Rick G

The date is not known, and the standard answer is that it will be released when it is ready.
Serif is still adding features to 1.8 and fixing bugs in all 3 applications. All the applications need to be finished and tested for all the operating systems that support them, so they can all be released at the same time. We have not seen any beta releases of Designer or Photo yet for Mac or iOS.
My guess is it will be at least 2 to 3 months, but that is purely a guess.
Merry Christmas, Alain.

We have made fixes/improvements to this area (No diagonal crop cursor) of the program in the latest Windows customer beta of Affinity Photo and/or Affinity Designer. If you would like to try these changes the beta software is available in the forum posts listed below.
The 1.8.0.526 beta builds are in links at the top of these beta forum posts.
Affinity Photo 1.8.0.526 for Windows Affinity Designer 1.8.0.526 for Windows Once these programs have been through a full beta process the change will be released in a future free 1.8.0 update/patch to all customers.

Hi @Rick G,
We are aware of this and it has already been logged with our developers. 

Affinity Publisher 1.8.0 should shortly introduce a new preflight-panel (which will be released in a free update if the beta testing of the feature goes well).

In all prior Affinity applications, including the 1.8 Publisher beta before 1.8.0.518, pressing Shift while inserting filler text into a text frame gives filler in English (specifically, from Lewis Carroll) rather than in Latin. That no longer happens in 1.8.0.518. The filler text is always Latin now.

That works well. I would still like to see them add a template extension so it would open up as an Untitled document. and let us save out the same way. This is fairly common with other software and probably not too difficult to implement
That being said, your solution works and this is small potatoes in the greater scheme. I hope it is somewhere on the roadmap
 

No, you’re not missing anything that already exists, but why not publish your favourite PagePlus templates to PDF? You can then open the PDF files in APub, save them and set them to read-only: when you want to create a new document based on a PP template, you can simply open the APub version and ‘Save As...’ to a new name in readiness for the new content.

Yes, this is something that has been commented on numerous times on the forum and it does need to be fixed.
In the meantime, make sure that Show Text Flow is enabled and zoom out so you can see entire pages.  Scroll through and you should be able to spot the red dots on the overflowing frames.

Hi, are you viewing on two different monitors? The screen grab on the left is significantly sharper as if it were on a high DPI monitor (look at the text), whereas the screen grab on the right looks much softer, as if it were captured on a standard monitor...

@juanborras
Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums  
Thanks for this, I will bring this up with the developers. I wonder if there is ever a time that you would want Drop Caps on more than the first paragraph? Perhaps it should be something that is ignored for any subsequent paragraphs of the same style (though that would fail when a body style with this set was interrupted by a bulleted list or something).

Thanks to you both for the help. I thought, of course, letter is letter. That is not so I did not consider. It worked just fine. I'm still working on it - Serif PagePlus X9 -. But would like to change later on Affinity.
Giovanni51

Are you asking as someone new to the Affinity suite of applications? Or do you have experience with Photo and Designer.
I ask because, with the exception of the Master Page layers, layers in Publisher work pretty much the same as layers in the rest of the suite, and the Layers panel works identically to the rest of the suite, I think. So in addition to any Affinity tutorials for Publisher, you might find some of the Designer or Photo tutorials of benefit, too.
Also, is there some particular aspect that is confusing you?
 

Just like the font manager, the F&R mechanism could identify fonts that are missing. We simply need a ‘Missing’ category for the Find box so that we can find those fonts and replace them.

He asked if I was running the setups from the temp directory. Au contrare ...I run them from a folder that holds my installation files. It happens to be on an E: drive but the programs install to C: like everyone else (presumably)

They indicated that this was the next step and it would replace and go beyond the old photo plus
That being said, this just created a lot of work
But thanks for the reply!

Hey there
what is the better alternative handling a lot of photos in Publisher at the moment?

I do a photo yearbook for my daughter with probably a few hundred photos (I dont know exactly yet how much it will be).
I am not through with it yet (doing November at the moment) and I see that when you open the document, Publisher needs a lot of time to open all the pages (e.g. load the linked photos)
In the meantime the PC reacts sluggish for minutes.

When all is loaded there is no performance problem anymore, but during loading the document there is no working possible

I wonder though, if it would be better if I embedd the photos instead of linking them... any suggestions to that?
Thanks

Serif should asymmetrically load ("lazy load") images. It would speed up overall load times.
Under the current manner of loading a document, I would still leave them linked myself.

there you have a point I not thought about.

I'll try that, and make a copy before doing so

thanks

Is this the sort of thing you want?

Assuming that it is, it’s fairly easy to do but you need an extra layer.
Basically:
* Make a new rectangle – or whatever shape your image is – the same size as the image;
* Set its Fill to None and its Stroke Colour to White;
* Make the Stroke thick – depends on how much you want to blur;
* Set its Blend Mode to Lighten;
* Give it a Gaussian Blur – amount depends on your requirements.
See attached AFPUB file for an example.
blur-image-edge.afpub

If you want to use a size that has no preset, you can simply enter the dimensions you want, or if you're going to use that size often, create your own preset. In that way, it would not matter that Digest isn't part of the standard set of presets.
If you have a specific print-on-demand publisher in mind, their website will probably tell you the sizes they can handle. And, again, you are not limited to the presets that are built-in to Publisher.

The retail and beta versions do not share settings, brushes, assets, etc.
If you want your retail assets to be available in the beta, you can export them from the retail version and import them into the beta:
In the retail version, open the Assets panel, and on the hamburger menu you'll find Export Assets. Then after the export, open the Assets panel on the beta, and use the hamburger menu to Import Assets.
Or, having opened a document that has the assets you can add them to the beta versions Assets panel from that document, if you want.
But they won't be there without action on your part.

edit.mp4

If you create your own Preset that's one of the settings that the Preset will remember, @Abernethy.
Choose your base preset in the File > New dialog. Change the Image Placement Policy. Click the hamburger menu next to the Page Preset dropdown box. Choose Create Preset, and name your preset. The next time you create a document, change Type from Print to Presets. Publisher should fill in the last one you used, but if not you can choose it from the Preset dropdown.
It would be even nicer if Publisher would default to the last document type you used (Print, Presets, ...) which would eliminate the need to change to Presets. But this should give you all the settings you need.

It’s pretty straightforward in the Affinity apps, too. Cover the image with a semitransparent shape such as a rectangle or a polygon, convert the shape to curves, use the Node Tool to edit it and then go to the Layers panel. Set the layer opacity back to 100%, drag the shape layer and drop it on the thumbnail of the image.

Body + seems to be broken by the use of the +. I would say it is a bug and I would also say that as a rule I never use non-alphanumeric characters (other than - or _) in file names or stuff like this in any program, just asking for trouble.