GarryP

If you want to get a grid where the squares defined by that grid are all of the same size, and you only see whole squares, then you need to calculate the common factors of both the height and width of the image/document you are editing and use one of those factors as the grid spacing size. There are various common factor calculation resources on the web. For example with an FHD-sized image, using https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/math/commonfactors.php I can enter “1920, 1080” into the input field and press Enter. I then get a list of common factors, each of which I can then enter into the Spacing field of the “Grid and Snapping Axis” dialog to get a nice grid. In my attached image I have used the Greatest Common Factor of 1920 and 1080, which is 120 (both 1920 and 1080 are divisible into integers by dividing by 120). If there are no common factors then you cannot do this. Note: You might be able to do this with Column Guides, if the document/image has the right height to width ratio, but it will probably require even more calculations anyway, so that’s maybe not a better solution. (But Column Guides, with an Outline Style, are possibly better if you want rectangles instead of squares.)

Photo will always show you the document at a ‘document pixel’ level and, because of this, vectors may sometimes not look as ‘clean’ as they do in Designer (or Publisher) where vectors are usually rendered at ‘the screen resolution’ (unless you are using “Pixel View Mode” in Designer). This is just how Photo works, and has always worked – this is not a bug, it's just how it is because of what Photo was designed to do. Documents in Photo, when a zoom greater than 100% is used, will always be 'pixelated' to some degree.

Also check that your diamond shapes are ‘true diamonds’ and that the angles are correct; a ‘slightly off’ diamond – maybe not visually apparent – will also give you a problem with alignment.

For diagnosis of an issue with exporting, giving us just the ‘after’ isn’t as useful as giving us both the ‘before’ and ‘after’. We can see what was produced but we can’t see what it was produced from. My first guess as to what the problem is here is that you could have used an Effect or Live Filter somewhere as these always cause the layer(s) they are applied to to be rasterised. Would you be able to provide the original Affinity document so we can look at it?

It doesn’t look like your diamond shapes were properly aligned before you started to duplicate them. It looks like there is a small ‘offset’ at the corners – see attached image where I have approximated where the edges of the diamonds seem to be (after a Levels Adjustment has been applied).

It’s difficult to tell from such tiny screen grabs, and without knowing what’s on the master page, what’s happening. I’ve just tried to re-create the problem but don’t get a Preflight error message – probably because my document is not your document. Can you share the document so we can see how it’s been constructed? If you can’t share the document, can you share some full-screen screenshots which include the Layers Panel with the ‘problem layer’ selected and the Pages Panel where we can see both the master page and the page?

If you search the forums for svg ascii you will see lots of information about this and ways to get around it. In brief, encoding="ascii" is not something that the Affinity applications can handle at the moment but changes for it to do so have been requested; there’s no particular reason for it not being supported, it’s just that support for it has not yet been added. Serif don’t generally give us timescales for any changes – you can keep an eye on the beta forum sections for any possible future functionality updates.

Unfortunately we can’t see your Layers Panel which would tell us something about how your pages are constructed. Sorry, I should have also asked for that; can you make another please? Can you also make sure that the ‘problem layer’ is selected in the Layers Panel and that we can see the child layers of the ‘problem layer’ and whether the ‘problem layer’ is itself a child layer of another layer? It looks like the Picture Frame you have selected in your screenshot is on a master page which may be why you cannot add a stroke to it. (I just tried it and I couldn’t do it but I’m not using the same document as you.) However, I don’t know how you could add a stroke to the Picture Frame on the left of the spread if that Picture Frame is also on the master page, which it seems to be. If you want the stroke to be on that Picture Frame for every instance the master page is used then you can add the stroke to the Picture Frame on the master page, but this specific case has got me wondering. Maybe the new screenshot will help.

Nice, thanks, I didn’t think about it that way round. And I guess I could save the selection in case I needed it again in either case. That works for me, but I’ll leave the request open in case anyone sees it and thinks of a better reason for keeping it than I can.

Edit: The suggestions in the two posts below by Walt give two good ways to do what I have requested but by using existing functionality. In the Liquify Persona, I’ve had a little look round and I can see that I can Clear the mask, Mask All, and Invert the mask, but can’t figure out if it’s possible to load a mask from a document layer. It would be nice if I could create a mask layer by using the various functionalities already provided but then also use that mask inside the Liquify Persona (and/or Live Liquify Filter). By doing so I could create masks which conform much more easily to the thing I want to liquify, or the thing around which I want to liquify, without a lot of manual work in approximating it with brush work. For example, if I have a picture of a building against the sky I could use the Selection Brush to create the selection, Refine it, then create the Mask in a normal way. Then I could load the mask into the Liquify functionality and then liquify only the building, or the sky, without ‘going over the lines’. Being able to do this would also make it easier to create liquify masks with straight edges, which I find difficult to do. I found this related thread: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/183041-liquify-— is-it-possible-to-convert-a-grayscale-image-to-a-mesh-or-a-mask/ ...but couldn’t find a subsequent feature request, hence this one.

The Picture Frame with the ‘X-handles’ is probably either locked or on a master page, but it is the same thing as the other Picture Frame, it just can’t be edited at the moment – try unlocking the frame or editing the master page. Note: When giving us screenshots it is usually much more useful to give us full-screen screenshots as then we can see everything that you can see, which often gives us clues to what is wrong or just plain tells us what the problem is.

If ‘PDF bookmark order’ is not going to be something which will be implemented, for the reason given above, how about having the option to see them in ‘document order’, and by that I mean in the same order as they are marked in the document? That, at least, would give us a better idea of where they are placed in the document in relation to each other, which is especially useful in a long document and when the same term has been given an anchor on different pages – it would lessen the problem of the user having to navigate to them one-by-one to find the one they need – see attached video (imagine navigating your way around that document with only an alphabetical list). 2023-08-09 13-15-31.mp4

A bug is something which causes the software to work in a way which is different to how it was designed to work. If the software is working as it was designed to work then it’s not a bug. Any difference between how the software works and your expectations of how it should work, no matter how reasonable those expectations might be, does not necessarily mean there is a bug. I happen to agree that it would be nice if the software did this a bit differently, and it might have been nice if it did it differently without any users having to request it, but none of that means that it is a bug. Reporting something as a bug, rather than as a feature request, makes no difference – from a user point of view – as to how quickly it will be looked at by Serif.

Welcome to the forums @ALICIA M The versions (e.g. 2.x.y) of the Affinity applications need to be the same in order for StudioLink to work. If you are being told that, for example, Designer is not up-to-date than you can: close Publisher, and; either launch Designer and update Designer in the usual way via the application; or update Designer via the Store you purchased the licence from; and then re-launch Publisher. You can do the same thing for Photo. The best way to update your applications is to update Designer or Photo first, then update Photo or Designer (whichever wasn’t updated first), and then update Publisher. This ensures that Publisher can see that the other applications are of the same version when it launches so that StudioLink works properly.

This sounds more like a feature request than a bug report, but it sounds like a nice change to have either way (or to have an option to tell the software which way round to have it). I’ve added an example document (AFPUB and PDF) which shows the issue. Clicking on the first bookmark is fine because only a few words, on the same line, were used to create the bookmark. However, clicking on the second bookmark shows the problem where the reader needs to scroll back up the document to see the start of the bookmarked text. The third bookmark shows the problem in a worse light by putting the user on the next page. I think it is normally more likely that the reader would like to start reading the text from the start of the bookmarked text rather than the end. (The problem is evident when reading the PDF in Chrome, Firefox and Acrobat Reader.) bookmarks-sometimes-go-to-wrong-place.pdf bookmarks-sometimes-go-to-wrong-place.afpub

Good to hear it worked. Hopefully 2.2.1 will be out sometime soon, so you will see the dialog again but it will be ‘for real’ this time.

Can you show us, in a full-screen video so we can see what you are doing, which part of the process you are having trouble with? The process to copy and paste part of a pixel layer, as far as can understand from what you have said, seems to be exactly the same for me in 2.1.1 as it was in 1.10.6. Can you give some details about what you are trying to do and how you were/are doing it? What, specifically, is different to how you used to like it?

You will keep getting the “New Version available” dialog until either: 1. You go through the instructions (in the linked thread) to stop it happening, or; 2. The update to 2.2.1 is pushed out to users and you perform that update.

Asking how to layout a “newsletter” is a bit like asking how to layout a garden, everyone will have their own idea of what it should look like. If you can give us an example of what you have been creating in Word, and tell us what you want to keep, and tell us what sort of changes you would like to make, then we should be able to give you better help. Once we have a better idea of what you are trying to make, we can give advice on how to make it.

Good to know you’ve got it sorted. Thanks for telling us.

You’re welcome. If it doesn’t do what you want it to do, or you want to do something different, just say so.

For issue 2 see: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/188808-email-link/#comment-1103072 (Found by searching the forums for hyphen email ).

Are you sure that the text “disappears”? With white text, even with a transparent background, if you are looking at the resultant image on a white background (as most browsers give you) you will not see the white text. Can you supply the exported image so we can see what you can see?

Unless I have misunderstood the requirements, one easy way to do this is to select the Picture Frame layer and add a White Stroke to it via the Colour Panel (or Swatch Panel) and the Stroke Panel, maybe with “Align Stroke to Inside” – see attached image.

I think there was a feature request made at some point to change the text to something like “Affinity Photo 2 version 2.x.y is currently the newest available.” to make this more clear, but I can’t find it. (Or maybe I just imagined it.)