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Peter Werner

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Everything posted by Peter Werner

  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.
  16. I can confirm the issues with the Lighting filter being out of place after changing the document DPI. I have a lighting filter on a group of multiple Art Text objects with layer effects (this lighting effect is always missing from PDF exports by the way, but I'm not sure if that's maybe a separate bug). If I change the document DPI in Publisher via the "Document Setup" dialog box, the positions of the Lighting effect, which are apparently resolution dependent, don't seem to be updated. This also messes up the undo stack – it's not enough to undo the DPI change via history to get the Lighting Effect back to its original position. The document in question was probably originally created in 1.7.2. Would be useful, by the way, to be able to directly change the DPI in the export dialog box for raster image formats to be able to render vector elements at higher or lower resolutions than the document was originally set up with. It just allows to set absolute pixel dimensions, but if I have a document that's set up in points or millimeters, that's less useful than a DPI/PPI control. Sending stuff to be professionally printed onto CDs/DVDs, in photo labs, certain sign companies, engraving firms, mug manufacturing companies etc., sometimes necessitates sending designs in the form of rasterized data rather than in vector formats like PDF like a "proper" printing company would accept. Also guys, if at all possible, please move the compressed file size calculation in that export dialog box out of the UI thread –for very large files (such as exporting a 60 cm x 90 cm poster at 1200 ppi to be printed by a photo lab), the hang caused by that can make changing all the export settings a major pain because every keystroke or click causes a 15 second hang. System: Affinity Publisher 1.7.3, MacOS 10.11.6, late 2008 Aluminum MacBook upgraded to 8 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256 MB, external Monitor connected via DisplayPort with custom ICC profile Eizo Color Navigator 6/Spyder3.
  17. I just ran into this as well and it is definitely an important feature. In my specific case, I'm working on prototypes for DVD boxes and the inlays are to be printed by a photo lab as regular 20cm x 30cm photo prints and then trimmed manually to the exact final size. What's even worse, the workaround I would normally use (going through a temporary PDF) is not an opting this time since there is a bug that prevents the live effects on the type from exporting to PDF correctly in this document. Having the option to include bleed on placed files is very useful whenever something is printed/prototyped on an office or photo printer to be trimmed manually – for me this often happens with prototypes, CD/DVD covers, postcards, small signs/labels etc.. InDesign's "Add Crop Marks.jsx" example script makes this really easy to set up.
  18. I can't seem to find the link right now, but I recall Adobe Photoshop product manager John Nack posting about the possibility of a Linux version of Adobe Creative Suite (at the time) on his blog many years ago. He stated that the reason why Adobe didn't do a Linux port wasn't the size of the potential market for Linux versions at all. Their market research showed, however, that offering Linux versions would not get them a significant amount of revenue from new customers, it would instead only shift a large part of their existing customer base to a different operating system. Serif today is in a very different position – shifting a large part of Adobe's existing customer base to Linux sounds exactly the kind of thing they might be interested in.
  19. Thanks, that's pretty cool, I must have totally missed that feature! Though this of course doesn't fix the problems when it comes to images that have been opened, pasted etc. as well as user created raster layers that have been transformed. But it's still a great improvement for many of the page layout-related use cases.
  20. This is also an issue in Photo where you can non-destructively scale a raster layer. Since there is no "Reset Layer Transform" command other than "Rasterize", which kills your resolution, you may end up painting/cloning etc. on a layer that has vastly different resolution than the rest of your document. Being able to see the scale of a layer may be crucial information in that case. Or you may have opened a raster image, transformed it slightly for a quick test, and now when you create raster layers, they won't match up with the resolution of your base image so you want to reset that base layer to its original size to match up 1:1 with the document pixel grid without losing all your undo stack. I recently had the case where I was quickly throwing together a comp for a client and then had to do more retouching work to an image in the comp stage in context of the final design than I had anticipated. However, the image was transformed non-uniformly to fit a design and now I was required to move everything into a clean 1:1 retouch of that image, but there was no easy way to find the scale factors and/or reset them so I could transform everything back so I could do further work on the image in 1:1 resolution. The only solution I found was to select the base image with the transform tool where it displays the DPI and then work out the inverse scale factor, but that only works for non-uniform scale, not for rotations and the like. In other cases, where I can't just re-import the base image, I'm also worried that this will lead to rounding errors since DPI is only displayed rounded to whole numbers, so I might end up with an image that's half a pixel or so off from 1:1, which is definitely not ideal since then every single pixel will be resampled if I export to a file at my document resolution. And when it comes to Publisher or Designer: In some cases, being able to use exact percentages like 50% or sqrt(2) times the original size is also important, for instance if a design was created for A3 and has to be resized to A4. With the current implementation, I often find myself re-importing the original image in such cases to get it to a guaranteed 100% and then multiply the values accordingly. That's obviously not a good workflow. The only option would be to look up the exact target dimensions in mm for A4 or know them (which I admittedly do, but there are other more exotic formats). Same thing again when I then need to check that the size is correct, where otherwise I could just look at the scale factor in a panel and know it's accurate at first glance. I'd therefore vote for the Transform panel to show the exact layer transform of image and raster layers and also to allow the user to edit, copy and reset them. Moreover, being able to Copy&Paste transform and inverse transform would come in handy in many cases.
  21. I'm using an external (Apple) keyboard that does not have an Fn key. Pressing the Fn key on the built-in laptop keyboard does not change the behaviour I described, neither in conjunction with the F-keys on the external USB keyboard, nor using the F-keys on the built-in laptop keyboard. Further investigation shows that furthermore, the shortcut input control in the text style editor dialog box doesn't accept F14 and F15 since these seem to automatically be tied to adjusting screen brightness on the laptop screen. Holding the Fn keys has no effect on this behaviour. I think if all of this was a case of system shortcuts taking precedence, they would just carry out their system function when pressed instead of nothing happening, as they do in case of F14 and F15. By the way, I've come across another oddity: Assigning F16 shows a warning that the shortcut is already mapped to "Zoom Out". Turns out this shortcut actually works for zooming out the document, but in the keyboard shortcuts editor in preferences, only Cmd+- is listed for Zoom Out. Maybe this has to do with the shortcut editor only allowing being able to handle one (probably the first) shortcut per command.
  22. Just did a quick test, and It would seem you are correct. You may want to post this in the Affinity Photo bug reports section.
  23. Your comment makes me suspect I'm actually dealing with a bug. I thought I had mixed something up, but checking an older proof PDF I sent out to the client, actually I think the numbering re-started with each story at first and then something caused it to suddenly continue across stories without me linking the text frames. Removing the "Restart Numbering Now" attribute from the first paragraph of the second story causes numbering to continue from the previous story. The text styles were all created from scratch. Maybe it's just a really obvious setting I am missing. I'm afraid I can't share the document in question publicly since it was created for a client, but I would be able to send a copy to the development team if necessary. Still, even if it's a bug, it would actually be really useful to have both options.
  24. The "Restart Numbering" setting currently allows resetting the counter per-document, per paragraph sequence, or manually only. Sometimes it would be useful to have a numbering sequence specific to a text frame or sequence of linked text frames, i.e. per story. This small handy setting would eliminate the need to manually reset numbering at the start of each story and therefore also one source of potential errors since it's quite easy to forget.
  25. I think it is worth mentioning that now with that Publisher has shipped with Studio Link enabled, you can just go to the Photo persona and use the Channels panel to check your separations. For some reason, page/spread borders disappear, but it's still a viable workaround. You need Affinity Photo installed in order for this to work.
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