GarryP

There is a similar discussion here:

In the UK, both Designer and Photo are currently being offered at £48.99 each from Serif via their own website so I can't see Publisher being more expensive than that - unless Serif increase the overall price before then of course. Serif often have offer periods - recently, Designer for iPad had a 30% discount on launch which coincided with an "Up to 30% off everything" offer - so it might even be cheaper for a while at the start to get more people on-board the good ship Affinity. Even if there's no discount offered, 50 quid for something with the power of Publisher with free upgrades - well, probably until version 2 at least - isn't a massive amount of cash (less than £1 per week if you only use it for one year) when compared to some other software.

If the Publisher beta expires after a month or two - as Zoot says - then, since Publisher and Designer share most 'basic' functions, you can get used to most of what Designer can do by using Publisher beta. Some Designer functions are missing from Publisher - the pixel persona, etc. - and some are only available via menus rather than toolbar icons but they are close enough to each other to get a reasonable idea of what the other can do. The layout, snapping, geometry, effects, text formatting and most of the drawing tools of Designer are in Publisher so you can have a decent amount of experimentation before you buy.

The technique you used - around 2:58 - with the corner tool to make the curve smooth was - once I figured out what you did - a very useful thing to learn. Thanks.

You're welcome. Publisher is in free user-testing beta at the moment which means that the beta version of the software - the only kind that's currently available - probably has no 'end date'. You can probably go on using the beta version as long as you want, and it's pretty stable as it is (unless Serif have put some kind of 'kill-switch' in there somewhere). The trial period only pertains to the free trial versions of Designer and Photo which are paid-for production-ready (not beta) software. As you were using Craft Artist, which was Windows-only as far as I know, I'll assume you're using WIndows so you will need to uninstall Publisher when you're finished with it as just dragging the short-cut to the trash will only remove the short-cut and not the software itself (unlike what happens on Macs when you drag an application to the trash).

I think Designer will probably be the most useful - of the three Affinity products - for scrapbooking and craft projects. As MEB suggests, you can download the - fully-functional - trial for free but you only get 10 days of trial period - actual installed days, not days in use - so it's best to watch some videos first so you don't take up a lot of that trial time getting to know the software before trying something real. Reading some of the on-line help https://affinity.help/ (it's the same as you get installed with the products) before you download would probably help too. You can always ask for advice before downloading the trial which will also help you to get the most out of the trial period (just make sure that you say you haven't actually downloaded it yet so people know the situation from the start). As for getting help, it might be good if you can give an example of something specific that you want to make. If there's a web page or something that people can look at, to give them a good idea of what's necessary, that would be helpful. People will probably give you lots of advice on different ways to do things and you can then choose what you want to try.

You can go to View -> Studio -> Fields to show the Fields studio and double-click on a field - e.g. Document Sections / Name - to insert it wherever you want. If you're using section name then you will need to set-up your sections first. I don't know if there's a way to pick up the text from the actual page 'on the fly'.

Really nice work. I especially like the last one where the two seem to be reaching out for each other; I hope they make it. The first one looks more like an underwater scene to me - the stars/dust are in front of the 'whatever-it-is', or is it semi-transparent? - but it's very good all the same. Lovely stuff.

@garrettm30 I think you're probably on the right trail as to where the problem comes from. I have a feeling that part of the problem is that the text wrap feature can only be given left/top/right/bottom gap distances which are okay for rectangular shapes but are pretty meaningless for curved shapes. To put it another way, where is the 'right-hand side' of a circle? Is it only at the furthermost right-hand point or does it extend around the curve in either direction for some distance? And, if it does extend around the curve, where does it stop being the right-hand side and start becoming the top or bottom? And what about curves that are more complex than circles? And what about concave shapes? The list goes on. What would be preferable in this instance would be some kind of 'distance from nearest point' gap size which would work at all points on the curve - somehow, but probably not all points since a curve is essentially infinite in length - but I wouldn't like to even think about how complicated that would be to code or what other problems would probably arise from that. And then you have the issue of wrapping around images that have a transparency, I've no idea how that's done at all. All-in-all, the text wrap feature tries its best at wrapping and normally does a good job but, in certain cases like this, it doesn't work well enough to do it properly all of the time and some manual intervention is required, in this case adding an extra invisible shape with wrapping that extends a bit further out from the actual shape (as shown in the image attached to this post). This isn't a massive problem and a quick manual 'fix' can be applied but it's maybe something that could be looked at in future releases. It certainly shouldn't delay the first proper release from coming out.

Windows 10, Publisher Build 145. I've noticed something about tight text wrapping around a curved shape that seems wrong, but maybe someone can explain it to me. Have a look at the first attached image. The text is 7pt Arial on a 9pt baseline grid. The filled blue circle is a layer that has tight text wrapping with a gap of 2pt all-round. The outlined blue circle - on the right-hand diagram - is 4pts wider and taller than the filled blue circle (observing the 2pt gap of the text wrap). As you can see, the text is further away from the circle at the top and bottom than it is at the right. I can understand why, for example, "hendrerit" below the circles isn't anywhere near the outlined circle because the baseline forces it to be further away, but I don't understand why the other text is so far away from the circle. The second attached image shows the same sort of issue but it looks a lot worse there. Can anyone explain why this is supposed to happen, or is it a bug? It just doesn't seem quite right to me. (I've also attached the afpub file in case anyone wants to have a play with it.) tight wrapping round curves.afpub

I think the decoration positions are - and should be, in my opinion - listed from the lowest (top of the list) to the highest (bottom of the list). In other words, the further you go down the list the higher - in relation to the text - the position of the decoration will be. This in in-tune with the font variant size - narrowest (smallest thickness) at the top, thickest at the bottom, as already said - and would be confusing if it was in alphabetical order.

You're welcome again. My worry is that this sort of easy-to-forget thing is something that a mean-spirited reviewer would jump on wearing hob-nail boots. Many reviewers won't have the experience/time/patience to look at, for example, the versatility of the grid system, or how nicely paragraph decorations work, or how well font alternates are handled, or maybe even 5% of what the software can do. But they might look at something simple like the colour picker during their few days - maybe just hours - of experimentation. It wouldn't matter to them if the rest of the application was working flawlessly, they'd just see it as a way to put the software down, which would be a real shame (at best). Anyway, as long as it's been noted as an outstanding issue then that's fine and dandy. Cheers.

I've noticed that this still isn't working on build 145 - the colour shown on the 'magnifier' is RGB 0,0,0 and black is picked (with the same CMYK values as mentioned earlier). I realise that there will be a lot of other work going on but I wouldn't want this to fall through the cracks as it's one of those silly "If this simple thing doesn't work then how can I trust anything else it does"-type of issues.

I agree that "All Pages" should be the default with the other less-likely-to-be-used(?) options there to be discovered by the user. Also, as mentioned in another post https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/68222-should-i-expect-spreads-to-be-exported-as-joined-pages-in-pdfs/ , I think it should be renamed to something like "All as Individual Pages" just to make it more clear.

Many thanks.