Peter Werner

Thanks for the reply! For some reason the search function did not give me any resultswhen I searched for a workaround before posting, but now I do seem to get several results. Maybe I misspelt something or just used the wrong terms earlier. Sorry for the noise everyone!

The "Area" setting in the PDF Export dialog box reverts to "All Spreads" every single time the "Export" command is invoked on any document. Other settings in that dialog box seem to be more persistent, so I assume this is a bug. I have to use the "All Pages" setting quite often, hence this can become a bit frustrating to change every time. And if I miss it, I have to go back and re-export the PDF one more time. Affinity Publisher 2.4.2 on Windows 10.

I did some more experimenting. It turns out that renaming the assets.propcol file in C:\Users\[username]\.affinity\Common\2.0\user and having Designer create a blank one from scratch on next launch does not fix the issue. Therefore it's probably safe to assume that it's not assets.propcol getting corrupted either. It also seems to be irrelevant whether I drag a file from the Desktop or an Explorer window showing an SMB network location. Next thing I can think of is system language – my system is running Windows 10 Pro 22H2 with non-English locale.

@stokerg Thank you for looking into this! As far as I can tell, pretty much any SVG or JPEG from any source I tried triggers this bug, so I don't think this is related to the file being dragged into the panel. I even created an empty new Designer document, drew a rectangle inside it, saved it to the Desktop, closed the document and dragged the file icon of the .afdesign file from the Desktop into a subcategory in the Assets panel. Results are exactly the same. Let me know if you would still like me to upload a few random files that are known to have triggered the bug (though, again, I haven't found any that don't). Alternatively, I could send my assets.propcol file if you think that might be the cause. By the way, contrary to what @Return stated, toggling "Show as List" will not cause the new asset to appear for me. But using the "Sort by …" commands indeed does.

Thank you for your reply! The assets.propcol file is currently around 124 MB, so not giant considering that it's not uncommon for even just a simple icon pack to be up to 15 MB. In my case it's 6 smaller asset packs averaging maybe 5 MB each plus two larger ones I put together from an existing library of material, one 10 MB and one about 56 MB. Even without those two, the panel never felt really snappy. It is probably safe to assume that it's common for a heavy user of the Assets feature to be working with a library at least this large, if not significantly larger. I suspect that something time consuming like rebuilding all thumbnails or moving a lot of data on disk gets triggered every time an operation is performed in the panel.

When dragging files from Explorer into the Assets panel, the interface does not refresh until another action is performed that can trigger a UI update, such as reordering subcategories, dragging an element in from a document, deleting an existing asset or similar. Moreover, the panel can get slow, such as when dragging elements from one subcategory to another (which by the way can get tedious because there is no way to multi-select items) or deleting items. Even just dragging to reorder subcategories can cause a lag of one or more seconds after the mouse is released. Designer Version 2.4.2 on Windows 10

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).