matisso

I spent 2 hours trying to get 9 artboards and all their background layers all aligned so I could export to the right size rather than 1 pixel bigger than it should be with a transparent edge. This is not OK as a workflow. There are tools like Sketch that make pixel alignment very easy and there is a button where you can select a object and say snap to pixels and bam no sub-pixels. 
In Affinity even though the property panel looks like it's on the pixel boundary 780  it isn't because if you turn on 3 significant places on the pixels display (trick I found in forum on this issue) it's actual 780.029. I don't want to have to wrangle to 3 significant places to get my art aligned for export! Nor do I want to have to be worrying about 100ths of a pixel cluttering my property display.  If the force pixel alignment is ON then it should never allow a layer to be off the pixel grid when creating or moving it and ALL X/Y should be integral. 
I have to admit I was a big fan and advocate to other UX designers of this product until now, but it's such a ridiculous thing to implement as it is that I have lost a lot of faith in it.
Stop adding new features and fix the fundamentals you are being told about by professional designers. Or stop claiming this is a professional tool because it clearly isn't. Because for all it's excellent parts it let down by flawed thinking in the fundamentals. I'm not the only voice here there are many threads here on the same topic from professional designers. 

This is so true. I was shocked to find out that there is no upgradable option from v1. I just bought the three software around September this year! I wish I knew their plan first hand so I wouldn't be in this nightmare. This is not acceptable honestly and it made me view Serif in a very different perspective. 

Nowhere did I criticise the offer to new customers, or ask for it to be made free, as you keep repeating. My disappointment is that there's no additional discount for those of us that have already spent hundreds on Affinity products, and will now have to pay again to keep them updated. £90 may be nothing to you, but to some of us that's a lump of cash we can't suddenly make available.
No need to be rude.
 

We've just had a tripling of our energy bills here, everything else is going up too, and the weekly food shop has increased by 25%. Services are being cut left, right and centre, and we've lost respite care for our disabled son. I'm not even going to think about the rise in mortgage rates and rental costs...
I've invested several hundred pounds in the Affinity Suite, and I find today all my products are now discontinued, so I have to find ninety quid somewhere, to keep them updated. As a loyal customer, and someone who has encouraged many others to buy their products, the additional discount for me, is 0.
Thanks, Affinity.

Right, so I already own:
Affinity Designer for Mac, iOS and Windows
Affinity Photo for Mac, iOS and Windows
Affinity Publisher for Mac
And I don't get an extra discount - I pay exactly the same as a new user.
Thanks for that.
Yes I know it's a good deal already, but some recognition of existing customer loyalty wouldn't have gone amiss.

It's been more than 2 years people are requesting support for variable fonts. I'd like to bring this topic up since it seems not getting any attention. Of course this affects all Affinity products and not only Affinity Publisher.

And if basic font support does not make it to the essential feature requirements please make sure to handle this failure/bug with a bit of dignity (even Photoshop 6 disables the styles for variable fonts and does not display random nonsense)


 
Cheers, Timo

If they allow us to save previous searches (suggested in another thread), then they could supply a few common settings.
For any who are not familiar with regex, let me give a few simple examples with some explanation to give you a taste for what it can do. (If you already are familiar with regex, you can just skip the rest of this post. I think I got carried away.)
By the way, "regex" is the common shorthand for "regular expressions", which in turn just refers to a kind of search by pattern matching.
--------------------------------
Example 1
First, let's say that you have received a story or novel from an author, and it is your job to do the layout. The author has indented nearly every paragraph with tabs or spaces, but you prefer to control indentation with a paragraph style. This means you now need to delete all the tabs or spaces. You could do that one-by-one—and hasten the onset of carpel tunnel. You might be able to do a simple find/replace to replace every tab with nothing at all, if tabs are only used at the beginning of the paragraph and nowhere else. Or you could try something like this regex:
^\s+ That tiny regex pattern will select any space at the start of each paragraph, whether it is a tab, several spaces, or any combination. The ^ indicates that what follows must be at the beginning of the line. The \s counts for any white space such as tab, space, nonbreaking space, etc. The + indicates one or more of the preceding, in other words, as many tabs or spaces as there are at the beginning of the line.
To remove those opening spaces, replace them with nothing. That is, leave the replace field empty and press replace all. Every tab or space at the start of a paragraph will be removed.
Similarly, $ indicates the end of a line, so you could remove all trailing space at the end of each paragraph by searching for this pattern: \s+$
--------------------------------
Example 2
Next, let's say that the author used a lot of numbered lists, but he manually typed out each number, like this:
1. First item
2. Third
3. Fourth
4. Fifth
Maybe you want to change the manual numbering to a paragraph style with automatic numbering. Or maybe you just need to insert an extra item, such as if the author forgot one thing and wants to include it. Here, I purposely made the "mistake" to leave out "Second," and now my numbering is off. To fix it manually, I would have to type the new item and then renumber every item after it. The disadvantage to manual numbering is probably obvious enough that I do not need to do so much explaining. So now you set up a paragraph style with automatic numbering and you are ready to apply it. To select the manual numbering we need to delete, try this regex:
^[0-9]+\.\s+ This will select the "1. ", "2. ", "3. " portions of the first part of each line, and so on. It looks more complicated, but we can start with what we know from the previous example.
The ^ indicates the start of a line.
Next comes the brackets [  ]. You use this to define any single character you are looking for. For example, [abc] will match either a, b, or c. In our example, we have defined a range by entering 0-9, which is the same as typing [0123456789]. Any one of those characters will count as a match. You can also use ranges like [a-zA-Z] to match every unaccented letter in lowercase and uppercase.
[0-9] by itself will match one digit only, so "10. " and above would not match. So we add the plus sign:  [0-9]+ will match one or more of the digits 0 through 9.
Next we want to match a period, but the period character has a special meaning in regex: it represents any single character. In this case, we want to match an actual period, so we do that by "escaping" the period, which is done by adding backslash before it: \. This tells the computer to match any literal period and not "any single character." You can escape any other characters that have special meaning in the same way. If you were looking for a literal plus sign, you put \+ . For a literal bracket, \[ , etc.
Finally, we have a space to search for. The author could have used a tab, a single space, multiple spaces, and he may not have been consistent. No matter, we can handle that with \s+ , which, as we saw earlier, will match one or more of any space character.
Now that we are correctly selecting the part that we want to remove (the "1. ", "2. ", etc.), lets do some replacing. Leave the "Replace with" field empty to just delete those manually typed numbers. But don't stop there: you can simultaneously apply the numbered style you want by selecting a replace format or paragraph style.
You see, once you have it set up, you can accurately format every numbered list item in an a whole document at the push of a button.
--------------------------------
Example 3
Let's say you have a long list of phone numbers in this format:
574-234-1998
930-823-1818
And you want them in this common US format:
1 (574) 234-1998
1 (930) 823-1818
There are several ways to go about it, but I might start with this:
([0-9]+)-([0-9]+)-([0-9]+) We already know from the earlier examples that [0-9]+ will match one or more of any numeral.
In this case, you see three of those numeral matches, but they are surrounded by parentheses: ([0-9]+) . Parentheses do two things in regex. First, they group patterns together when things get complex (which is not necessary in this case), kind of like a math equation. Second, they also define "capture groups" that we can reuse later. You will see the benefit of a capture group in a moment.
The last thing I have done here is insert a simple hyphen, twice placed between these capture groups of numbers. It is a literal character, meaning it matches an actual hyphen in the text. Our regex pattern will match any string of numbers divided by two hyphens in this format (where x is any number):
xxx-xxx-xxxx
x-xxx-xx
xxxxxxx-x-xxxxx
(You see in this case it was not necessary to specify how many digits are in each group. If you had a string like 1-19321332-8, it would also match. If you had such numbers in the text that you did not want to match, you would have to be more specific.)
Now, let's replace using this pattern:
1 ($1) $2-$3 We are adding the numeral 1, parentheses, and a couple spaces, but we are also putting back the numbers that were found in the capture groups. $1 refers to whatever match was found between the first set of parentheses. $2 and $3 likewise refer to the matches inside the second and third sets of parentheses. This is what a capture group is and how it can be used.
As a variation on this example, maybe you live in a different country, and the the starting and ending format is different. Maybe you are starting with raw numbers from a database, like this:
5742341998
9308231818
And you want this format:
574.234.1998
930.823.1818
Again, no problem. We just need to alter our search and replace patterns a little bit. Search:
([0-9]{3})([0-9]{3})([0-9]{4}) Replace with :
$1.$2.$3 I have not changed the search pattern very much: I have taken out the hyphens, and instead of the + to indicate one or more matched character, I have instead used {3} and {4} to specify exactly 3 or 4 matched characters.
 
--------------------------------
Summary
I have tested all of these examples in Affinity Publisher, and they do work correctly in the current beta.
There are a few more basics I have not covered, but I hope these examples give you an idea of the power of regular expression. I regularly make thousands of corrections in book with a short series searches that are of common use in our material. It takes me about 10-30 seconds to do those thousands of corrections (since I saved the find/replace expressions that I use most).
But the value in understanding regex is not simply in having a few saved searches that may or may not match the problem before you; rather, it is in knowing how to build patterns to accomplish what you need. Anytime you have a repetitive task for changing text, find/replace can probably do it for you, and regex is what takes it beyond simple text replacement.
When you first start using it, it may take you just as long to figure out a pattern as to just manually make any necessary changes, so the temptation is to stick to what you know. However, the same time spent doing a boring repetitive task could instead be used as an exercise to broaden your skills while accomplishing the same goal. Depending on your interests, you may even enjoy the challenge. Regardless, next time you come across a similar problem, you will be able to apply what you learned, and over time your efficiency will greatly increase.
(Did anyone actually make it to the end of my long post? I did indeed get carried away.)

i have the same problem.
Working with macros makes no sense if you cannot save (export) the photo with a macro, too.
Because i edit upto hundreds of photos a day (all photos have to be saved in the same format and into the same folder) it is not useful if you have to save (Affinity call this "export") every photo manually after editing.
I want to find an alternative to CSS, but in PS it´s possible to "save as" as a part of a Macro for many years...
At this time the lack of the "export"-function as part of a macro is the k.o.-argument against Affinity Photo for me...

Absolutely a +1 for me.
GREP/Regex Styles is an absolute must. I create lots of nested list documents (bullets and numbering) with multiple styles per line, with various delimiters using brackets and stars. With InDesign I can paste in the text (with the numbers of tabs defining the nesting level) and my document is completely formatted. I have already bought several copies (VPP Store) of Publisher to play with, just to support you guys as a viable alternative to Adobe. I'd love to be able to start using it to completely replace InDesign and that the only feature that's stopping me.

We are pleased to announce an update for the Windows release of Affinity Publisher, version 1.9.2
The detailed changes in Affinity Publisher for Windows 1.9.2 over the release build Affinity Publisher for Windows 1.9.1 are as follows:
Fixes & Improvements:
General
Fixed Stock Panel retrieval for Unsplash Fix for Replace Image moving Picture Frame content unnecessarily Significant performance improvements for assets (import, export, organisation, etc.) Open PDF swaps top and bottom bleeds Failure to create an object style if the only delta was line weight Fixed Assets and Symbols transforming when dragged onto resized Artboards or Groups Fixed crash when placing assets containing Artboards Fixed Live filters that have any position controls being broken on saving and re-opening the document Transform panel ignores ruler origin in line mode Asset Pack list sorting improved. Misc fixes for My Account feature and content downloads. Data Merge Manager could crash on 'Generate' under certain circumstances Several stability improvements in response to issues with specific documents  Create palette from document was only using the current spread Fixed possible crash reparenting anchors in the Anchor Panel. Bleed was not honoured for placed Artboards Scaling issues with placed Artboards Tool not updated correctly when Zooming (Win) Added F15 / F16 shortcuts for Tablet Zoom (Win) Fixed crash at startup due to bad OpenCL drivers (really this time) (Win) Performance improvements when Preflight panel showing lots of errors / warnings (Win) Fixed crash when embedding a document listed as missing content in the Resource Manager (Win) Fixed crash when attempting to open a file with links to images containing disallowed path characters (from e.g. macOS) (Mac) Fixed gradient transparency not working with images on M1 (Mac) Showing a studio page should unhide the application UI (Mac) Fixes issues with numeric entry fields in some non-English locales. Document /Spread
Document size presets create incorrectly sized pages if the Document DPI doesn't match the preset DPI Business card templates shouldn't be facing page Guides added via Guides Manager are now clamped to Spread size Master Page Guides could be applied incorrectly when a Master is applied to only one page of a facing page Spread Fixed Bleed inconsistency that could occur when 'Adding Pages from File...' (Mac) New Document Templates are now alphabetically ordered (Mac) Fixed bleed / margin colour tooltips Text
Grouped Text in Assets could change scale when placed Added Preferences option to normalise text breaks on copy to clipboard Unwanted auto-correct capitalisation caused by exclamation and question marks Inline text objects should not have Text Wrap options enabled Text Style Editor > Next level should use "[Same Style]" rather than "[No Style]" Active text Selection on pasteboard not always drawn correctly Decrement paragraph level would sometimes find the wrong previous style Fixed potential hang moving pinned nodes If spaces are overset, squeeze them up to keep the caret within the frame Performance improvements generating text wrap shapes in complex cases Table Format Panel previews always rendered as RGB Hyperlinks to Anchors can point to incorrect Anchors if Anchor name has been duplicated Paragraph Decoration has no "inherit state" when used as "based on" style Alignment context toolbar options for table cells don't work Implemented OpenType Reverse Chaining Contextual Single Substitutions (e.g. Iosevka Font) Fixed crash when a custom wrap shape outline has been converted to text Pinned nodes could be wrongly moved into overflow Redraw issue resizing Table with insets RTF Import: Paragraph style from footnote destination was leaking into main text Typography Panel fails to display certain properties Improvements when copying text as Unicode. Also renamed 'Normalize Breaks' to 'Preserve Unicode Breaks' in Preferences (Mac) Font Size drop menu now sends updates when keys are used as well as mouse  (Mac) Hyperlinks containing spaces at the end of the URL broken (Mac) Hyperlink button can be incorrect disabled (Mac) Anchor dialog doesn't display correctly on older macOS (Mac) Edit Text Style dialog list truncated on Big Sur (Win) Not enough space to show Text Style shortcut on Windows Import / Export / Resources
Fixed being unable to download full resolution OpenAsset images Improved Brush and Asset categories alphabetical sort options Fixed crash choosing Add Pages from File with 'After Last Page' selected Replacing a scaled Picture Frame image wasn't maintaining placement Convert to Picture Frame does not use default saved settings, cf Convert to Text Frame Renaming then re-linking a cropped PDF or AF document scales the un-cropped document Missing Content Status for placed PDFs Placed PDF Page Box / Maximum Content calculated incorrectly Add Pages from File could handle z-order badly when moving page content Renamed Export Area 'With background' option to avoid confusion. Fixed other Export UI inconsistencies Linked Documents (EPS, SVG, AF) sometimes displayed the PDF Passthrough options Fixed crash when replacing Image Resource with Raw Fixed issue replacing Picture Frame images for Master Page Frames (mac) Prevent overwriting a Package on document close (mac) Fix for Export More > Preset menu being disabled  
Changes, improvements and fixes in 1.9 made since 1.8 (including the new 1.9 features) are listed in some detail in this 1.9.0 Publisher Windows update announcement 
 
UPDATING TO THIS VERSION (Free for existing customers)
The software version can be seen on the splash screen and the About dialog (in Help > About Affinity Publisher).
If you’ve purchased from the Affinity Store— each time you start the Affinity Store software it will check for updates and offer any available update. The latest update will install over the top of any earlier version, with no need to uninstall. You can download the latest installer by logging into the affinity store here and find the order in your account and use the "Download" button in there. Alternatively, this new release (and previous versions of Affinity Publisher for Windows) can be downloaded from this link (that installer is NOT for Windows Store purchases and needs a product key).
If you’ve purchased from the Microsoft Store— Microsoft Store updates are done automatically by the operating system (each time you start the application). If this does not happen for you, open the Windows Store app and click the three dots in the top right corner of the app and then go to Downloads and Updates. Click Get Updates. This should hopefully force the update to show.

Hi Peter, detail refinement is indeed an unsharp mask filter. The use of percentage rather than pixels for the radius is basically an oversight: at one point, there may have been further designs (e.g. adaptive sharpening), but as it stands, the percentage is simply 1:1 with the pixel radius (so 100% = 100px).
 
Apologies for the confusion and it'll be with the developers to look at. Hope that helps!

Hi Peter, you're correct that raw handling is important, and raw converters will handle demoisaicing differently with varying results.
 
There are several more steps involved - which are again handled differently between raw converters. Demosaiced raw data starts as "scene referred", which is a measurement of light in the scene. You will very rarely (if at all) see a raw file in its linear "scene referred" form. It then goes through gamma curve correction, gets mapped to a colour space and has a tone curve applied to produce a result more in line with the user's expectations (similar to an in-camera JPEG).
 
 
So to answer your question - yes, there's a difference between SerifLabs and Core Image RAW.
 
SerifLabs will demosaic, gamma correct and tone map, but as you've found, the additional tone curve is optional. If you turn this off, you'll only see the image with a gamma curve correction. No additional sharpening is added by default - this is left entirely up to the user. Colour noise reduction is added by default; previously it wasn't, and we faced a lot of criticism over raw development quality because users are so used to having raw processing software apply it automatically. The harsh reality is that yes, your camera really is that noisy ;). You can turn this off if you wish on the Details panel, I just wouldn't recommend it.
 
I've done some analysis, trying to make a SerifLabs-decoded image match a Core Image RAW-decoded image, and I've come to the conclusion that Core Image takes some additional steps. It adds sharpening whether you like it or not, there's no doubt about that. It certainly performs colour noise reduction, and I also believe it does some luminance denoising and then dithers slightly by adding in some fine noise to retain texture. This approach wouldn't be entirely out of step; for quite a while, Apple's H264 decoder added some fine noise to reduce blocking and banding (this is back in 2007/2008 when its hardware-based H264 support was less comprehensive). I'm unsure of Apple's modern approach to H264 but I expect it's more refined now.
 
 
At this stage of Photo's development, the raw handling could still use some improvements, and over time it will be improved: namely a better approach to demosaicing and some more effective noise reduction. Demosaic implementations are continually being researched and written about, and there is always scope to do better here.
 
 
As far as advantages of SerifLabs go, there is one that I can strongly point out: because betas are made available in-between major releases (either for bug fixes or to introduce new features), new raw camera support is added frequently - so if you invest in a new camera, chances are you could grab a beta and be able to open raw images sooner rather than having to wait for an official update. For example, 1.5 was released in December and supported the new Olympus E-M1 mk2 camera which also shipped that month. It also opened images shot with the camera's high res mode (sensor shifting to produce 80MP raw files) - a feature that's still yet to be supported in some raw converters.
 
At the end of the day, the best advice is to experiment and find which raw converter's results you like the most based on what you shoot; e.g. if you do a lot of high ISO urban photography you'll want some fairly robust noise reduction and, perhaps more importantly, good colour handling. If you're into landscape photography with difficult dynamic ranges perhaps you'd find the ability to remove the tone curve more useful. And so on and so forth...
 
Hope that helps!

If you are tempted to reply to any negativity in this thread, please just post your own positive thoughts instead, or just step away. (It is directed at us and we do not need defending, thank you)
This offer goes out to everyone who has not unsubscribed from our marketing offers, and is here to do 2 things:
Encourage you to try the software that you have not yet bought, or encourage those around you to do so for 90 days. Without letting you know it was available you would not know to tell your friends. Encourage the purchase at a discount of something that you have not yet bought, for example the iPad versions (Serif cannot tell if you have purchased Affinity software from the Mac App Store or iPad store by looking at your Serif Account, as that sale is Apple's data and we cannot see it)

Or maybe you need to grow up.
What about people who own only one program and would want to take advantage of this and buy the other two.
Or people who bought programs for Mac and would also want to buy now for Windows, or the other way around.
 

I have just received your completely unnecessary email of 19 January "We’re here to help – use our apps free for 90 days" WHY I am a registered used of all three apps plus add ons. I do not need to be offered a 90  Day Free Trial, and 50% off all apps etc.
Unnecessary emails clog up email in boxes and will tend in the future to just dump email from affinity without reading them.
Someone in your marketing departments needs to be sacked.
Please put a stop on this type of email to existing customers.

Seriously someone got to take care of this (for me especially in Affinity Photo). For library with lots of brushes it's almost not usable.
Also here is what will be great: Make there a popup and we can just type in (partial) name of the brush and filter brushes automatically. This is something Photoshop doesn't have and everyone would love to have and that would make Affinity Photo several million times even better.
Happy new year!

+1
Yes please, fix this, Affinity! I’m just getting acquainted with the Pixel Persona in AD, as I am mostly a vector guy, and this is a real productivity killer here, too. Even the smallest change to some of the tool’s parameters (as basic as width) causes the highlight in the brushes panel to vanish. I did a project a while ago that relied pretty much on brushes (both Designer and Pixel personas) and the only reasonable way to manage brushes was to create an individual collection so I could remember which one is for what, but that is not the way to do it!
However, with vector brushes you can always paste properties to a different object like @Jonopen had mentioned – which is a nasty workaround but does the job. Not possible for pixels, obviously.
cheers,
Matt

This was asked before.
I include a screen capture of all the options available in the Find & Replace and Select dialog from FreeHand.
It was great to have something like this :-)

+1
Definitely a must.

Hello there,
the picture says it all, I guess, but just for clarity: there seems to be a hard coded Mitre limit in the Contour tool and there are situations where it needs to be adjusted. These are plain vertices, no funky extra ones underneath, yet the obtuse corner is behaving as expected but the acute angle leaves no choice but to either alter the geometry or switch to Illustrator’s Offset tool, where it can be adjusted.

Please make AD even greater, thanks!
Best regards,
Matt

+1 for true vector brushes, this has been mentioned countless times already!
This could be nice, too, especially if it were possible to randomise size, rotation, opacity, etc. Both blobs along the path and a single click blob tool would be useful.
Cheers, Matt

+1 for true vector brushes, this has been mentioned countless times already!
This could be nice, too, especially if it were possible to randomise size, rotation, opacity, etc. Both blobs along the path and a single click blob tool would be useful.
Cheers, Matt

+1 for true vector brushes, this has been mentioned countless times already!
This could be nice, too, especially if it were possible to randomise size, rotation, opacity, etc. Both blobs along the path and a single click blob tool would be useful.
Cheers, Matt

+1 I'm also waiting for vector brushes before I completely abandon Adobe.
In particular i need something like the "pattern brushes" in Ai.... the ability to add any vector graphic to the brush palette and create repeating brushes, along with the ability to create corner tiles and end points.

I'm really hoping Affinity updates to allow true 100% vector brushes to be more editable and relevant in future releases. What are currently labeled "vector brushes" are not 100% vector and cannot be expanded as vectors. They have their uses and I appreciate them - but in my line of work, I need to be able to export 100% vector - no raster in the final output.
Right now we can only modify the 100% vector brush to a simple taper on each end - As I have attached to this post, there are many other types of tapers and such I'd love to be able to do with a 100% vector brush.
Going a little further - I'm hoping for a blob-tool that can allow for any shape to be made and used -