GarryP

Welcome to the forum. There are a few ways of doing what you want. The first is simply to drag the row 'header' border - for quick adjustments - and the other is to use the Table panel (View -> Studio -> Table - or - Table -> Show Table) and set the Cell Height for the selected row. Resizing using the Transform panel resizes the whole table/layer, which will in turn resize every row.

I wonder if something like what you are asking for will come when the three 1.7 versions are commercially released. It looks like you will be able to switch easily between the application personas so it would make sense if these sorts of things - favourites, palettes, etc. - were shared between all three rather than importing stuff. And, on a related note, if this is to be done, will this 'synchronisation ability' be available to beta test so there aren't any nasty surprises upon release?

It sounds like you want Frame Text. Go to the help and look for the Text 'chapter' (between Object Control and Tables); you'll find a lot of information there.

I'm confused as to what you are asking for. Do you want template book covers to be provided with the software, or do you want the facility to add bar codes to a document?

I normally have many copies of the same document saved as backups so I would like to add to this request. I would like to have a "Continue in New Version" option on the File menu. This function would save the current document and then create a duplicate with an automatically incremented number suffixed to the file name which the user would continue to work with. For example: * Create document; * Save document as "Document"; * "Continue" - file "Document" is saved and a new document "Document1" is created which the user now works with; * "Continue" - file "Document1" is saved and a new document "Document2" is created which the user now works with; * etc. etc. This would be useful but not vital as I'm already used to working the way I am now. Would be nice not to have to do this manually though.

Very nice. I can't tell that it wasn't done using 'traditional' methods at all.

Can you remember exactly how you searched for "variable font"? I've just done a quick check and searching for 'variable' (without the quotes) - 463 total results - from the home page search box got me two fairly obvious results (that were not from this thread) on the first page of results. However, when searching for 'variable font' (again, without the quotes) - 7668 total results - I had to read down to the middle of the third page of results to see anything that looked like what I was looking for. And after searching for 'variable +font' (no quotes) - 7250 total results - I had to, again, go to the third page to see a relevant result. But, after entering 'variable font' (no quotes) into the search terms and ticking "Find results that contain… All of my search words" I got just 45 results, many of which were relevant. You might just need to slightly change how you are searching. I don't use variable fonts myself so I can't really comment on how they should be handled. However, from my perspective, I would say that if I can't trust the software to tell me something simple, such as which variant of the font I'm using, then I can't really trust that it will use that particular font properly at all. If the software can't use it fully and properly then I think it might be best if it doesn't let users use it at all. But maybe that's just me.

Variable fonts aren't yet handled by any of the Affinity apps, as far as I know:

Ah, sorry, the OS X version of Publisher looks like it works differently to the Windows version in this regard. (Seems like the OS X version is a little bit more 'integrated' with the operating system than the Windows version, or something like that.) You'll probably need an OS X user - or developer - to give you the answer there. In the meantime, what does the third icon from the left under the words Picture Frame in the Context Toolbar do? (It's the one that looks like a small grid of rectangles.) Does that let you change how the files are displayed?

As far as I know, Publisher doesn't have a "Save as Slideshow" mode - I've not noticed one - but you can display a PDF like a slideshow using the Full Screen Mode of Adobe Acrobat Reader. Or you can use any number of utilities - search the web, E.g. https://www.ilovepdf.com/pdf_to_powerpoint - that can convert a PDF into a slideshow (I've not used any so can't comment on their usefulness).

Welcome to the forum JF. The window that opens when you come to choose a photo to import is not part of Publisher but is a part of the operating system - in Windows you get a File Explorer window, and in OS X you get a Finder window. This means that you should be able to change what you see in that window using the normal methods for that operating system. The attached image shows the options for Windows 10. I cannot remember what you do for OS X but it will be similar.

Coding today is very cheap compared to back in the day. Instead of having to purchase something like Turbo Pascal/C, which you pretty much had to do in the olden days (if you wanted to do it legally), you can now get IDEs and SDKs for free from all kinds of places for just about any language you want. (I remember having to pay £99 for Acorn ANSI C back in the 90's.) Just type "coding for free" (without the quotes) into any search engine and you will get millions of results. As with Walt, I don't want to get into any kind of "religious war" on this but, since you're using Windows, try searching for "Visual Studio Community" and see what you can get. (Or maybe wait a week or so and download the new version that's - apparently - coming instead of having to upgrade almost immediately.) Also, depending on what you want to do, there may already be a free library that you can use so you could cut your own coding down quite a bit. (E.g. Searching nuget.org - a good place for libraries and extensions, all open source and free - for "text manipulation" shows 2691 packages.) Or, if you prefer Pascal/Delphi you could also try lazarus-ide.org Basically, what I'm trying to say is that the possibilities for free coding are practically endless.

To add a little to what fdelaneau said, beta software can also sometimes be in a larger package than then eventual commercial release because the developers haven't done any 'housekeeping' on it yet. (For example, old versions of stuff can be left hanging around just in case they're needed.) The last Designer beta package I have is around 360MB while the package for 1.6.5.123 was around 245MB so I imagine the commercial Publisher package could be similarly smaller, perhaps. The last download for the drivers of one of my graphics cards was over 560MB, so 366MB for an application with the functionality of Publisher doesn't sound too bad to me, in this day and age. At least we don't have to install it from floppy disks; that would take quite a bit longer than 26 minutes.

MickRose, using the Frame Text Ruler is certainly one way to be sure that you are actually editing the text in the selected text frame but I don't think that would be everyone's preference. Nice tip though. haakoo, setting insets for the text frame would mean that any vertical guides that have been set-up would no longer be as useful for aligning other layers with the text; in other words, there would be a gap. Probably not a general 'fix' but maybe something worth considering.

I understand where you're coming from with this. It can be difficult - or sometimes impossible, see attached GIF - to see if the insertion point - or caret, or cursor, or whatever it's called - is being displayed, which makes it difficult to know if pressing a key will add text or perform a function via keyboard short-cuts. Unfortunately I don't have a good suggestion for a 'fix' either. The best I could come up with was to change the frame in some way - different colour, dashed outline, or something - to tell the user which 'mode' they were in, but they don't seem like nice options. The mouse pointer does change but it sometimes shows the 'caret' pointer when you can't actually type anything into the frame - when a text frame is not selected for example - so it's not a good indication of what's going on.

I think it's worth noting that you need to already have an installation of the commercial release to be able to download the beta. This means that people can't try the beta - with the new functionality - without already owning Designer. (This isn't the same for Publisher as there is no commercial release yet, at time of writing.) I thought I'd say this in case people were thinking they could try the beta instead of a trial version of the commercial release. iamscotty, I don't really know what you mean by "can you expand the image/shape after applying it to the plane so it's an independent, workable shape". You can certainly edit the shape after it's been fitted to a plane but this might not be what you mean. See the crude attached GIF for some very basic examples of what's possible. I haven't used the Isometric features much myself so I don't know what the limitations are. The "Remove from Plane" function as suggested by Aammppaa certainly looks like it would be very useful.

Wow, some really amazing isometric work there. I have no idea if Designer can do what you would like it to do but maybe someone else can give you more information. One of the developers would be a lot more suited to answering this. Sorry I can't be of much more help on this but this level of work is way above my pay grade. Again though, fantastic work.

I think it would be nice to have a community gallery as mentioned above but I think one of the problems might be that of curation. Having a community-curated gallery could cause many problems: differences of appropriateness; clashing of egos; 'flooding'; etc. On the other hand, requiring the Serif people to curate a gallery is probably asking too much of them considering what they're already busy with. Invision - who make the forum software - have a Gallery App - https://invisioncommunity.com/features/content/ - which "Lets users create and manage their own albums, and determine how visible they are to the wider community" so that might be a road worth travelling down, perhaps. All-in-all, it sounds like a nice idea but I have my concerns about how this would actually work in practice.

Yeah, a lot of stuff to read in that thread, sorry. Having said that, it gives you some idea of the passion that some users have for the software and those new features. (If no-one cared there wouldn't be 26 pages of posts.) You should be able to pick out only the videos posted by Ben to get an idea of the new features without necessarily reading all of the comments and suggestions but there's still quite a bit of reading/scrolling to find them. (Try going to the thread and doing a search for ".mov" (without the quotes) within that thread only, see attached image.) I would say that making your suggestion - or asking a question - here rather than adding to the pre-beta thread would be best. You're generally more likely to get a response to a new thread than adding something to an old one. Also, the more specific you are, the more relevant the response(s) will be.

Welcome to the forum. One of the developers - Ben - added some great videos showing the new tools off before 1.7 came to beta. You can find them here: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/52300-sneak-peeks-for-17 Don't expect the UI to be the same as in the videos but you can get an idea of what's what.

You're welcome.

It's great to see stuff that has found its way into the real world, especially when it looks as good as this. Even though it's still in beta, this is more proof that Publisher is already good enough to create professional-looking publications. Lovely work.

Thanks SrPx. I would love to have made some kind of parody with zombies, or similar, in it but I just don't have the artistic skill. One of the lines that was dropped from the accompanying TV information film was "If your Grandmother, or any other member of the family, should die whilst in the shelter, put them outside but remember to tag them first for identification purposes." Shame that wasn't shown in the booklet. Smee Again, you might be interested in this podcast episode: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/atomic-tattoos/ Very interesting, and a bit scary too. Thanks gdenby. Yeah, probably not the most useful booklet that's ever been created. One sentence in it that gets me each time is, on page 13, where it talks about having a radio and batteries: "Keep any aerial pushed in". As if getting poked by your radio aerial is something you'd be most worried about during a nuclear holocaust/winter. I've just watched this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLGHRjLnfMk Near the end, the narrator says: "If the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had known what we know about civil defence, thousands of lives would have been saved." I don't really know what to say about that.

That worked a charm. Image now uploaded.

Here's a project that I've been working on - on-and-off, a couple of hours here and there - for a while now. It is a basic recreation - using Designer and Publisher - of a genuine UK Government booklet that was commissioned in 1976 for distribution if nuclear war broke out. It was on sale from 1980 but was to be distributed free to every household if things stated to look really bad. I've tried to be reasonably accurate in recreating it as best I can be bothered to but there are still some issues: * The booklet was manually typeset in 1976 so the actual typefaces used are probably not available in digital form. I've tried to get close but there are differences. * Where reasonable I have tried to keep the typography as it is in the original document, including the strange 'quirks' that don't seem to have a good reason for being there. (Almost every paragraph needed some manual tweaking.) * The colours are probably not accurate. I've been working from scanned documents of differing quality and don't have the original to hand (a quick check on eBay shows some originals going for up to £75). * The image on the front/back cover was created entirely in Designer but it's not a perfect facsimile. * All of the other images were taken from a scan and tidied up - with GIMP - to differing extents (usually very basic stuff). I simply don't have the skill or patience to recreate them with vectors, especially for a silly experiment like this. * Some things - weird layout, strangely positioned text, etc. - that bugged me in the original have been 'improved'. * I've added a disclaimer to remind the reader that they're not looking at the original document, just in case there was any confusion. While reading the booklet I recommend listening to the 12" Annihilation Remix of "Two Tribes" by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. The narration in the song includes phrases from the TV information film that accompanied this booklet, and some phrases that were in the original script but dropped from the film for 'decency purposes'. This took me way longer to do than I expected it to but it was a good learning exercise. I hope you like reading it. Know your warning sounds people! Note 1: To see it clearly, click on the image and zoom in. Note 2: The image quality has been deliberately reduced to make it less easy to use for nefarious purposes.