliminate the "10".

As MEB says: When you activate the ruler it is displayed above the text frame - you should be able to create a new bullet style (probably Bullet 4) to enable you to apply it regularly.

You seem not to appreciate the notion of copying. Providing the same functionality is not the same as copying - copying would be to use the same code in the same programming language to produce the same functionality. This is a common misconception for people without an appreciation of software development. Similarly there is a common misunderstanding of the difference between patent rights and copyright. There is no "invention" involved in snapping tolerance and tilted planes - these ideas cannot be patented, which is the "right" associated with invention.

Thanks - first time I tried it didn't appear to work but following your advice it did , just was noticeably slow and maybe I was too hasty to deselect the first time.

This didn't work for me. I have flat pasted a selection from one layer into another that has a transparent background. This gives me almost the selection I want to work with but to refine it I have used select by sample colour to select a range of pixels that I wish to convert to background transparency. In GIMP with such a selection I would simply delete the selected parts of that layer making the chosen pixels part of the transparent background. I followed the procedure outlined above but it just turned my background black and the selected colour remained unchanged. I'm sorry if this seems to "hijack" the original question but the topic title is absolutely apt as I wish to make the colour I now have selected just a part of the transparent background on this layer.