GarryP

Thanks for sharing that. It’s always interesting to see how people who know what they are doing do what they do.

A while ago I was lucky enough to pick up a surprisingly cheap copy of Jim Krause’s Type Idea Index https://www.mydesignshop.com/type-idea-index (My brand new copy was only 99p but it normally retails for £30 and upwards.) It’s a great book to get ideas from and has a wealth of information about using type in all kinds of ways. My usual method of finding a font is to find an image of some text that I like and then trawl through many, many, pages in dafont.com until I get something that looks close. Not a great method - and very time-consuming - but I usually find some interesting things along the way.

Ah, so the total number of vectors that have been painted is ‘hidden’ by rasterizing some of them at various points in the process. That makes sense. Initially I thought that the visible vectors were the only ones that had been used. That would have been really amazing. (I’m not an artist so I don’t know how these sorts of things are done, so thanks for explaining.) That said, it’s still impressive work, both by you and the Affinity team.

Can you really get detail similar to that on the left from just the vectors similar to those on the right?

I think a warning seems quite reasonable. As long as the toolbar doesn’t scroll. I don’t think I could cope with a scrolling toolbar. P.S. Could the Pen, Pencil and Vector drawing tools be given a joint ‘flyout item’ - similar to the shapes tools - to reduce the space needed?

Cooper Black, yes, that’s what it is. I had forgotten all about it since moving back to Windows.

You’re welcome. The choice of font can be difficult. Your cover looks like it’s for a ‘thriller’, or maybe a ‘romantic thriller’, or possibly ‘family revelation drama’. I’ve found that using a basic title font for that sort of book title works reasonably well in most cases, sometimes with a bit of a subtle effect if that adds something relevant. The covers of most thrillers do this. My general go-to title font is https://www.dafont.com/built-titling.font which does a lot of the heavy lifting for me. I generally do these sorts of things for fun - and learning - too.

The full data restore process - e.g. after a hard drive failure - for Duplicati seems a little more complicated than I would like it to be. It seems like every time I change things - not exactly sure what - to do with the backup configuration I also need to manually export that configuration to a separate place - not sure where - in case anything goes wrong so I can use that in the restore process (or somehow remember various details, sometimes difficult in an emergency). I might be getting this all wrong - difficult to know unless you’ve actually been through the process yourself - but I would much prefer to simply copy/paste the files from the backup location and just get going again without needing to install anything (including the backup software as I might not have internet access at that point). That’s just my personal preference though.

Would a book be referred to as a ‘production’? Also, there’s no author name. Unless, of course, the author’s name as actually “A JDA Production”. Maybe it’s Alan John-David-Alvin Production of the famous Hollywood script-writing Production family. Sorry, just me being a bit silly there. On a less-frivolous note, I don’t think the font is a good choice for the image. I have no idea what the book is about but the font doesn’t seem to match the picture in my opinion. The picture gives an impression of mystery with an air of “the possibility of rescue from oppression or misery” while the font seems to say “Hey kids! We’re having a party with cake and balloons.” The juxtaposition doesn’t work for me. Also, I think there might be too much ‘space’ overall. I’m not sure what I mean by that but the title seems too small and ‘washed out’ to me. Not sure how best to ‘fix’ that.

You can restore individual files, as you can using most reasonable backup software, but you can’t simply copy the backed-up file from the backup location or load it into the relevant application directly from the backup media. You have to restore the file via the backup software first because of the way the software backs up ‘blocks’ from the files rather than the files themselves. To put it another way, the software stores pieces of the ‘jigsaw’ rather than the whole picture and the ‘jigsaw’ needs to be put back together in order for the picture to be seen. I’m not sure I would want to be reliant on this kind of restore process in an emergency and would, instead, prefer to be able to simply copy/access a fully-intact version of the file from the backup media without having to go through a ‘restoration’ phase. Of course, when restoring from any kind of backup you’re reliant on the backup software working properly but I just don’t think this sort of process is right for me with my current requirements.

Another interesting suggestion, thanks v_kyr. Like you say, it’s optimised for online storage - not something I need or want at the moment - but it seems to do local storage too so it’s a possible option - and I like the fact that it’s open source. One issue I might have is that you can’t access files directly from the backup but I don’t know how much of an actual problem that would be for me. (In an emergency I think I would like to be able to simply access the backup file rather than go through some ‘reintegration’ procedure.) Anyway, I’m still taking suggestions before I start doing the real work so I’ll add it to my list.

Lovely. Works in a Character Text Style too.

In addition to the previous suggestion, you could use menu “View → Customise Tools” and drag the Rectangle tool over to your toolbar so it’s always available no matter which other shape tool you used last.

If you insert a time via a field - current, created, saved, printed - Publisher doesn’t count the time as text when it comes to the spell check but that’s probably not good enough for what you need. You can ‘trick’ Publisher into not marking a time such as hh:mm as a spell check issue by inserting a Hair Space (via Text → Insert) either side of the colon, e.g. hh<hair space>:<hair space>mm. (Doing the same using a Zero-Width Space would look better but it doesn’t work for some reason.) It’s not ideal but might might be okay for some purposes.

A nice theme that works well for the genre. The eye is immediately drawn to the main image subject with no distractions while keeping a sense of mystery. Nice choice of font too. Great stuff all round.

Does the Shift key always work in other applications? Do you have any keyboard managers – Flexikey or anything similar - running?

Another good suggestion LibreTraining, thanks. Just under £30 for the Standard Edition isn’t a bad price. It also seems to have lots of useful features. It doesn’t look to be updated very often – four years between version 7 and 8 – but that isn’t always a bad thing – if it’s not broke then don’t fix it. The Block Level Copying feature – not available in the Standard Edition – sounds interesting but I don’t think it will be useful for Affinity documents because of how they are probably organised. Should be okay for things like databases but for documents where things are regularly inserted and removed - everything else being moved forwards or backwards in the stream - it maybe isn’t going to help much. I’ve added it to my list for further consideration none-the-less.

Actually I’ve just checked and you can actually put the text frame on a master page and then have different text in each frame. So it seems like you can do what you want after all, sorry.

As the layers on a master page are repeated on every page you shouldn’t be putting layers that change on master pages. (Exceptions to this are page numbers etc.) If the content of the layer changes then you need to put that layer on a normal page. Edit: This isn't true, I've just checked. To get a text frame with a background that ‘expands’ with the text you can use a decoration as per the attached files. expanding-text-frame.afpub

Oops, sorry DesignT. I use the beta without realising it these days. It’s so stable that I don’t think about using the current commercial release. gdenby’s file uses pretty much the same technique as my example – elliptical gradient etc. - so there’s not much point in me recreating mine in 1.6, but tell me if you really need it for some reason.

Quite possibly but I think it really depends on what ivbera wants to do that can’t be handled by the normal alignment tools. The image on koop’s original post can be easily achieved using the alignment tools but I don’t know what the precise requirements are in ivbera’s case.

Here’s a quick experiment that I threw together quickly. You might be able to make something with it if you tweak various things. rainbow.afdesign

Thanks for the suggestion Sam Neil. Copiaris seems to be a little fiddly compared to what I want – scripts/tasks/variables - and the Lite version looks a bit limited – only one source directory allowed – but it’s worth keeping in mind. Sometimes the option that looks least likely at first can actually be the best option.

Vertical alignment doesn’t really apply to the Artistic Text tool. Artistic Text can be thought of as just a ‘fancy’ shape - like any other shape – and, as such, has nothing for it to be aligned within because it is already ‘aligned’ within itself. Or, to put it another way, the size/dimensions of the Artistic Text layer are the extents of the glyphs within the layer itself so there’s nothing else to align the text with. It’s a bit like trying to align a rectangle to the bottom/top/left/right of its own rectangular bounding box. It’s the size that it is so it can only be where it is. Would you be able to give a simple example, preferably with images, of the issue you are having with Text Frames? My understanding is that master pages are not really places for place-holders and I don’t see why having a text frame bigger than the text would cause concern. I’m just having trouble understanding what the root problem is.

Thanks for the suggestion Jeff. Paragon HMD is a bit more pricey than the ones already suggested as you say but, from a quick skim through the user manual, it does look to be a bit more comprehensive than some other backup applications. Maybe a bit more than I need but you often don’t know what you actually need until you realise you didn’t have it. It looks like it uses WPF for the UI – and not WinForms - which suggests to me that they are keeping up with new(ish) technology rather than sticking with old ways of doing things, which is also a plus for me. I’ve added it to my list for further inspection.