JGD

1. Wow. I didn't know they didn't have that one yet. But I suspect it's low-hanging fruit and it will come sooner rather than later. Sooner, unfortunately, than universal layers, but alas, such is life. 2. I also didn't know that. I'll probably have to check that one out. But it's also low-hanging fruit, so keep pushing for it. 3. It's a nice-to-have feature, but unless it's something you do on a daily basis, if you have an old version of CS lying around you're better off firing up a dedicated virtual machine if need be (on the Mac you probably will have to do that, yes, and deal with its potential fugly non-Retina-ness) and load it up on there. It's a feature that I'm certain is on their internal roadmap somewhere, but it will take years to come. 4. I highly doubt it. Those files are proprietary, so I'm really not seeing that happening. Honestly, you're better off sending .PDFs and trying to convert people into the Affinity fold. The price of admission is stupidly low and the licences are perpetual; if it ever reaches critical mass, even the most die-hard Adobe fanboy may eventually relent, and it's not like you're forcing them to install Corel. As for IDML, that would be cool, and please correct me if I'm wrong; it's a bit of a more “open” format, right? 5. Same as above, and the other posters already covered it. But I'll also add: if IDML import is doable, it stands to reason that IDML export should be, too, so at least regarding Publisher you'd be covered. And Photo can already save .PSD files, so there's that. 2/3 native competitor format support is pretty good if you ask me.

Bonus: if you want to take type designers into the fold as well (a niche of a niche of a niche, I know, but one can dream), try and test direct copy/paste PostScript compatibility with Glyphs.app (I can put you in direct contact with Rainer Scheichelbauer, one of the Glyphs devs, if you want), FontLab VI (I don't have Adam Twardoch's contact but I know someone who probably has) and RoboFont (same). It's not a basic thing, but there's something wrong/non-standard with your vector specification. Maybe Adobe didn't document its spec well enough and you had to reverse-engineer it, or something, and maybe it's too late to fix it, but if you ever do so, extra kudos for that. Well, what do you know, I may have spoken too soon. I did some quick tests and it seems to be fixed already, so maybe I'll be able to recommend you to my type design students after all. It's a really small market but, production-wise, type design is so basic that you don't need to work in the Artboard model and can just use a gigantic one-artboard document and be done with it. It basically consists of setting up a grid and some parameters, drawing curves and copying and pasting. Cool. But now you'll have to deal with my nit-picking regarding all things node-, curve- and grid-related. I may even ditch Ai for my personal modular type design-related needs sooner than I thought (Ai's node selection is getting worse and worse by the day, so when it comes to type design any current shortcomings in AD will probably still be offset by those, ha). And it's just too bad that our classes are a wee bit small (5-7 people at most for workshops, and 15 at most for MA classes)… and also students usually have to purchase Glyphs.app anyway if they want to carry on working in the field afterwards, as their licenses are always time-restricted. Oh well. As for the others, September is still the timeframe, yes.

I will just link to this, in a slightly bigger font but not so big that it will get me banned/reprimanded for my insistence: Universal layers. There are various different ways of achieving this, in increasing degrees of complexity and interdependency between the various components of the suite, and achieving the most complex ones would be awesome, but extremely hard and unlikely in v.1.x, sure. But failure to even put it in the roadmap and addressing it, right now (v.1.7.x) in the… safest and simplest way possible will inevitably result in me not recommending Affinity Designer to maybe hundreds of people until it finally is. That is a basic and common feature that trumps many others already crossed-out on the list. The document/layer/artboard model is the very heart of the application, really, and it is oh-so-broken, weird, unintuitive and inflexible at the moment. It works for basic projects only (and yes, before you bring up all the cool demonstration artwork from reputable artists, from a production standpoint even the most complex of illustrations is, well, basic, whereas an apparently basic map or diagram is insanely complicated), and only a checkbox and a few lines of code separate it from being a veritable powerhouse for all things vector. @Ben, you mentioned current vs. new users, and I completely get it. However, when developing for some current users, especially teachers, you're also developing for many other future, potential users. We know in advance what kind of projects they will be faced with, so we can most certainly predict the issues that will arise in mostly any app our students use, and we will adjust our software requirements to our curricula and definitely not the other way around, as you may understand. We're talking volume licensing and entire classes buying this thing during their attendance or right after graduation, here. And the next window of opportunity may close this summer/around September. Please bear that in mind, guys. Take care!

Bonus comment #2: There's also a way which you could deal with the whole “Clip to Canvas” conundrum that will inevitably arise if and when you get around to implement any of these proposed features. If said option to “Automatically move objects to and from artboards” is turned off, it stands to reason that when dragging an object outside of an artboard it would technically remain in it and thus be clipped out of view, with no draggable features unless you switched to outline mode, am I right? And that is also terrible UX, which leads me to believe that maybe that's the reason why you came up with the whole “drag—partially clip—reappear as universal object” behaviour; well, guess what, not all users like it anyway because sometimes they may end up with just a tiny visible tip of an object and thus have to resort to all sorts of shenanigans (like scouring the Layers panel or using Outline view) just to find their “missing objects”. I propose, thus, a sensible compromise, that might be activated automatically when that “manual mode” is engaged, but might also be optionally toggable in all other scenarios: what if the portion of any object outside of its parent artboard appeared slightly transparent and/or in outline view? And if it overlapped another adjacent artboard, when selecting said artboard the latter would automatically obscure those objects or, alternatively, only the clipped out objects from any given and selected artboard would show at a time in said transparent/outlined manner. And if you wanted to see all hidden objects at once, easy: either you triggered Outline mode, or you selected all artboards at the same time. In fact, the latter option might allow you to make them disappear in outline mode in unselected artboards so as not to make critical vector editing work extremely confusing on complex projects with overlapping stuff all over the place (I'm showing some foresight here, because I tend to be a mix of rational and chaotic/messy, so I know in advance that would eventually happen to me and I'm sure it would to happen to others as well). This is intuitive and completely workable, and would, as a bonus, solve that unforgiving UX scenario I mentioned first. And it could be just yet a different View mode. Call it Hybrid or something. Make the whole “Clip to Canvas” functionality a toggable set of options with various degrees of “clipping aggressiveness” (maybe even with custom transparency values?) in Artboard mode. I don't know, I'm not the UI/UX expert here and cannot (nor had the pretension to be able to) provide you with all the answers, but I know enough to at least be able to make an informed assessment, and to me it seems that, as it stands, Affinity Designer's entire layer model is a complete mess and doesn't offer users nearly as much choice as the competition. It's oversimplified for the sake of looking/feeling nice or just being different, but ends up chopping the legs off of an otherwise superb application. Please, please, please consider this feedback more seriously than the last time. I and others have been waiting for this for more than a year now.

I'm also adding a separate comment as a bonus, because this may open yet some other cans of worms and I want to keep it separate from the original one, so please bear with me: As for the universal/document layers themselves, and their visual manifestation in the Studio UI, any layer sitting above the topmost artboard could automatically become “universal”… because it technically already is. That is intuitive for any user to grasp, but some extra visual feedback – like, say, change its descriptor in the Layers panel from “(Layer)” to “(Universal Layer)” … and maybe even rename the current artboart-level layers into “(Artboard Layer)” for good measure – would also be very welcome and help a lot with discoverability. But if you want to go the extra mile and make sure people instantly get it without having to create and move layers around, you can also add a draggable separator with an independent scroll field, kind of like the one between Master Pages and regular layout pages in InDesign and APub. If you dragged layers and objects below the separator, they could automatically snap into the nearest artboard (since with the concept of universal/document layers, it would no longer make any sense to have universal/document objects sandwiched between different artboards in the layers panel like they do now, and with the “Automatically move objects…” behaviour activated, they could just jump to the topmost layer in the universal/document section when dragged, in the actual WYSIWYG document working area, from their current artboard onto the pasteboard). Boom!, instant reconciling of both Affinity's new and current artboard-centric layer model and Adobe's/Corel's/Macromedia's document-centric one, without having to add an extra Artboards panel like Adobe did. That should make a lot of people happy without cluttering the UI too much. Also, you could extend the concept to Affinity Publisher, and thus even allow for document-, master page- and layout page-level layers, in a totally logical and consistent tie-in with the Designer Persona. That would actually make Affinity superior and more flexible than Adobe's offerings.

[Edit: for your convenience, I created a new, specific and more focused request, as the original one from this current thread is partially solved already. I'm leaving this comment here for archival purposes, but if you want to save yourself the trouble of reading all this, you're better off checking the new one.] Ok, @MEB, I'm tagging @Patrick Connor as well and I'll ask you for a little help here, or, if this feature I'm asking for hasn't been implemented already, a little compromise on your part, please. It should be easy to code and require either an extra button on the layers panel, or an extra checkbox in the settings window. I've just realised that if we bring the objects outside of the artboards and into a layer above all of them, we actually get a “universal layer” and can export each artboard and have objects that span them display both while editing, with the pre-selected and grayed-out “Clip to Canvas” setting, and on the exported files. This is indeed the behaviour I intended on, and will save me all of those shenanigans with slices I was talking about before. The thing is: there is no way of preventing Designer from moving objects out of one of those universal layers and into an artboard layer whenever moving an object over the artboard it was already over. It immediately gets sucked into that artboard the moment I click and drag it. Funnily enough, if I nudge it with the arrow keys, it won't do that, so there's already some inconsistency there. Please, please, PLEASE, PLEASE give us a mode where we have full control over which layers our objects go to and stay in. I've tried everything: locking the artboard layers, hiding them, disabling the “Edit all layers” option, nothing works. AD keeps doing what it thinks is best for me, even though I do not want it to. For me, AD will be useless for many projects, and all it takes is for you to add a “Automatically move objects from external layers into artboards” toggle. Please do it. It will be an insta-fix for all the issues I mentioned. I know I'm not being too clear here, but if you want I can provide you with some narrated video screen captures of both Ai and AD so I can explain you the interaction model I'm aiming at. I REALLY want to use AD for all of my work, and I REALLY want to unreservedly rally behind it and recommend it to my students. If you want me to do that, PM me or something, because now that I finally turned in my dissertation I have much more free time to help you right now.

Hi guys. Sorry in advance for the redundancy, but I'm creating a new, separate topic, since part of this request was already kinda “solved” and my earlier post on said thread is TL;DR material. So here goes the shortened [it ballooned a bit again, but now with new, useful ideas] and focused version: There's a super easy way to solve a very serious philosophical UX choice which almost completely prevents me to recommend Affinity Designer to, well, mostly everyone. As you know, when you have a document into artboard mode, objects will be cropped whenever they go past the boundary(ies) of their respective artboard and reappear once they fully transition into the pasteboard, and AD automatically moves them in the layers panel according to whichever artboard they touch/hover above. This is already normal and expected AD behaviour for most users. You can also manually move objects and layers outside/above artboards (I'm henceforth calling those “universal layers”, but feel free to give them a better name, like “document layers” or whatever), which do allow you to have any objects they contain appear – and, obviously, export – in two or more adjacent/close artboards. This is a great sign of a potential UX choice, as it is proof the document and layer model is completely ready for the addition I'm proposing; only the UX and the UI need a slight tweak in the form of a toggle and a few lines of code (by the way, nudging objects with the arrow keys doesn't trigger this behaviour, so it should be properly harmonised with the click+drag behaviour in both modes). The only issue is that doesn't allow you to deactivate said behaviour of automatically moving objects/groups/layers into artboards when dragging them around with the mouse/trackpad, even with the “Edit All Layers” option disabled (the logical behaviour would be for objects not to switch layers or move into artboards under any circumstance if you're working in one layer in isolation, period. That particular case should be treated as a bug, not as a feature, and maybe the devs should ask users if they mind that slight change). That could and should still be the default behaviour, so as not to confuse current happy users, but if we were given said toggle, AD would instantly become much more usable for 99,9% of use cases and a much bigger percentage of current and prospective users. As I've said before, if any of the devs/mods or other users want me to do a little narrated screen capture to demonstrate this, I'm all up for it. Kudos for the Affinity team and all the best for you all, João

Ok, @MEB, I'm tagging @Patrick Connor as well and I'll ask you for a little help here, or, if this feature I'm asking for hasn't been implemented or isn't on the roadmap already, a little compromise on your part, please. It should be easy to code and require either an extra button on the layers panel, or an extra checkbox in the settings window. When testing this use case again on the latest Designer beta, I've just realised that if we move, in the layers panel, the objects from any of the artboards into a layer above all of the latter, we actually get a “universal layer” of sorts and can export each adjacent artboard and have any objects that span/straddle them display in their entirety both while editing – even with the pre-selected and grayed-out “Clip to Canvas” setting, yes – and on the exported .PDF files. This is indeed the behaviour I intended, and would save me all of those shenanigans with slices I was talking about before. It would indeed allow me to work with AD in the same work I do with Ai and did with Freehand. Maybe you added this from Publisher? Maybe I was just a bit of an idiot and didn't realise it was already possible-ish? The thing is: yes, it's all nice and good to see that things are progressing in the right direction, but this isn't a workable option yet as there is no way of preventing Designer from automatically moving objects out of one of those “universal layers” and into an artboard layer whenever moving an object over the artboard it was already over. It immediately gets sucked into that artboard the moment I click and drag it, thus rendering any actual “unversal layer” work, like multi-page technical diagrams, impossible (maybe I could use rectangles as faux artboards while working, and just add real ones when exporting, but I'm betting AD would start sucking objects into them left and right and screw me over anyway; edit: I've just checked, and that's precisely what AD does, so perhaps that toggle I'm proposing could also apply to newly created artboards, now that I think of it). “Frustrating”, as another user put it, doesn't even begin to describe how this feels. “Infuriating” is probably more appropriate of a term. Funnily enough, if I nudge an object with the arrow keys, it won't do that, so there's already some inconsistency there. Please, please, PLEASE, PLEASE give us a mode where we have full control over which layers/artboards our objects go to and stay on (you know, like, if we select a layer and start creating new objects, they automatically go there and stay there no matter what until we click on another layer in the Layers panel or on an object from a different layer? Even if we already have several artboards strewn around? That would also allow us to have artboard-specific objects, kind of like ersatz “master pages/watermarks” which would move along with them, while having content floating above them, which would make AD great for technical work, like technical drawing for dummies, something which Corel and even Ai are also decent for). I've tried everything to prevent that behaviour: locking the artboard layers, hiding them, disabling the “Edit all layers” option, nothing works. AD keeps doing what it thinks is best for me, even though I do not want it to. For me, AD will be useless for many projects, and all it takes to change that is for you to add an “Automatically move objects from external/universal layers into artboards” toggle (yeah, I'm not too sure on the naming convention for those layers, but you should come up with a name for them, as they are indeed special; only incomplete and useless at the moment). Please do it. It will be an insta-fix for all the issues I and other users mentioned. And if the default is the option most of your user base is used to anyway, there will be virtually no disruption to their workflow. Win-win situation, am I right? If you decided and were able to implement that “select object when intersects [sic] with selection marquee” (yes, you should fix that typo, by the way) to accommodate both Corel and Adobe users – an option which is nice but not critical, as muscle-memory is easily retrainable, whereas entire workflows may be either possible or not depending on more low-level UX issues like this one –, you should be able to throw us soon-to-be-former Ai users a little bone, yes? Call it “manual mode”, if you will. A mode in which AD doesn't decide anything for you and gives you full control, kind of like that magical “Allow document pages to shuffle” option in InDesign which puts everything into a “manual mode” of sorts but does allow you to produce extra complex documents that wouldn't be possible otherwise. Will it be harder to use for some users? Yes. Will it allow other users to actually work with your software? Also yes. And before you say it, I do know you could probably use the Designer persona in Affinity Publisher to overcome this limitation, but I feel that's a bit overkill and extremely unfair for people who may not have a need for that app otherwise (I will buy it anyway, but I should stand up for those users as well). Also, it wouldn't allow you do easily make manual booklet impositions or more complex documents, as APub can't even do multiple-page spreads yet and will never allow you to move pages on two axes, I'm guessing. Do you want students to be able use Designer for prototypes done with their large format inkjet printers, or not? Yes, I know what I'm talking about sounds a bit bizarre, but we did make such experimental projects, with objects spanning multiple spreads, at both my BFA and MA, to learn the ins and outs of imposition (we basically did the pages in InDesign and reimported them as .PDFs into Ai and did the whole thing by hand) and print production in general. Publisher can definitely handle objects spanning multiple artboards (and universal layers, by default), and Designer would also be technically able to do so (well, it already is, as long as you don't touch it with your mouse/trackpad ), if it wasn't for that choice you made for us and which we can't toggle. I know I'm probably not being too clear here, as we're all on the same timezone and it's almost 3 AM now, but if you want I can provide you with some narrated video screen captures of both Ai and AD so I can explain you the interaction model I'm aiming at. I REALLY want to use AD for all of my work, and I REALLY want to unreservedly rally behind it and recommend it to my students. If you want me to do that, PM me or something, because now that I finally turned in my dissertation I have much more free time to help you in earnest. Also, speaking of teaching, as soon as I [hopefully and finally!!] graduate in a few weeks I'll be sending CVs and portfolios to all design schools in Lisbon for teaching positions, so maybe come September you'll have yet more platforms where your wares will be promoted.

Ha, that's cute. The other day, I had to do a book cover in spot colours, and just couldn't, for the life of me, get InDesign to respect the separations from a linked file generated in Illustrator. I tried everything: saving it in .Ai format, in .Ai format with a .PDF stream, in pure .PDF format, in .EPS format, nothing worked. I kept getting CMYK output no matter what I did, and yes, I knew I had the correct export settings in ID and the separations were indeed correct inside of Ai. I ended up linking a new version of that file with only the black elements and the duotone .EPS pictures I had done in Photoshop, and pasting the spot colour vector elements atop it, directly from Illustrator into InDesign (which is hugely impractical, as vector editing in ID, if I ever need to do it, is a total disaster). A complete shambles, if you ask me. Why in the hell did ID get the separations right in the photos' channels and not in the objects' fills? Also, and maybe I'm just misremembering it or something, it seems I can no longer do proper separation previews in Acrobat Pro, either (just the ink coverage estimate), so if I want to do those I have to reimport my final .PDF exports made with ID back into Ai just to check them. If APub can at least get all of this right, and I believe it will eventually do so, I'll be immediately sold. As for the entire transparency and gradient situation when it comes to spot colours, I will obviously check it again, as I always do periodically (I even have a test file ready, with all possible combinations, such as gradient from 100% to 0% opacity, from one spot colour to white, from one spot colour to another, and different blending modes of spot colours on top of others), but the last time I did it seemed to be coming along rather nicely. For comparison, back in the pre-v.1.6 days of AD they'd mostly get converted into CMYK at the slightest disturbance.

I'm not getting this on Mojave 10.14.3 (that I've noticed yet). I'm not updating to 10.14.4 because of the infamous Mail.app + Gmail, as I depend too much on my Gmail accounts for my work, so maybe that has something to do with it?

Also bumping. This thread must be kept alive, and every time a new Publisher update/beta comes out we should be checking in the release notes whether this feature is finally being put to its paces.

YES. Also: this. I'll definitely be using Publisher for most (if not all) of my projects as soon as it comes out of beta. Bring on the multi-line composer with hyphenation fine-tuning controls, and I'll be using it for typesetting entire books, too.

Another UI consistency nit I must pick, just to be sure: I see you've increased the button/icon size and total height, and reduced the left padding on the main toolbar, starting on Photo and now also on the latest build of Designer; we can expect the same change in the next build of Publisher, am I right?

Uhh, a default Ctrl+W shortcut for Preview mode, I like it. Is this new on this build, or did I just miss it? I've always found it supremely stupid how in InDesign such an essential shortcut was modifier-less and thus could never be toggled while editing a text box and, even though having to press a modifier key on every other instance takes a little bit more effort, seeing how your hands are both on the keyboard in that scenario and how it's a shortcut which you can perform with only your left hand anyway, not having to occasionally perform that extra mouse click and leave your editing task is a usability win by my book. You may find my excitement over such a small detail to be a bit silly but, in all fairness, that's actually the shortcut I use the most in InDesign. Being the perfectionist that I am, I'm very conscious of my grids but also of my final output, so that WYSIWYG toggle is of paramount importance to me. I know you can always customise those, but having sensible defaults is also great for everyone, especially for fostering best practices when it comes to teaching students how to work with certain apps; the less preparatory work on classes and workshops, the better.

Thanks! I'll try that as soon as I have a bit more free time on my hands. Well, I guess it was either auto-added or I was doing simples experiments with that layout before, and just forgot do delete it…

Hi guys, Once again, thank you and congratulations for the master page functionality. It needs some polishing, but at least it's finally here. Anyway, on to the issue at hand: I was curious to see how Publisher would handle two sets of columns with staggered linking (as in A-B, A-B, across the spread) for bilingual layouts, and I see it's not really managing it well at all. If I don't touch the links the left-hand page will be empty, and if I relink them properly across the spread as they are in the master page, when adding new pages they won't relink across different spreads. I enclosed my super basic test file for you to play with. staggered bilingual linking test.afpub

Well, colour me impressed. There's this thing with the pages not auto-linking when empty that doesn't fully convince me, but when there's content in the equation, it does seem to be behaving nicely. I found some other issues, but I'll post them in the appropriate thread instead. I'll give it a proper spin ASAP, even without the anchored object functionality; either feature would've gotten me to try the beta in earnest, and it's great to see you tackled the most important one first. Even in setting your priorities right, you prioritized right as well (how meta). Anyway, kudos! You're getting there…

Well, well… A big step in the right direction, for sure. We can finally use Master Pages for content! They don't link automatically across pages – in fact, they don't even link across the spread, as they won't retain the links added in the master, either –, which would make setting some projects much more cumbersome than on InDesign, requiring a lot of clicking, but at least I can finally envision it being viable and allowing for after the fact editing of their shape and placement. We're finally moving into proper professional DTP territory. Edit: Oh, wait. I'll have to eat my words. Auto-linking across each spread and across different spreads does work, as long as you have content on the first text box. I only tried it with filler text, so I can't be 100% sure, but it certainly looks to be the case. That discrepancy seems a bit counterintuitive, but maybe there's some reason to it; either way, that's something I can live with, for sure. Guys, give us that anchored object functionality which we know you're working on, and you'll be all set. Kudos for the great update, this is a huge relief and has got to be the best graduation gift in advance I could've gotten. As for the rest of the functionality, I'm sadly not even looking into them until February (because submission deadlines). Oh well… See you later!

When working inside of a company, even a small one (like the 8-person company I worked for before I went freelance again), with separation of labour, these are the kinds of workflows we're dealing with. Heck, even in most professional work I've done individually as a freelancer, I wasn't even asked to do colour correction or retouching because the materials arrived at my digital doorstep in ready or near-ready form. I'd say more than half of the use cases in the DTP market – save perhaps for a zine/self-publishing thing, and herein lies the issue if that's the market Serif is aiming for –, benefit more from layout automation than from cross-app file manipulation. May I remind you that I've worked on events, both of the artsy and the medical (really boring) kind, publications (both just the book covers and the whole enchilada, with hundreds of images and hundreds of text pages)…? Never once have I missed this functionality. I keep all my files tidy, and I can get at them quickly and relink them in a heartbeat (well, I only wish right-clicking them in the Links panel wouldn't grind InDesign to a halt, but that's a whole 'nother matter). Not being able to quickly set thousands of words and resize my layout so I can check, on the fly, how they behave, on the other hand, is an absolute non-starter. I'm not questioning your assertion; of course it would be the reverse for other projects. A minority of them. Which would still be doable without said cross-app editing feature, whereas the projects I am speaking of just can't be done in a serious and professional fashion without basic DTP features. I know this sounds very “road-to-Abilene-ish” (and am I repeating myself here? It certainly feels like it), but it's better to have a decent app which appeals to everyone, professionals and prosumers alike (i.e. current users of Adobe CC, Serif's actual competition and the package it will be compared to by default by reviewers, whether any of us likes it or not), than a superb prosumer app which will be completely panned by professionals (i.e. which will only appeal to users who are content with apps like Corel in the early days, Serif's own defunct Plus suite, MS Publisher, etc. etc.). The latter scenario would make Publisher effectively DOA, whereas the former would buy it some time to limp along with the rest of the Affinity suite while it played catch up with InDesign. While not an ideal situation, that was precisely how Adobe killed Quark in the long run, so I wouldn't be betting against Serif just then if that was the case. I stand by what I've said: if Serif is investing on that functionality over the missing stuff some people have been clamouring for here in the forums, that's utterly misguided. There's no point in differentiating from your competitors if the basics just aren't there, sorry. If that's what you're all fixated on, the brand new reinvented wheel Serif is selling you, and believe that's the end-all, be-all of DTP, I have a nice, red suspension bridge just like the Golden Gate to sell you as well.

Aha touché! Naming is just what it is; it should be as descriptive, short and unambiguous as possible. Even though in a literal sense that's what they are, “Global” seems to me to be too vague a word; hence my proposal of “Document Layers”, as in “layers belonging to a specific Publisher/Designer file”. And “User” doesn't make any sense, as it has been said here already, so, again, if each app already has established naming conventions, why not use them? In fact, you could have “Document Layers”, “Master Page Layers” and “Page Layers” in Publisher, “Document Layers” and “Artboard Layers” in Designer, and just “Layers”, period, in Photo. Different apps call for somewhat different conventions and UX, and there's nothing wrong in that. As long as they are somewhat consistent across the suite and predictable in their behaviour, users will be fine. Now this is a bit confusing for me, right now, but as soon as the 29th of this month I'll be sure to check it out… It's good to know; maybe it's a new feature and I missed it, maybe it's not that easily discoverable, or maybe it's just me who am an idiot. Anyway, I'll still ask it again: even if you can toggle it, can you still maintain said hierarchy? AFAIK, seeing how there aren't global layers and pages are always layers themselves, an object can never belong to two artboards at the same time, or not belong to any artboard from the moment it touches one. Maybe there has to be a mode akin to Illustrator where Artboards are just… I dunno, removed from the Layers panel and get a panel of their own, or something. Or just kicked up to a separate level inside of the current Layers panel. Or maybe those newfangled Document Layers could get their own level above the pages and, as long as you were working on those, you could get an experience similar to that in Illustrator. Or maybe you could intermingle global layers and artboard layers, in a more fluid conception (that would probably be the best UX scenario, as you could have global background elements, global foreground elements, and everything in between). Whatever works for big projects (like, say, website or app mockups) where organising stuff by Artboards isn't the end-all, be-all, which would mean you could instead just use them as glorified export slices.

That's all fine and dandy, but that should not be their #1 priority, sorry. The extra few seconds it takes to open that one file externally are negligible in comparison with the extra seconds, multiplied by whatever number of objects you have (at which point they would become minutes, if not hours), it would take to reposition them all in case you made some change just because there wasn't an inline/anchored object functionality in Publisher yet. The same goes for having to redo an entire project because you can't fill master page text frames with content, resize or reposition them after the fact and have the corresponding pages and content reflect those changes. That's how professional DTP apps work, and the whole point of using a DTP app instead of WordPad or TextEdit.app (i'm not even comparing DTP apps with Word or Pages, because those two can do that, too, and produce very decent results if you take your time to learn how to get them to do it). Nobody with more complex workflows and projects will even give Publisher a serious go if those features aren't there, and if they inadvertently jump right in and buy it outright because Photo and Designer are indeed awesome, some may even get pissed, ask for a refund and even drop a bad review. With all due respect for Serif devs, I know I would, and I'm hopeful I will instead buy it on day one and be happy that it works for at least some of my more complex projects, and not just for four-page inserts… Just my €0,02, which by now must be adding up to a €10 bill or two as I've been hammering this point here for quite a while now. Objectively speaking, the time savings brought by said novel feature, which they put front and centre on their website and InDesign kind of lacks, are vastly outweighed by the time savings (or lack thereof) brought by those super, super basic and essential features I've mentioned, hence my comment about which features Serif devs are probably working on right now. We all assumed that said marketing choice meant that the other basic features would be there, you know? As in, “look at how our app is actually superior to InDesign”… Except it isn't, because that feature doesn't make enough of a material difference in the grand scheme of things. It's kind of like selling you a boat with tire chains and expect you to use it as a snow vehicle; yes, it has a feature indeed useful for the use case it's meant for, but the core package is completely inadequate (even if you could, in theory, throw it off a snowy hill and have it slide halfway through ).

Or, you know, you could just call them Document Layers and Artboard/Page layers (Artboard for Designer, Page for Publisher). Boom, done. And now that you mention it, in the current layer implementation in Designer, layers are in fact just glorified groups whose contents you don't have to double-click to select/edit/move separately and which are dependent upon a specific artboard. Serif basically made something that isn't quite as functional as Layers, and not as rigid as groups, thus leaving that functionality in this sort of weird uncanny valley. And speaking of groups and global stuff, the same goes for groups and objects, as there should be global groups/objects. You *must* be able to have objects outside of artboards, or even spanning multiple artboards (and yes, that should/could also apply for spreads in Publisher, as it's very common to have objects, namely images, spanning both sides of a spread or multiple pages on a multiple-page leaflet, something which isn't possible in Publisher yet but which Serif devs definitely must take into account for future proofing). I know this will force Serif to rethink the whole document interaction/structure model, or add further complexity in the form of yet another user preference, but it must be done in order to take certain workflows into account. Not being able to have objects temporarily outside of artboards and in the pasteboard while maintaining their relation to the overall layer hierarchy drives me nuts, as does having them auto-crop when they are halfway inside and outside of an artboard. Maybe some illustrators and even graphic and UX designers like working that way, but to me (and many other people, I'm guessing), that's completely bass-ackwards. Yes, many designers and illustrators are messy, and like (nay, have a need for) being so. As for Publisher, do not even think of making auto-crop the default behaviour; that's what Preview view mode should be there for, and you could add it to Designer retroactively as well (as the current default behaviour, and it could still be the default, except it would be toggleable). Your working documents do not have to be pretty, and DTP apps are not strictly WYSIWYG until you trigger some sort of preview mode. The same goes for spreadsheet apps, word processors, presentation apps, etc.… Most people (especially prosumers and professionals) are way more capable of handling those abstractions (like global layers) and the concept of hidden/non-printing elements than you seem to give them credit for… as long as you give those features intuitive names and decent discoverability. And yes, for artists, there absolutely must be a totally WYSIWYG working mode (make it a Persona, if you will), but a DTP app is as technical and un-artist-y as it gets. It's a workhorse, and while its documents don't have to be ugly and cluttered, they don't have to be totally pretty in their default view either. In fact, I think the default view on an app aimed at long form typesetting should even include hidden characters, to avoid common mistakes. Yep, there, I said it.

Yep, I fully concur. I never had to do long form bilingual stuff (only programmes with inline bilingual stuff set in different styles), but I'm sure it will come in handy. By the way, if you want to see some examples of my work (and work by my colleagues, both those who came before and after me), you can check this page: http://www.admedic.pt/portfolio.html (there's an english version, but it only goes as far back as last year and obviously doesn't include any project done by me). My tenure includes the last four congresses in Nov. 2014, and most of the congresses in the entire year of 2015, and you can spot mine from a mile away because I tend to use a lot of repeating patterns ( http://www.admedic.pt/uploads/2congressourosexopatianeurog-nia.pdf , http://www.admedic.pt/uploads/Programa-Preliminar-Curso-APNUG-de-Urodin-mica-23-03-2015.pdf , http://www.admedic.pt/uploads/Programa-XIII-CPG-2015-06-04.pdf , http://www.admedic.pt/uploads/Programa-A5-X-Congresso-APNUG-2015.pdf , http://www.admedic.pt/uploads/Programa-Cient-fico-182-Reuni-o-SPG_2015-11-04.pdf), textured backgrounds (http://www.admedic.pt/uploads/PROGRAMA-Wksp-LMP-HFAR-2015-web.pdf , http://www.admedic.pt/uploads/Monofolha-Wksp-LRC-HFAR-2015-09-03.pdf ) and just more abstract and simpler vector+bitmap stuff ( http://www.admedic.pt/uploads/Programa-CBColposcopia-2014-PORTF-LIO.pdf , http://www.admedic.pt/uploads/ProgramaCientificoCursoB-sicodeColposcopia-2015-11-03.pdf , http://www.admedic.pt/uploads/Programa-Congresso-APU-2015-09-15.pdf ). Interestingly, this last project is a great example of one of the first practical uses I made of Affinity Designer instead of Illustrator for gradients (too bad they got so mangled with compression), and of the absolute need for anchored objects. Just imagine having to manually reposition all of those stupid little pharma logos or those pixel/vector-based separators each and every time I had to edit something on that programme… Do you guys finally understand the kind of apparently basic projects I did in InDesign, which I could never do in Publisher in a reasonable timeframe or without hating it to the guts in the process (even more than I already hate Adobe)?

In very complex documents, with page decoration, tables, extra information outside of the main text frames like event dates or times, coloured or even vector page backgrounds (like logo- and/or pattern-based watermarks), non-linked images (and believe me when I tell you that for finer control and really varied, magazine/brochure-like layouts, sometimes linking them is a terrible idea) etc. I can think of quite a few projects (maybe half of all of my work) where I've used layers for that, and it really is great to be able to quickly lock and hide stuff on demand and en masse. And sometimes just out of habit and good practice, just in case I do need to adjust my design and segregate stuff further down the road. My experience tells me that when working in complex design projects with finicky clients (or even just for dealing with creative bursts out of my own volition), foresight and good planning, especially in the beginning stages of every project, when you may be less stressed out and have more time to spare, is absolutely key.

Not to sound like an old fart, but I'd say that that “other more serious problem” you've mentioned is the least of Serif's worries, and not very serious at all if you really think about it. The whole Designer/Photo Persona thing *is* quite overrated in Publisher, especially for professional users who own Macs and PCs powerful enough to have all three apps loaded simultaneously and are already used to have their linked stuff on a separate folder and to open it up manually. In fact, I don't even know how those Personas will behave; kind of like a “lite” version of each of the other apps, and also like how when you double click on an embedded or linked file in later versions of CS and CC the corresponding app loads up? As for the other apps, I personally use Designer and Photo, sometimes in the same project, and I rarely if ever use the Pixel persona in Designer. Yes, it surely can come in handy for illustrators, but it really wouldn't bother me personally if that feature wasn't there… As a regular old graphic designer, I like keeping my vector and pixel editing apps as separate as possible, thank you very much. On the other hand, I can appreciate the fact that said Persona exists probably segregates pixel editing features further than in Illustrator, thus simplifying the main Vector Persona by comparison, which is a great thing in my book, so I know I'm definitely reaping the benefits of a feature I don't even actively use that much. I know I may be in the minority here when it comes to Designer, but I can assure you that when it comes to Publisher, an app squarely aimed at the InDesign and QuarkXPress camp, I'm not. Editing stuff inline or having a nice little shortcut is most definitely *not* a serious omission, and it's not what's holding Publisher's release back, either. I'd gladly trade that feature over the other missing ones I've mentioned time and time again (proper master page support, anchored object support, global layers, etc. – not to mention a multi-line composer clone, but I fully accept that to take multiple years to be available), because being able to do your projects in a less-than-super-elegant but timely way beats not being able to do them at all in a cutthroat environment with crazy deadlines, stupid clients who drag their feet and whatnot, and I'm betting the Serif guys are hard at work on those features as we speak. That doesn't mean that said marquee feature, a seamless and elegant continuum between apps and file formats, won't come to pass sooner rather than later. But yeah, if they quietly dropped it, no one in the DTP community would bat an eye. As long as the files were fully compatible and rendered correctly (and I believe they already are), we would be just happy.