GarryP

In Publisher, you can also see those options in the Text Frame panel, Vertical Alignment section.

Another good suggestion, thanks. I like the idea of getting an email telling me the status of my backups. I also like the way it seems to be pretty-well integrated into Windows. It seems to have only one backup schedule, which might be limiting, but that could be fine. Only £30 with 30% off at the moment. Added to my list of things to look into properly at some point soon.

Thanks to everyone who suggested SyncBack. That seems like an interesting product too. The free version doesn’t seem to have File Versioning, which is useful but not absolutely necessary. If I buy V8 now it looks like I would get a free upgrade to V9 in June, which is nice, and only £38 for the SE version which seems more than capable of doing what I need of it. I’ll see if I get other suggestions before I start my experiments.

Thanks carl123, I’d never heard of that one before but it seems to have lots of nice features for a very nice price – only £26. I’ve bookmarked that page and will have a read of some of the manual soon. I think I might also try the trial – at the very least - as it surely can’t be worse than what I have at the moment.

This might not, at first, seem to have much in relation to Affinity but there is a point to me asking the question (see below). I have a WD external USB drive for my backups but the software that came with the drive didn’t work very well (I couldn’t tell it exactly what to backup and the restore process took a very long time). I then looked at using the basic Windows backup function instead but I just can’t get it working the way I want it to (faffing around with libraries and it doesn’t seem to do anything most of the time). So I’m stuck with not having a reliable automatic backup. My general requirements are: * Windows-only – Windows 10-only if necessary; * Easy to select what to backup – e.g. click on a folder and press the “keep backups of everything in this folder” button; * East to select what not to backup – e.g. click on a sub-folder and press the “don’t bother backing this sub-folder up” button; * Easy to restore previous version of file – e.g. browse to the backup I want and press the “restore this version” button; * Easy to set when to backup what – e.g. Backup <this> folder once a day at dinnertime, and <that> folder every hour; * Lets me set exactly which folders and files I want to backup, not just the ones it thinks I might need (very important as most of my stuff isn’t in the Documents folder); * Keeps multiple versions of each file, up to a limit which I can set individually by folder – e.g. keep the last <X> versions of the files in this folder; * Low system overhead – e.g. I don’t want my system slowing down noticeably while the backup is happening; * Low cost – e.g. less than £50 and no subscription (like the Affinity apps). I have no current use for: Cloud storage; Encryption; Backup to multiple drives/RAID; Anti-ransomware; Email backup; Drive cloning; Multiple licences; Removable storage backups; Transfer between machines. Since the Affinity Apps – especially Publisher - can produce rather large files it would be great to be able to set different backup schedules for different folders so, for example, my important files are backed up often, but my experiments are only backed up every now and again. The Affinity apps use and produce large files so it would be nice to have something that can handle these without much fuss. I’ve noticed a few discussions about backups on this forum recently so I thought it might be useful to pick peoples’ brains and see what’s being used out there. So, does anyone have any recommendations? What are you using and why do you like it? What were you using and why did you switch to something else? I’m currently looking at EaseUS Todo Backup Free, which looks okay, but doesn’t seem – as far as I can see at the moment - to give me as much control as I want.

Welcome to the forum. You can use a combination of paragraph Left Indent and First Line Indent to get what you want but I don’t think there’s a way to make Publisher work out the numbers automatically (would be nice if it could). If you activate the Frame Text Ruler you can drag the indents instead of entering numerical values.

The Tab key – by default and by design – normally hides the UI (panels, toolbars, etc.). However, it shouldn’t function like this when you are editing fields in a panel. Are you sure you haven’t pressed Enter before pressing Tab? While you are entering data in the fields of a panel, the Tab key should move you to the next field in that panel while keeping that panel the focus of the UI. Pressing Enter while entering data in a panel is the equivalent of saying “I’ve finished entering stuff in this panel” and the focus should leave the panel – like OKing a dialog box but the panel remains visible - so that the Tab key reverts back to its ‘hide the UI’ functionality. I’ve come across this myself a few times and I’m fairly sure that the ‘problem’ was caused by me pressing Enter when I shouldn’t have.

That Smarticon Generator tool looks amazing. Unfortunately there’s no similar extruding tool in Designer. I think I remember reading some requests for a ‘long shadow’ tool which is a bit like a greatly-cut-down version of the one in the video. Inkscape has an extrude function – and you can import SVGs that it creates into Designer - but I can’t remember how to use it.

You’re welcome. If enough people request this feature then I feel sure that the Affinity team will at least consider it for inclusion, but probably for a future release rather than the first one.

I’ve never noticed an option to add a safety margin and there doesn’t seem to be anything in the Help about them. One basic option is to: create a new master page/spread; set-up a margin on this new page/spread which is where you want the ‘safety margin’ to be; add the new master page/spread to each normal page/spread where needed; keep the “Safety Margin” master page/spread just above the other master page(s)/spread(s) so the ‘safety margin’ doesn’t interfere. Then, when you want to check that things are okay: drag – and keep the mouse button down – the “Safety Margin” spread layer to the bottom of the layer stack to quickly check that all looks okay; while you’ve still got the mouse button down, drag the “Safety Margin” spread back to where it was. It’s not ideal but this way the ‘safety margin’ remains hidden until you want to do your checks. My attached GIF shows how it could be used, but I’m not sure if it helps much.

Apologies for the lateness of this reply. I’ve been regularly checking my forum activity stream that is supposed to tell me what’s been posted to threads that I’ve been part of but it’s only today that I get a notification on this one, for some reason. Anyway, thanks for giving some examples of when someone might draw an invisible curve. I have done plenty of those things myself but I have always made sure that the stroke has a colour before I started drawing so that I was sure I could see what I was drawing. That’s just something which I’m used to doing and I’m not saying that it should be a practice that everyone should adopt. It seems like there are quite a few reasons why someone might draw an invisible curve with the Pencil tool so, with that in mind, I now agree that there probably should be a way for the user to see the path of the curve even if it has no stroke or fill. That might sound like a total turnaround but I don’t have a problem with changing my mind if I’m proved wrong. What I wanted to do was make sure that there was a real need for something before the developers put a lot of time and effort into making it happen. Time spent on something that isn’t needed is time wasted and time lost from more important things. To take one example, in ‘a previous life’ I had someone come to me asking for some fairly large changes to be made to part of a system that, once the requirements had been properly discussed, were not necessary at all as that part of the system was found to be redundant and was subsequently removed. Approximately five weeks of design, programming and testing were replaced by 10 minutes of simply deleting stuff – and we saved a couple of reams of paper each week into the bargain. All I needed was to be convinced by having some good real-world examples showing that the changes would actually be needed, and you’ve now done that as far as I’m concerned, so thanks again for that. So, to clarify, in short, yeah, lets see the curve while it’s being drawn if no stroke and no fill have been set.

So what is “Auto-scroll” supposed to do? The documentation says: “Switch off Auto-scroll (panel scrolls to layer content when it is selected on the page)”. However, all it seems to do for me, if switched OFF, is that the layers panel no longer scrolls when I drag a layer in that panel.

I think I might be getting myself a bit mixed up so may I confirm something so I know we’re talking about the same thing? From your posts it sounds like you want the following functionality: “When the user selects a layer on the canvas, the Layers panel should automatically highlight the selected layer and scroll to where that layer is in the layer hierarchy if that layer is not currently visible in the Layers panel.” Is this what you want to happen, or something else?

Unless I’ve misunderstood the requirements, you can also set the Layers panel to “auto scroll”. When this option is on, when you select a layer on the canvas, the selected layer should be automatically highlighted in the Layers panel. To make this happen, go to the top-right corner of the Layers panel, click on the little menu icon, and check/tick “Auto-scroll”. Having said that, I’ve also seen this behaviour when “Auto-scroll” is off and, conversely, “Auto-scroll” doesn’t always scroll to the layer that was last created so I’m not sure if it’s working properly or I just don’t know exactly how it’s supposed to work (there’s not much in the Help about it). P.S. Deleting threads makes it impossible for other people in the same situation to find the same answer without asking the same question again.

I think I’ll keep my version to myself. I didn’t get very far with it and, looking at it just now, it was even more basic than I remembered. I got some of the background done but as soon as I started on the robot I saw that I simply didn’t have the artistic ability to get anywhere with it that I would have been happy with. I’ll keep my eye out for Electra Glide in Blue just in case I spot it being shown on a movie channel somewhere; thanks.

This would be great as a prog-rock album cover. I’m already imagining Rick Wakeman wearing a gold cloak and a top hat behind a stack of keyboards. Nice work.

Yeah, it’s probably not for everyone. I watched it back in the late 80’s – late-night UK Channel 4 if my memory serves me correctly - so there’s a chance I might not like it now either. You’re welcome. When I first got Designer I tried to make a replica of the original poster but I quickly got to the stage where I realised that I didn’t have the skills/talent required to make it look good so I gave up. (Designer is the sort of application that inspires people to make stuff but some of us just don’t make the grade when it comes to artistic things.) Your version is far superior to mine and very much deserves all the praise it’s given.

Lovely stuff. It’s all great, but I especially like the lighting/shadows on the buildings. P.S. The 1984 Giorgio Moroder restoration of the film with a pop soundtrack was a good version from what I can remember. (It sounds weird but worked strangely well.)

As a ‘quick fix’ you could use a single-cell table. That way you can use the table cell border formatting for the whole frame.

Welcome to the forum. Some interesting ideas there. The default, when placing a new object, is to put the new object above the currently-selected layer. Your first suggestion – if I have understood correctly - is to replicate this behaviour when adding a new ‘empty’ layer. This seems reasonable to me. Always having a new empty layer added to the top of the stack can be awkward sometimes (the Auto-scroll function doesn’t follow it) and, as far as I know, there’s no inherent reason for that behaviour. Your second suggestion sounds quite reasonable also. If you have multiple layers selected then it’s usually because you want to do something with them together, and adding a ‘wrapping’ layer when they are selected – rather than just putting the layer at the top of the stack as usual - sounds like it could come in useful. Unless there are good reasons why these two suggestions shouldn’t be considered, they sound like good candidates for inclusion to me.

There is a Leading Override setting in the Character panel, in the “Positioning and Transform” section. You can use this to set different leadings in the same paragraph but, naturally, it only works on a line-by-line basis.

I agree that the Help icons are much clearer than those in the application but the arrows – in this case – are necessary to show what happens. One of the issues some people had was that the application icons can look the wrong way round to people who read right-to-left as there was no way to see ‘which way round’ they were.

But why would I want to draw an invisible curve around/between an object or objects, or for any other reason? That’s what I don’t understand. I can understand why I might want to see where the curve started if I wanted to draw a closed curve but I don’t know why I would want to draw a closed – or otherwise – invisible curve in the first place. I’ve been playing around with graphics software for quite some time but I’ve never drawn an invisible curve because I’ve never needed to draw one and that’s why I don’t see the use of being able to see the path of an invisible curve. If you could give me an actual real-world example - what you would use an invisible curve for and why you would need to use the Pencil tool to draw it - then I might be able to understand, but at the moment I just don’t see the purpose of it.

dutchshader: My first attached image shows how the buttons look on my screen: Break; Close; Smooth; Join; Reverse. The Close and Break buttons icons are not the same as in the Help, which is a little troubling. The little lines coming out of the single node on each are confusing to me. Also, the icon on the Close button doesn’t look like what it actually does. The icon looks like the function will join two nodes whereas the function actually puts a curve between the two end nodes. So Close should look more like my second attached image. haakoo: I agree that “Open Curve” and “Closed Curve” are better descriptors in the Layers panel. PaulEC: At first I thought a toggle button might be a bad idea but I can’t – off the top of my head - think of a reason why. One part of me is saying “That won’t work” while another part is asking “Why won’t it work?” Maybe someone can give a good example of where it would reduce functionality.

Surely the path of an invisible curve drawn with the Pencil tool is irrelevant? It doesn’t matter if the curve is a simple straight line, or squiggles all over the page, or anything in between, the result is the same: a curve you can’t see. And if you can’t see the curve then the path it takes is irrelevant. Maybe, instead of just saying that the functionality is different or missing, if you gave a concrete example of when a user would want/need to draw an invisible curve with the Pencil tool it might help to clarify the situation. Simply saying that it should work the same as another tool – which does a different job - or that another application does it isn’t a good enough reason for me to agree that the Designer Pencil tool should do it. If you can give a good enough reason then I’d be happy to change my mind but, at the moment, I haven’t seen anything that proves that the Pencil tool should work any differently to how it currently does. So, to clarify, please: 1. Give a real-world example of when a user would want/need to draw an invisible curve with the Pencil tool, and; 2. Give some idea of how often a user would want/need to do this, and; 3. Explain why this process can't or shouldn't be done with another tool which already has the different/missing functionality.