matisso

This is a great tip. Thank you!

Seems true, but only superficially. I can (and do) check what software is capable of before deciding to buy it. But there’s always a limit of how deep you can go with this kind of explorations. Imagine you’re buying a house (far fetched, but bear with me). You can ask about just anything prior to the decision, but there is no way of really knowing how it’s going to be living there, other than living there. You need to take an (informed) leap of faith at some point. You make this look so simple but then again, the the proof is in the pudding and no amount of reading the ingredients list will substitute buying it. Do you really test each and every feature for literally every possible scenario? I know that trials are made for testing. Still, if you do, I think that either the number of your scenarios is rather limited, or you have insane amounts of time on your hands. A subjective selection of stuff that’s actually on the Affinity’s tin, as opposed to imagined by me that it will be there some day: Regular expressions – except neither you can elevate paragraph styles with them, nor you can even bloody save your custom expressions. Once the recent list gets long enough, you can’t reuse ones that you created before if you haven’t saved them in another place. Automated column / row guides, that you can customize to your heart’s content… as long as the gutter stays the same. Incidentally, Data Merge Layout has the same flaw. So-called “vector” brushes that are really just bitmaps with a vector backbone. This name is as misleading as it can get. RAW development that doesn’t let you simply clone adjustments from one photo to another, something that is found in pretty much every other development tool. Neither of the above was something new invented from scratch by Affinity and it only makes sense to expect comparable experience with competing products, per the marketing division. The irony: all they really needed to do was to implement these features the right way (to get your work done efficiently). The icing on the cake is that the requests to improve the above have been out there for really long. Yet they remain crutches and Affinity have the nerve to claim the suite has “all the tools you need” and is ”fully featured”. I call b/s. Sure, in the end it’s the matter of who their target group is, as these are subjective terms as well. Huh. Exactly where had I said the stuff you wrote? 😵‍💫 Read the part above for a refresher. I couldn’t care less about the OP, honestly. After I had read it, I thought it’s nobody I would like to interact with. It’s the comment by @wonderings that I thought was worth answering. And I’m not trying to pigeonhole anyone who’s not critical, either. In limited cases, it really can be a great product. Paraphrasing what I had said previously, feel free to be as enthusiastic about it as you want, people. Who am I to be telling you to stop? But again, you stop telling me to use something else and go some place else, just because you’re unhappy with me being unhappy. 🙄 Apologies for any ruffled feathers, but this is exactly what makes you tribal and fanboyish. Not the enthusiasm, or support. It’s just a tool, yet some seem like there’s a very personal statement behind using it… For those who choose to feel offended: when you hover over a user’s name, there are three buttons on the tooltip that appears, left to right: [Message] [Find Content] [Ignore]. I’ll leave you with that. 🙂

I’m sorry but I’m not going take this bait and waste my time. In a similar vein, I could ask you what value is in the fact, that you personally don’t know of any such person and how many people do you know of, in general? This really goes nowhere. I believe you’re quite wrong here. Maybe you can’t define these needs, that’s ok. But no professional dabbles in any of the software of their choice just for the sheer sake of of dabbling in it. They may, if they choose to, but at the end of the day this software is not in a vacuum. There’s a quite well defined set of core features for professional programs like this suite to produce e.g. a reliable print-ready output file, or a solid design that can be quickly adapted when the project changes its scope as it often happens, etc. They are tools of the trade after all, and neither graphic design, nor printing, nor photography were invented ten years ago. So what these trades need has been known for quite a while and Affinity still don’t deliver a full package. One person can be an expert in illustration, another one in newspaper design, and so on. But if Affinity call their product line “professional” then the majority of professionals should be able to make effective use of it. Meanwhile, until now I have known literally one person using Designer professionally (Tomasz Biernat) and quite many professionals, whom I look up to, that remain with the big A – because it simply delivers and makes earning your living as a creative much easier, unlike Affinity. Then again, it’s only my words, right?

Look into the Paragraph Tab settings in the help file.

I did not say that, @R C-R. But there’s a great deal of people claiming Affinity has it all, and you can ditch Adobe just like that. Heck, even their marketing does that, albeit not that explicitly. Or people defending or turning a blind eye on obvious faults because “Affinity are doing their thing and are not Adobe copycats!”. Well guess what, Adobe were here first (sure not just them, but let’s keep that aside) and they have set a great deal of standards, whether you like it or not. So, yes, experienced users do want industry standard features, not Adobe features. It’s the framing of such issues that makes these people look like fanboys.

I’ll tell you what they get salty about. The promise of getting a professional package on par with competing applications, which remains unfulfilled, and likely will never be. This software offers some professional features sprinkled around the fundamentally lacking base and it has been like this for way too long. When I bought V1, I was aware of the limitations (certainly not about each and every one) but bought several licenses not even looking for return on the investment, but still happy to fund what I then regarded as the Adobe competition. Oh, and Affinity still try to position their product line like this, but nobody in their right mind and enough experience (it’s important to stress this, because if you’re looking to up your game starting somewhere from an office suite level, certainly Affinity will feel a different league and perhaps tick all your boxes) treat it so anymore. V1 definitely felt refreshing but also a lot was missing. When V2 was launched, I had a lot of doubts and eventually passed, because it no longer seemed as if it could keep the momentum. New features and improvements were there, but still too many things were still missing (and are to this day). I bought it only after it got discounted because then it seemed like fair value compared to the original price and feature set. My gut feeling was right though and it still turned out to be the same terrible mixture, only with a handful of additions. Some implemented so badly they are more crutches than features. So if I spent the money I feel I have every right to voice my expectations of what professional suite should offer – I simply expect Affinity to walk the talk. If someone else’s choice is to be a fanboy and claim Affinity is the Holy Graal of creative software, so be it. But neither it’s my right to try to silence them, nor it’s their right to silence those of us who don’t join the cheering, but expect our definition of “professional” and genuine “focus on customer experience and community” instead – which attempts I have seen too many times here. 🤮

Isn’t it? That’s what you get when using quasi-professional software marketed as professional. The excerpt below comes from InDesign documentation: You can use the Smart Text Reflow feature to add or remove pages when you’re typing or editing text. This feature is useful when you’re using InDesign as a text editor and you want a new page to be added whenever you type more text than can fit on the current page. Having said that, @hatGuy’s suggestion is also a very good workaround – thanks! – and it can take just a few moments if you use shortcuts. But that’s the whole thing with using Affinity – you constantly have to find workarounds for a great deal of things that can be done in other apps in a jiffy. Monies saved. Your time? Not so much.

Yeah, no overprint was pretty much obvious here (if you know how printing works, that is). Incidentally, it was also a very nice illustration why exactly overprinting is needed – you could get away without it only if printers are aligned perfectly, which hardly ever happens, and I’m not even starting on paper issues. 😉 Besides, pure black will look somewhat bland without it. One more check that could have also been tried to troubleshoot this – kind of bypassing proper overprint – would be to simply add the underlying ink values to the text ink that sits on top of these backgrounds. Effectively this means manually doing what the software does while handling overprinted inks. So as an example in this case, assuming the tan at the top is CMYK 0/0/24/42, the text would have to be CMYK 0/0/24/100 (Y:24 is what gets added, black is already there at 100, other channels are empty). Or, more in general, assuming the text is K:100 on top of any solid colour, you add whatever CMY values are underneath to it. It’s not a proper way of preparing production-ready files, but could also serve as a test where the problem is, without worrying whether the export / print pipeline handles the overprint settings or not.

Whoa! If this is in the help file? I must have missed this. Either way, thanks a lot for that.

@kathy-Upnorth there’s still no auto-trace in Affinity. @GarryP:

So-called vector brushes in Affinity have just a vector spine but the actual stroke is bitmap based. So the answer to your question at this point is “never” – unless they rewrite brushes significantly. I feel bad for you having fallen for this. Maybe you still have time to get a refund. Just recently Figma announced true vector brushes in their Draw and you can define custom ones as well. So you might use Figma for that as well, but in general this sucks big, doesn’t it?

Copy that. I should have watched your yesterday’s video, but it was late when I read that thread somewhat diagonally. By ‘manual work’, you mean deciding which dot gain profile to apply to each of said images, is that right? Or is there something more to it? Thanks.

I digressed quite a bit there. Bottom line, by all means use professional, industry standard ICC profiles, and if they include dot gain, so be it! They are tailored to provide the best possible reproduction. Of course, talk to the printer or whoever handles the technical side as well. They should know the best how to prepare the output files. Whenever I ask about colour management and get a response such as ‘oh we don’t do profiles, just send us a plain CMYK PDF with no profiles embedded’ I look elsewhere, or make it absolutely sure that whoever is paying for a print run, understands the consequences (including me not responsible for whatever comes out of the press, colour wise).

You are providing insanely useful and detailed information, but I think you are wrong here. Dot gain happens primarily (for CTP process, exclusively) during printing, when ink is absorbed by paper and it slightly spreads at the inked area edges (for anyone who needs to picture this, imagine making a dotted line with a fountain pen on a napkin – you will end up with a vastly different result than using the same pen and a quality notebook). This ink spread, expressed as additional area coverage in print (averaged, see the Wikipedia link for details), is what dot gain value actually means. E.g. 40% K in the digital file ends up in print with dot gain of 20% as 60% K, if not addressed. Now, that gain depends on several printing conditions, paper stock being the primary factor. On a side note, Matthew Carter’s Bell Centennial typeface is a prime example of taking these factors (namely high speed printing on low-quality paper) into account in type design, even though we’re talking about something far bigger than a halftone dot. Come to think of it – in CTF (computer-to-film, as opposed to direct computer-to-plate) days, if there was any distortion of halftone dots, it would have been inherent to the photographic process regardless of printing, which happens further down the pipeline. So, even assuming this needed to be accounted for, I suppose it would be handled by RIP rather than an ICC profile. Dot gain on Wikipedia. Last but certainly not least… I believe know my way around these issues pretty well, but I still feel I have to carefully read what you’ve posted in this thread, @lacerto and @Ldina. Very resourceful input there. Chapeau bas!

You appear to be dropping some real gold nuggets there. Thanks! Could you please elaborate a little more on the restrictions you mentioned, @lacerto?