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Peter Werner

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  1. I just ran into similar problem with a placed CMYK AI file which would always get rasterized when exporting to PDF. I was able to get it to work by going to the options bar of the selection tool in Publisher with the object selected and under the "Layers:" dropdown choosing "Show All". Despite never having changed any of those layer options and all layers being on anyway, choosing "Show All" resolved the export problem. EDIT: I found this thread using search, this is referring to Version 2.3.1
  2. Agreed. For me, what still keeps me away from using Publisher for more projects instead of InDesign is primarily the lack of an equivalent to Adobe's multi-line paragraph composer and Adobe's much superior Optical Margin Alignment feature (in Publisher, activating that option without extensive manual tweaking just makes everything worse unless the font has specific information embedded, which most fonts do not). I hate to say it, but especially text in narrow columns still looks signifantly better in InDesign. I'd be very happy if that changed.
  3. I have to say, your process is pretty quick that way! Still, I think it would require someone to think about the problem for and extended amount of time or research it and then to add custom shortcuts for two commands to get there. Selecting might also be a bit slower in a complex real-life situation with more objects around, and the object would stay in the same position in the document hierarchy. Nevertheless I think this is the quickest solution we have so far. I'm sure something along the lines of the Find & Replace plugin you mention will pop up very quickly as soon as we have an API. But it seems more suited for automating more complex tasks. It looks to me like using that to quickly swap two objects would take a similar amount of time as doing it manually would. But then again I have never used that plugin.
  4. Thank you for taking the time to clarify. My intuitive assumption would be that such a command would operate with respect to the effective bounding box, with all transforms except translation basically "baked". I think your post also serves to illustrate another reason why the naive approach of copy/pasting coordinates may not yield the desired result in all cases. Another question that arises is what should happen if the two objects are children of other objects, such as members of groups. In this case, I would assume that they also swap position in the document hierarchy.
  5. The great thing is, purely mathematically speaking, the Lift/Gamma/Gain/Offset wheels don't do anything different from what is already possible with the Levels tool. It's just a different interface. That means if this feature is added to Photo, it could be written to PSD files as a Levels adjustment layer so the file would still come out looking correct in Photoshop or other software. DaVinci Resolve, 3D LUT Creator and similar software have tons of great tools that clearly show that Adobe's color adjustment toolset has not developed much since the 1990ies. Some minor advancements have made it into Camera Raw, but not a lot. I'd be very happy to see some more of these great tools from the film and video world make it into Affinity.
  6. My suggestion would be to respect the setting of the transformation origin widget in the Transform panel to determine which anchor to use for position switching. With respect to individual object transform, I would suggest to just keep all local transformations like rotation/flip/skew etc. associated with the object since this would match what most people would intuitively assume the result of such an operation to be: I think anything more advanced than that would need so much user input that it would defeat the purpose as it would no longer be a one-click operation. That being said, I could indeed imagine a "Switch Attributes" command or script that gives the user a dialog box with checkboxes for granular control of which attributes of an object to transfer and whether to switch or copy attributes between the objects. So you could check or uncheck "position", "rotation" etc. individually, but also "effects", "style", "stroke attributes", "fill attributes", "blend mode" etc. Another approach might be a "Copy Attributes"/"Paste Attributes" type of set of commands. Similar to corresponding features in Adobe Lightroom (pictured below), DaVinci Resolve or Autodesk Maya. But again, that would solve a different problem.
  7. My estimate would be that for an average serious user of Affinity Publisher, swapping the position of two objects is a task that comes up at least once or twice per session, whereas the use case you give is much more specialized. If I had to guess, I would estimate that they differ by at least a factor 1000 in frequency of relevance for the average user. If you say it's something that comes up in your work a lot, I'd be happy to include such an option for you if we end up having to go the scripting route. I am sorry if you got the impression that I somehow do not value your contribution to this discussion. My point was that even with the faster process you suggested, it's still significantly less efficient than a dedicated solution. It also has other disadvantages, such as the fact that the software only displays floating point numbers with a limited precision in the UI, so copy pasting coordinates may cause position shifts in some cases. I'm not sure how to respond to this in a constructive way – the reason why we are having this discussion in the first place is that I don't like that procedure.
  8. I did write one for breaking a frame into columns in InDesign at some point. I ended up using it so often that I wondered why they never added it to the core feature set. Could you give some other examples? Most of the ones I can think of are already there ("Align Vertically", "Convert Art Text to Text Frame", "Swap Stroke and Fill Color", "Duplicate Layer", …) I'm actually genuinely curious because if these things aren't added, I'm thinking about writing a script as soon as we have support for that. I did. My point is that these are not one or two click solutions. 12 seconds versus 2 seconds easily adds up.
  9. It's really interesting to see all these different ways to achive the desired result, but I think these demo videos being 20 seconds long are a testimony to the fact that there is indeed a potential to save time with a dedicated command. I think it's one of these small things that can really add up if you use a software every day. All of these can be achieved in some other fashion, but after a while of using these workarounds, it just feels like there should be a faster way. A similar thing that I run into constantly is whishing for a command to quickly break a multi-column text frame into individual linked frames (corresponding feature request post here).
  10. It would work and it's certainly a better approach than manually repositioning them. But it has disadvantages over a dedicated command: It's a minimum of 7 operations (group, flip, ungroup, select, flip, select, flip), 10 if you have to flip in both directions It will not respect the transform origin set in the Transform panel It is not an intuitive process for a user, particularly if the objects are on different pages or artboards It does not have an option to rewire text frames within a text flow (we'd have to discuss if this is desireable behaviour or not though)
  11. When doing page layout work or screen design, it is extremely common that two objects on a page need to exchange places. The manual approach is rather tedious: Select one of them, drag it out of the page (or on top of the other), select the second object, move the second object exactly into the position of the firast object, and then to select the first object again and move it to exactly the same position that the second was in before. In some cases, even temporary guides or helper objects will be involved to ensure accurate positioning. A simple menu command or keyboard shortcut that just swaps the XY position of two objects would make this common task much quicker. Just select two objects, press a key and they are exchanged. Similar options could be created to swap the contents of two picture frames or to swap objects while maintaining the boundary rectangle by scaling them to occupy the same space.
  12. That would have the following disadvantages: Bigger file size in both Publisher and the PDF (compared to pass through) Does not prevent rasterization happening twice (once inside Publisher and once by the printer's RIP) Will cause triple rasterization if the image is then resized in Publisher after it has already been rasterized to document resolution Does not prevent quality loss if the effective image resolution is very close to document resolution (say, a 300dpi image placed and resized so it ends up at 298 dpi) Breaks link to original image asset file Has to be re-done manually when file is replaced (eg. when client sends an updated version) Will not update if, for whatever reason, the document resolution is changed later The "Rasterize" command has no setting for Nearest Neighbour sampling, so rasterizing an image that requires Nearest Neighbour resampling would just cause it to go blurry one step earlier in the process If I hand such a document to someone else to work on, they would have to be aware of the situation or risk messing it up when making changes I think being able to choose per image whether the data is to be passed through without upsampling (better quality and smaller PDF file size for images like QR Codes, screenshots and pixel art as well as matching InDesign's behaviour) or upsampled to document resolution on export (which, for especially for photos will lead to slightly better quality results) would be a better solution. In my case, I worked around the issue for now by rasterizing all the photos to document resolution (which probably uses bilinear or bicubic sampling) and then setting the resampling in the PDF output settings to Nearest Neighbour. I was only dealing with a two-page document, but if I was working on say, a tech magazine with a mix of screenshots and photographs, that would be rather error-prone and cumbersome, to the point where frankly, I'd just do the project in InDesign instead and not worry about it.
  13. When exporting to press-ready PDF from Publisher, the software always seems to re-rasterize images that have a resolution lower than the document resolution (or the resolution specified in the export dialog box). There currently seems to be no way to just pass the images to the PDF at the original resolution. There is no per-image control over how they are resampled/upsampled. I have a case here where a client has provided me a QR code as a PNG image, with a resolution that is much lower than my document resolution. Exporting with any other sampling than "Nearest Neighbour" will obviously result in an blurry QR code. Exporting with "Nearest Neighbour" will result in all other images potentially getting upsampled using Nearest Neighbour sampling. As a user, I actually may not want images like the QR code re-sampled at all. Re-sampling that image even in Nearest Neighbour will just generate pointless data and the RIP at the printer will re-sample once more at native print resolution, so depending on the image and how close it is to the document resolution, there could be some generation loss, artifacts or even moiré incurred. Ideally, we would be able to have a PDF that has images at their native resolution so they will get resampled only once during the RIP phase at the printer at its internal maximum physical output resolution. InDesign can output such a PDF and in fact will do so by default – it does not upsample images at all. Another use case where upsampling could be undesirable would be when creating PDFs with web graphics for client review. In that case, the client may actually want to inspect the image at a pixel level by zooming in in their PDF viewer. Just passing the images through to the PDF at original resolution would allow for this (though the user would have to use a PDF reader that does not do image filtering when zooming in for this of course). Just imagine someone places a 299 dpi image in a 300 dpi document and exports it to PDF. The resampling result will not look great. But if the native image is passed though, it may actually look great (depending on the zoom level in the PDF viewer). Another use case are screenshots in magazines. If these are resampled like photos, they can become blurry or exhibit ring artifacts when resampling with a filter like Lanczos. Of course one could just export the document with Nearest Neighbour filtering, but that would cause all photos in the magazine that are even slightly under document resolution to become Nearest Neighbour filtered as well. Don't get me wrong, upsampling to document resolution is actually a good idea in most cases as printers in my experience only ever do Nearest Neighbour filtering and you may gain quality. It might be useful to allow the user to control these settings at an object level. For instance, for the QR code in my example, an option not to upsample could be activated. Upsampling of images could be deactivated globally in the PDF export settings. Or, with upsampling activated, all regular photos in the document, except the QR codes and screenshots with upsampling off at object level, would be upsampled on export for slightly better quality.
  14. That settings seems to be unrelated. In fact, I was able to reproduce the issue without creating a symbol, only grouping the text and the line and then applying a constraint to the text layer in the example I am attaching. The arrowheads disappear as soon as the constraint is applied to the text when the enclosing group is implicitly converted from a Group object to a Constraint Group object. Changing the arrowhead end position setting on the line does not remedy the clipping.
  15. Here is how to reproduce: Add a line Add a stroke and extremely large arrowheads to it (eg. the Bar type at maximum size) Add an Art Text layer Mess with Constraints and create a symbol (Constraint Group) from both Now the arrowheads are not taken into account in the bounding box computation and appear clipped. Additionally, maximum size for the Bar arrowheads is capped at 500%, even when higher values are typed into the text input field. In certain instances, this can be too small. Same on both Mac and Windows.
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