Medical Officer Bones

Would be nice if you could add the reverse column direction(right-to-left) option for the text frame.
This is useful in Japanese/Chinese.

I find some of these complaints in regard to update costs somewhat baffling.
8 years ago the first version of Affinity Designer was released. 7 years ago Photo. 3 years ago Publisher.
Throughout that time customers received free updates and upgrades, and many new users purchased the software at a reduced special offer price. I am one of those.
All the free updates actually made me feel I ought to ask Serif to charge me MORE, because the cost for V1 in relation to its functionality was always greatly in favour of its feature set. In short: very inexpensive for what was on offer.
V2 is a new release of Affinity. It is offered again at small cost compared to other commercial alternatives. V1 continues to run and isn't 'taken away'. There is no subscription. Unlike companies such as Adobe, older versions are not removed from the user's installation options. Serif's business model is based on the "you pay for it, you have an unlimited license" approach, which is actively abandoned by most other software companies.
Yet: like it or not, Serif has to generate revenue to cover development costs. They can't forever keep leaning on bringing in new users. The Affinity devs have always stated that free updates would be available for V1.xx. They stated unequivocally that V2.XX would become a paid upgrade.
Now, I understand that if a user purchased the software in the last 3 months, having to pay for a full upgrade is understandably inconvenient, and it would have been perhaps preferable for Serif to handle those cases differently.
But surely enough, at SOME point Serif has to make SOME money, otherwise business becomes untenable and they'll go bankrupt. Right?
Or perhaps Serif has a good reason to go down the subscription route after all: even IF you try with your best intentions to provide professional-level design software at a very affordable price level, AND offer 50% off to everyone at release time, STILL people complain about it.
If I were them, the subscription business model suddenly is beginning to look quite attractive. Because there is no use in trying to please everyone anyway.
PS I do agree that a grace period of 1 year or so to fix critical bugs in V1 would have been good to have and alleviate part of the complaints made.

I've gone further, and informed my member of parliament!
 

I find some of these complaints in regard to update costs somewhat baffling.
8 years ago the first version of Affinity Designer was released. 7 years ago Photo. 3 years ago Publisher.
Throughout that time customers received free updates and upgrades, and many new users purchased the software at a reduced special offer price. I am one of those.
All the free updates actually made me feel I ought to ask Serif to charge me MORE, because the cost for V1 in relation to its functionality was always greatly in favour of its feature set. In short: very inexpensive for what was on offer.
V2 is a new release of Affinity. It is offered again at small cost compared to other commercial alternatives. V1 continues to run and isn't 'taken away'. There is no subscription. Unlike companies such as Adobe, older versions are not removed from the user's installation options. Serif's business model is based on the "you pay for it, you have an unlimited license" approach, which is actively abandoned by most other software companies.
Yet: like it or not, Serif has to generate revenue to cover development costs. They can't forever keep leaning on bringing in new users. The Affinity devs have always stated that free updates would be available for V1.xx. They stated unequivocally that V2.XX would become a paid upgrade.
Now, I understand that if a user purchased the software in the last 3 months, having to pay for a full upgrade is understandably inconvenient, and it would have been perhaps preferable for Serif to handle those cases differently.
But surely enough, at SOME point Serif has to make SOME money, otherwise business becomes untenable and they'll go bankrupt. Right?
Or perhaps Serif has a good reason to go down the subscription route after all: even IF you try with your best intentions to provide professional-level design software at a very affordable price level, AND offer 50% off to everyone at release time, STILL people complain about it.
If I were them, the subscription business model suddenly is beginning to look quite attractive. Because there is no use in trying to please everyone anyway.
PS I do agree that a grace period of 1 year or so to fix critical bugs in V1 would have been good to have and alleviate part of the complaints made.

I find some of these complaints in regard to update costs somewhat baffling.
8 years ago the first version of Affinity Designer was released. 7 years ago Photo. 3 years ago Publisher.
Throughout that time customers received free updates and upgrades, and many new users purchased the software at a reduced special offer price. I am one of those.
All the free updates actually made me feel I ought to ask Serif to charge me MORE, because the cost for V1 in relation to its functionality was always greatly in favour of its feature set. In short: very inexpensive for what was on offer.
V2 is a new release of Affinity. It is offered again at small cost compared to other commercial alternatives. V1 continues to run and isn't 'taken away'. There is no subscription. Unlike companies such as Adobe, older versions are not removed from the user's installation options. Serif's business model is based on the "you pay for it, you have an unlimited license" approach, which is actively abandoned by most other software companies.
Yet: like it or not, Serif has to generate revenue to cover development costs. They can't forever keep leaning on bringing in new users. The Affinity devs have always stated that free updates would be available for V1.xx. They stated unequivocally that V2.XX would become a paid upgrade.
Now, I understand that if a user purchased the software in the last 3 months, having to pay for a full upgrade is understandably inconvenient, and it would have been perhaps preferable for Serif to handle those cases differently.
But surely enough, at SOME point Serif has to make SOME money, otherwise business becomes untenable and they'll go bankrupt. Right?
Or perhaps Serif has a good reason to go down the subscription route after all: even IF you try with your best intentions to provide professional-level design software at a very affordable price level, AND offer 50% off to everyone at release time, STILL people complain about it.
If I were them, the subscription business model suddenly is beginning to look quite attractive. Because there is no use in trying to please everyone anyway.
PS I do agree that a grace period of 1 year or so to fix critical bugs in V1 would have been good to have and alleviate part of the complaints made.

I find some of these complaints in regard to update costs somewhat baffling.
8 years ago the first version of Affinity Designer was released. 7 years ago Photo. 3 years ago Publisher.
Throughout that time customers received free updates and upgrades, and many new users purchased the software at a reduced special offer price. I am one of those.
All the free updates actually made me feel I ought to ask Serif to charge me MORE, because the cost for V1 in relation to its functionality was always greatly in favour of its feature set. In short: very inexpensive for what was on offer.
V2 is a new release of Affinity. It is offered again at small cost compared to other commercial alternatives. V1 continues to run and isn't 'taken away'. There is no subscription. Unlike companies such as Adobe, older versions are not removed from the user's installation options. Serif's business model is based on the "you pay for it, you have an unlimited license" approach, which is actively abandoned by most other software companies.
Yet: like it or not, Serif has to generate revenue to cover development costs. They can't forever keep leaning on bringing in new users. The Affinity devs have always stated that free updates would be available for V1.xx. They stated unequivocally that V2.XX would become a paid upgrade.
Now, I understand that if a user purchased the software in the last 3 months, having to pay for a full upgrade is understandably inconvenient, and it would have been perhaps preferable for Serif to handle those cases differently.
But surely enough, at SOME point Serif has to make SOME money, otherwise business becomes untenable and they'll go bankrupt. Right?
Or perhaps Serif has a good reason to go down the subscription route after all: even IF you try with your best intentions to provide professional-level design software at a very affordable price level, AND offer 50% off to everyone at release time, STILL people complain about it.
If I were them, the subscription business model suddenly is beginning to look quite attractive. Because there is no use in trying to please everyone anyway.
PS I do agree that a grace period of 1 year or so to fix critical bugs in V1 would have been good to have and alleviate part of the complaints made.

InkScape features a quite decent bitmap autotracer, and is free.

InkScape features a quite decent bitmap autotracer, and is free.

InkScape features a quite decent bitmap autotracer, and is free.

It is happy to see the release of V2. However the functions about CJK support can be improved.
First, I'd like to request for a function which can easily create CJK vertical texts like this.

Second, punctuation and paragraph distance.
For CJK words, punctuation like a comma or a full stop can't be placed in one line to be the first element. For example, the comma below has been put at a wrong place.
In comparation, there is what the text be like in MS Word. None of punctuation become a "pioneer".

BTW the paragraph distance of CJK words in Affinity suite is a bit weird because the distance between two paragraphs is equal to the distance between two lines in a same paragraph.
More and more people from east Asia start using Affinity suite so that we hope to improve the experience when composing CJK words.
 
 

I would love to see the developers and/or moderators chime in here. It is such a basic requirement in publishing, and I wonder if this is even on the (road) map for them.

Simply stated: 1bit images are part of the core workflow in much of my work. I do not expect Photo to support these in R2 because the developers have unequivocally stated that Photo will never support a 1bit image mode. But that is fine: I can use PhotoLine and other software for that.
But it is ABSOLUTELY essential that Publisher leaves placed 1bit images alone and retains these in the PDF export. Publisher R1 is incapable of doing this.
Publisher finally adds book support and with the addition of 1bit image PDF export I can finally say InDesign farewell. But only if it actually works, and I cannot find this information anywhere in the new features list.
Would anyone be so kind to place the following 1bit image file in Publisher R2 and export to a PDF with these options:
downsample images turned OFF allow jpeg compression turned OFF And share the PDF with us here in this thread?
2017-10-01_inktober2017_swift_by-David-Revoy.tif
[image source: https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/viewer/sketchbook-src__2017-10-01_inktober2017_swift_by-David-Revoy.html]

Makes me wonder why. Reversing text is not a challenging thing to do when programming, and the alignment of the text is already an option. Is there some huge consideration that makes this a difficult feature to add? The Affinity apps don't feel like they have spaghetti codebases, so this should surely be relatively trivial in the grand scheme of things? Something like 2bn people around the world use RTL written languages, so it would seem a market segment worth supporting.

Probably has an embedded profile. 
My output was about 180k.
Even so, final pdf output size is a small part of the issue. 

It's not about just appearance. Not for myself, anyway.
As above, it will mess up screens. But, as your example is also output at 300dpi, that too is wrong. The file is at 599. 600 is a real minimum. But, I also, in the same file, will use full-color images that need output at different dpi. A professional application has setups to output different image types at different resolution just for these cases. As Affinity applications have a document dpi involved (dumb decision), I don't know if Serif would even be able to implement such a thing.
Your pdf is also larger KBs than need be because of the conversion (about 3 times larger). Image having an entire book with 100s of those images--aside from the printing issue.

Tudor: It messed it pretty badly - I work in manga industry, and 1bit screentones are standart there - and if you send PDF to printer, but 1bit screentones are actually 8bit (grayscale) screentones, printed pages are full of moire, and thus, practicaly unusable...
Learnt that hard way, we have to shred whole issue of one book, and print it again.
 
Still don't understand why Affinity doesn't support 1bit images... they are standart in printing industry...

Simply stated: 1bit images are part of the core workflow in much of my work. I do not expect Photo to support these in R2 because the developers have unequivocally stated that Photo will never support a 1bit image mode. But that is fine: I can use PhotoLine and other software for that.
But it is ABSOLUTELY essential that Publisher leaves placed 1bit images alone and retains these in the PDF export. Publisher R1 is incapable of doing this.
Publisher finally adds book support and with the addition of 1bit image PDF export I can finally say InDesign farewell. But only if it actually works, and I cannot find this information anywhere in the new features list.
Would anyone be so kind to place the following 1bit image file in Publisher R2 and export to a PDF with these options:
downsample images turned OFF allow jpeg compression turned OFF And share the PDF with us here in this thread?
2017-10-01_inktober2017_swift_by-David-Revoy.tif
[image source: https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/viewer/sketchbook-src__2017-10-01_inktober2017_swift_by-David-Revoy.html]

I half expected to see BMP export after all the discussion and suggestions for V1 to include it. That thread is closed, so here is my official suggestion for BMP export support to be included in V2.
It's the standard for several Industrial Controls software packages and using MS Paint or IrfanView breaks my workflow and creates unnecessary intermediary files.
Thanks for listening.

Yes, Publisher does that. And changes are visualized in real time while changes are made to word spacing, which speeds up the typographical design stage 🙂
Framemaker's modal dialogs look and feel old-fashioned in comparison.

Spelling checking is nicely implemented via the Preflight panel. Additional dictionaries for different languages (excepting Chinese, Japanese, and Russian) may be downloaded from LibreOffice or OpenOffice and installed.
Grammar checking is unsupported. Check my comments further below regarding my thoughts on Affinity and long documents.
Nah, not possible in the current incarnation. See comments below again.
 
Nope, not possible or supported. Of course it is possible to use a third-party math editor to create vector files for import and placing in Publisher. Even LibreOffice has a decent math editor built-in nowadays. Or use a free math editor such as
https://sourceforge.net/projects/eqtype/
This is THE achilles' heel of Publisher for this type of work. Aside from a number of other rather essential missing features, I will not touch Publisher for ANY longer text-heavy document creation, because it just is a terrible idea to manage all chapters, sections, indexes, TOCs, etc. in one master document workflow.
Not good. And therefore, in my book (pun intended ) Publisher is ill-equipped to even attempt a long structured document project.
There are other glaring missing features that are deemed 'somewhat' essential:
not possible to insert either foot notes or end notes. obviously missing: text styles management across chapters, sections, etc.  text variables: does not compute! text editor (with longer texts spanning an entire chapter, editing text in text frames is at a minimum daunting and cumbersome, at most unusable. 1bit images remain unsupported and cannot be placed or exported without conversion to RGB. This is absolutely problematic and unacceptable in academic writing, CAD publications, and technical manual production environments. (Greyscale images are problematic as well with PDF export). Conditional text? Forget about it. Support for non-western languages typesetting such as Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, etc? Nope. Collaboration is also problematic, since the entire document would have to be managed in one huge file. At least with FrameMaker, InDesign, and Sphinx it is possible to utilize a Git (Github/Gitlab) workflow. And Adobe also provides in InDesign collaboration tools for larger projects and the publishing industry (also third-party support for various collaboration tools if you Google for it).
In any case, Publisher R1 is wholly inadequate to fit in a long document workflow.
Let's hope R2 does better. InDesign version 1 and 2 were lacking as well, and now it would be acceptable to use it for this type of document project.
I prefer Sphinx with restructuredtext (markdown) or just plain old LibreOffice for technical writing & documentation.
But that doesn't mean I am not open and hopeful to see Publisher take a stab at these and FrameMaker. Very curious to see if some of the above caveats have had any attention given by the devs tomorrow.

There is only one thing that Publisher lacks that prevents me from using it for my work. It is my only wish for R2.
Place a 1bit tiff image. Export it to PDF without Publisher converting that image to RGB. It should leave it alone. I've given up on 1bit image support in Photo, but please allow for 1bit images to be used and exported AS-IS to a PDF with the background transparent - overprinting the black.
That's all. 🙂

There is only one thing that Publisher lacks that prevents me from using it for my work. It is my only wish for R2.
Place a 1bit tiff image. Export it to PDF without Publisher converting that image to RGB. It should leave it alone. I've given up on 1bit image support in Photo, but please allow for 1bit images to be used and exported AS-IS to a PDF with the background transparent - overprinting the black.
That's all. 🙂

I have a feeling that Affinity Photo's architecture perhaps complicates the implementation of a true 1bit (and 8bit indexed) mode to such an extent that the devs would have to re-code large swaths of their core code. I don't think they ever anticipated the need for a 1bit mode architecture, and patching the current code base is probably a really bad idea.
And to be fair, it does present a new set of novel problems: how do you deal with transparency? Layers? How will those layers with different bit depths interact?
For example, in Photoshop most of the functionality is simply turned off. No layers, no blending, most filters are greyed out and unavailable. Same in indexed mode.
PhotoLine is completely unique in that it allows the user to actually keep using layers, vector layers,  blend modes, layer masks and effects, but many effects and blend modes have no effect in 1bit mode, and layer masks still allow for grey values, which potentially can lead to issues. So in PhotoLine's case the responsibility lies entirely with the user to avoid making mistakes.
Photoshop and PhotoLine represent in my mind two extremes in how to tackle the implementation of a 1bit mode: either limit the user's freedom when working in 1bit mode, or allow full freedom, but with that freedom comes the user's responsibility to avoid using features that might break the 1bit workflow.
For an experienced user or expert PhotoLine is a revelation when working with 1bit graphics. For a novice a potential minefield, and Photoshop's hand-holding probably a better approach.
And if an 8bit indexed bitmap mode is required in your workflow: even PhotoLine avoids opening that tin can of worms. I would argue it is preferable to switch to a dedicated 8bit (pixel art) image editor, such as Pro Motion NG, because of an entire new set of requirements.
All of which returns us to the need of 1bit support in Affinity products. For many print/textile professionals it is an absolute requirement. If the Affinity devs could integrate 1bit in the export persona, fix the custom 8bit palette option (which has never worked), for heaven's sake implement a proper real-time preview in the export persona, as well as make sure Publisher (and Photo and Designer) deal with 1bit images properly in the PDF export and keep the original higher resolution, then Serif may perhaps at the very least provide a feasible 1bit workflow.

In the meantime the latest 5.1 release of Krita added extended Webp support with every option under the sun

@RasterFarian Completely agree with you. When this conversation comes up, I bring up a simple question to explain that PPI and DPI are very different:
Why do two images with different PPI attributes print at the same size on paper? One image is a multitone colour image at 300ppi. The other image a 1bit black and white image at 1200ppi. Both print at 5 by 5 inches.
If PPI and DPI are treated as being identical, one cannot answer this question. DPI and LPI are part of that answer, as you also mention. Confusing the two is just a plain wrong and misguided use of the terminology. And no: that is not an opinion. That is how they are used in the print industry for decades.

@RasterFarian Completely agree with you. When this conversation comes up, I bring up a simple question to explain that PPI and DPI are very different:
Why do two images with different PPI attributes print at the same size on paper? One image is a multitone colour image at 300ppi. The other image a 1bit black and white image at 1200ppi. Both print at 5 by 5 inches.
If PPI and DPI are treated as being identical, one cannot answer this question. DPI and LPI are part of that answer, as you also mention. Confusing the two is just a plain wrong and misguided use of the terminology. And no: that is not an opinion. That is how they are used in the print industry for decades.