pdussart

Dan C, Thank you, but the problem seems to be elsewhere. I use Norton and all my drivers are up to date. I use a Logitech Pebble mouse, fed by rechargeable batteries. For whaterver reason, all my AA batteries seem too provide a too low voltage, they probably have aged, or something like that, no problem for years. I suppose the Bluetooth connection is becoming erratic, but I do not get warning message about this. No problem with the touchpad. I will try top quality non rechargeable batteries next week, and will use the touchpad in the mean time. Thanks any way. Regards, Philippe

Dan C, here two screen coîes Regards, Philippe

Dear, I use Affinity Photo 2.3.1 on a Windows 10 Dell portable (with all recent Windows updates) If I open Affinity, after clicking, Affinity freezes from 2 to 10 seconds, each time that the mouse is clicked. Other key, like ENTER or Keyboard Arrows have normal short response times. Same behaviour with other applications. If I leave Affinity, everything back to normal. Any advice ? Regards, Philippe

Dear all, Universities and Google publish regularly new image tools. The drawback is that code, when available is not easy to use. Here is a promising tool that encompasses HDR, denoising, fading colours, focus adjustments See https://bmild.github.io/rawnerf/index.html A state of the art Resizing Tool might be worth considering too. It looks like it goes beyond what we can do with Affinity, Topaz and others. May be a point for Release 2 ? Regards, Philippe

Dear all, I have made some time similar comments about IPTC and other metadata. Data entry requires to jump from tab to tabs. Multiple templates would help to manage different projects, from a data entry point of view. With templates, only required fields would be show, with an door to use optional fields Option to fill some fields with variables and formulas, e.g. filling the IPTC Text and Description with say "Photo 123", as the combination of the Text "Photo " and "123" being the EXIF file name. IPTC Author to be fill automatically with EXIF data. I am presently using the DAM tool called Daminion to do this job. Daminion for single user is about 100 USD/EUR/UKP, so in the same price category as Affinity products. Serif could find useful to look at this tool from a ease of use and fonctinality viewpoint. Serif may want to discuss a deal with the Daminion guys (or other equivalent tools in the same price category). Such integration could work for virtually all photo, video and PDF file formats. So useful for any Affinity Photo, Designer and Publish user. Regards, Philippe

I add this comparison of codecs https://res.cloudinary.com/cloudinary-marketing/image/upload/w_700,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto,dpr_2.0/Web_Assets/blog/Battle-of-the-Codecs_fnl.png

Dear Affinity support, According to DPreview and other information sources, it looks like an improved JPG comes to us (more compact files, visually better, etc) See https://www.dpreview.com/news/5829652105/jpeg-xl-image-format-promises-smaller-files-backwards-compatibility-and-more see also http://ds.jpeg.org/whitepapers/jpeg-xl-whitepaper.pdf For Affinity Designer, Photo and Publisher this new codec looks like bringing a lot of benefits for images, but also potentially reducing PDF sizes, etc. Browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Edge already give some support. Any comment/statement/thought from Serif about JPG XL ? Regards, Philippe

Dear, Regarding languages and spelling, I think that a "language of document" should be available, regardless of User Interface. Possibly at in the Edit/Preferences/Auto correct screen. The way I do work: 1) Affinity User Interface always in English (Edit/General) I prefer to use "native" UI as there are some times strange UI translations. 2) Most of my documents are 100% French. Here I would use Edit/Preferences/Auto correct "French" as default value for all documents. Presently I need to force upfront any new paragraph to French. Extra work. 3) I am also making multilingual documents. The most frequent mix is French/English/Dutch. These documents are either French with quotes in other languages, or complete paragraphs in other languages, or multilingual documents with translations side by side. Again Edit/Preferences/Auto correct "French" as default spelling would be a solution for me, with quotes/paragraph changed to other languages. Regards, Philippe

Dear all, References to XNview and other tools looks like metadata management is important for many of us. This does not make these tools real DAM tools as far as I am concerned. Limited search capabilities do not help. I would suggest Serif managment to look at Daminion. See https://daminion.net/feature-tour/daminion-server/ The free version can manage up to 15.000 pictures per database. Paid versions ar affordable as single user. There are ways to upgrade for teams and share files management through the cloud. This is a powerful tool that covers JPG but also PDF and many other formats. It is geared to document files, but also to retrieve them by various search facilities Bulk functions are very powerful Regards, Philippe

Dear all, As part, of the 1.9.1 Affinity Photo announcement, there is an updated list of camera and lenses. It is better than the Lensfun one as per Github. Some lenses widely sold like Sigma 24-70 zoom of the Art series are missing, etc. The present list is an improvement. I think that Serif should make clear where this new list comes from. The reference to Lensfun is misleading, as the Lensfun database is not updated for 2 years. This new list might be a license of the commercial PTlens list, which is "old" Lensfun + recent updates. The PT lens service is interesting, as you can get a lens profile of your lens (if not part of the data base), should you provide a series of pictures, as per instructions of PTlens maker. Serif/Affinity Photo could be clearer, provide some kind of single point of access to this topic (e.g. direct link from Affinity Photo through the Help or the Studio links) with explanations. The Help section should be updated end extended for clarity I mean not just a list of the lenses available, but also how it works and how to request a new lens to be added, etc Regards, Philippe

Dear, There are a lot of threads about missing lenses and cameras. Is this a surprise ? I do not think so. According to the Github Lensfun site, the last update is 2019-02-16 ! The guy who ran this Github site now runs a private business and sells updated lens databases Some lenses of the free Lensfun database were already missing two years ago, like half of the Sigma Art series, the best Zeiss series, etc. Affinity competes with other software companies. Some of them use an updated lenses list and refresh it regularly. Affinity Photo is an ambitious photo program, the present lens database is a weakness and helps people with an old kit. Metadata management and picture organization (DAM) are also weak. Hopefully release 2 with come with fully fledged solutions for these three points and be worth the investment. Regards, Philippe

Guys, I have to stick to PagePlus. Spelling is very hard to manage with Affinity Publisher. I want a simple thing: 1) the user interface is English or any other interface language supported by Affinity, regardless of the computer OS set-up. 2) Uncouple the spelling languages from the Affinity interface language; e.g.interface in English, spelling in French 3) Please provide: - a single command to define the spelling language for the whole document. This should be used as initial set-up or to overrule language settings of imported PDFs Note: PDF imports from Pageplus which are correct in French are not understood as such by Affinity and are shown as incorrect because English is used as default spelling language by Affinity. - a command to define the spelling language by page (right click on the Master page and the Page views - adjust the spelling language on the spread dialog) - a command to define the language by text block (right click) - it should be easy to manage multi-lingual documents and toggle spelling by page/blocks of text etc, in a WYSiWYG way 4) BUG ? if you change the spelling language in the Preferences/Auto-correct, whatever you do, it always go back to English and the change of spelling language does not occur. Note: the spelling Help explanations are not clear and do not seem to provide practical help for the spelling questions. Regards, Philippe

Dear all, My printing company is changing its recommended ICC profiles. I have to do some reprints. It was ISO coated V2 (ECI), it becomes PSO Coated v3. Can I "just" go back to the .afpub file and export it as with the new profile ? This would be a matter of seconds. Do I need to go back to each picture and do something ? Then replace existing pictures with new profiles ? This would be matter of hours or days for large documents ? By the way, I might have the same issue with old Pageplus X9 files that I need to reprint. Regards, Philippe

Joachim, Thank you. My layer name and the colour name are OK, with the _ underscore. But the channel name not (see the screen pictures). I have checked and rechecked my design and still get the problem with the automatic tool of the printing company. I will check with their staff,probably at cost. Regards, Philippe

Sir, In order to produce stickers, in am in touch with a German Publishing company. In order to get stickers cut around my design, a layer with the compulsory name "Cut_KC" must be created. I will be the path for the machines to cut around the design. The VolltonFarbe / Solid colour must be also called "Cut_KC" It seems that Affinity Photo (latest production version on Windows) gets rid of the underscore. So my PDF files are rejected by the printing company. It costs 80 EUR to ask this supplier to fix the problem,..... It seems that the Colour Channels are not properly named (no underscore) This might be the naming issue in the file generated by Affinity ? Please advise See attachments Regards, Philippe Colour_name_bug.afphoto Colour_name_bug_message.afphoto

Gabe, I am happy with UTF-8. Regarding metadata entry, I would prefer to enter key metadata info as a last step in Affinity. This would happen in the field. I would use a template with about 8 fields like Caption, Description, City, Country, Keywords, Author, Copyright notice, Usage terms. After such template set-up I just see the fields that I need, no less no more. It is also a way of not forgetting one of these fields. Juggling with 4 windows could be error prone and time consuming. Also an update in one go of the RAW and JPG files of the same shot would be useful. Back in the office, another team or myself are dealing with fine tuning of this matadata (like resolving keywords mispellings, keywords dictionnaries, translations and other metadata issues). Like Uwe, I am using Daminion to manage this second step. We have got 30,000+ RAW/JPG couples, I.e. 60,000 files managed that way so far. Regards, Philippe

Dear, I am a little bit puzzled by the new metadata management. It is anyway good news, I am waiting for this since day 1. IPTC data entry fields seem to be split in 4 windows: - File - IPTC (Image) - IPTC (contact) - Rights I would favour a single window, juggling from one to the other is not convenient. Most if not all other photo managers do so. (Adobe, Xnview, Irfanview, etc) Adding a template for the fields that matter to you is also an usual feature Not clear whether encoding is UTF-8 or similar, whether you can change the encoding, in order to read and store properly accented and special characters (French, German, Spanish, Arabic, etc) Is XML coming with the next beta release ? Regards, Philippe

Dear all, The help function of Affinity Photo regarding EPS and other export is confusing. I need to get a 100% vector based EPS file, starting from a JPG file. I assume the following EPS export process : File Export then the "More" section and use for Rasterize "Nothing" in order to get an 100% Vector EPS file ? Is "Nothing" the same as "100% Vector based" ? I have no way to check this. Please help Regards, Philippe

Dear all, IPTC is the driver, as it defines the metadata to be stored. (the WHAT) IIM was HOW ITPC defined the way of storing this metadata. XMP is a more recent way HOW to store metadata. XMP has progressively replaced IIM. XMP is flexible and enables also to store metadata from various sources like EXIF, Core ITPC but also user created fields. Some tools create two files for a single shot, say 123XX.JPG and 123XX.XMP On the other hand, JPG standards allow to store metadata directly within the JPG file. In this case 123XX.JPG only As far as Affinity Photo is concerned, if Serif chooses for a limited ITPC support (say a dozen of fields), an update of the JPG file would suffice without separate XMP file. If you go the DAM route, OK. I would not overload Affinity Photo with this. (step three for me) Here is a list of tools that are recognized by the ITPC organization, as per www.itpc.org Affinity Photo should get there in order to join the "professional" club, assuming this is the Serif's aim. ACDSee Pro 10 Adobe Photoshop CC 2017 Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC 2015.8 Daminion 4.6 DigiKam 5.0 ExifTool 10.46 FastPictureViewer Professional 1.9 FotoStation 8 Image Relay 5.0 Imatch 5.5 Photo Mechanic 5 Photo Supreme 3.3 PhotoGem 1.0 Portfolio 2.5.3 STOCKBOX PHOTO 5.40 WPMeta 1.3 XnViewMP 0.84 Regards, Philippe

Dear all, IPTC is an old well established standard, implemented in most image management tools (from freeware to expensive ones) IPTC was just implemented by Adobe in their products in the 90's, but the development of these standard started in the 70's. The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) was established by a group of news organisations including the Alliance Européenne des Agences de Presse, ANPA (now NAA), FIEJ (now WAN) and the North American News Agencies (a joint committee of Associated Press, Canadian Press and United Press International) to safeguard the telecommunications interests of the World’s Press. Since the late 1970’s IPTC’s activities have primarily focussed on developing and publishing Industry Standards for the exchange of news data of all common media types. EXIF is limited in its ability to describe pictures. ITPC standards coupled with XMP (a way to describe them in a sidecar file) are very useful. I am managing a 30,000+ pictures data base and using a subset of ITPC standards: Caption (text description), Picture taken date, Picture Update date, Keywords, Country, City, GPS location, Picture author, Copyright (rights owner), Copyright notice (text), Event Affinity Photo and Designer should be able to enter such ITPC data. Affinity Publisher should be able to register a wide set of PDF Properties. I mean just data entry for these 3 Affinity products It looks like Affinity Photo is using Lensfun for its lens correction. May be a business deal regarding metadat with Exiftool, XnView or Irfanview would help for providing a robust solution (Serif do not want to re-invent the wheel, ...) A DAM (digital asset management) is a different story. DAM is used e.g. to manage large sets of pictures, create folders of your pictures, select pictures, add further descriptions, etc. This is a complement, if you have very large quantities of pictures, if you a long term archiving need. Newspapers and museums use DAMs to extract a single picture out of millions in two clicks. This could become a fouth Affinity Persona. Personnaly, I see three separate tools in professional image management, rather than an integrated tool. Lightroom tries but is far from perfect. 1. A tool like Photomechanic to copy images from a camera, populate automatically some metadata, rename file names, etc 2. A tool like Affinity Photo for picture improvement (including appropriate picture descriptions through EXIF, ITPC, XML) 3. A DAM like Daminion to manage large quantities of pictures, with search facilities based on metadata Regards, Philippe

Dear All, I have no way to display control characters of PDF files, so I cannot say whether Scribus writes a PDF file correctly or not (see above) But I have another example of conversion issues with the Word -> PDF -> Publisher process. 1) Create a page with Microsoft Word (bought Jan 2019, new PC on Windows 10) Set Word so that all control characters are shown 2) Save Word as PDF (with option rasterize if not embedded) or PDF/A Results in Affinity look the same. Both tested. 3) Open PDF in Publisher 247 with option "Group Lines in text frame" - the result is "strange" Publisher creates Text Frames that do not seem consistant with Word control characters. An additional logic seem to take place. - e.g. in some cases (after 10 spaces) a new frame is created, regardless of a character paragraph end In this case, I think that a new frame should not be created by Publisher after a certain amount of spaces, but after a paragraph end. I would also suggest to add a third option when opening PDF files : "Convert blocks of text" in a "structured" set of frames. Ideally, categories of blocks would be: Heading - Core text (in one or more columns) - Footer This would be an useful option for publishing simple documents as books or magazines containing "structured" pages of text. Alternatively, a third option would be "For each page, put all text in a single Text Frame, while respecting the original visual position as per PDF display by Acrobat Reader. Also, a simple tool to merge Text Frames would be welcome: - CTRL+ right click on frames to select, then merge. - Option 1: Keep the the X Y positions of the text as per PDF display by Acrobat Reader. - Option 2: Wrap text in the merged frame. 2 PDF files in attachment + 5 screen shots. Note: check the sequence of file names Regards, Philippe Publisher PDF import Text Frames Example A.pdf Publisher PDF import Text Frames Example B.pdf

Dear all, I read different things about "soft hyphen" etc. I have no clue about what this is. I have used this version of Scribus and the other tools mentioned without any issue with my German printers for PDF-X3 documents. About 20 magazines and four books. I even took the risk of using Publisher 145 for printing a book. It worked fine ! (my old PC was windows 8.1 at the time - I got a new PC with windows 10 in January) As far as I am concerned, I just use the hyphen that shows on my keyboard. No Alt+ combination or whatever "clever". Note: Same issue with Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer I can only conclude that there is a "glitch" somewhere with Affinity tools. Note 2: I am using common fonts like Arial, Times New Roman, Helvetica and Verdana. Nothing fancy. Regards, Philippe

Dear, If I open a PDF file with Affinity 249 on Windows 10, in some cases, - hyphen are disappearing with Affinity, while this issue does nots exists with Adobe Reader, Microsoft Word, Edge, Scribus, etc I think that during the open process, the character before the hyphen gets transformed into some combination with the previous character. See input PDF file, description of findings + screens and .AFPUB files in attachement Regards, Philippe Affinity issue Open PDF.afpub Affinity issue Open PDF.pdf mania201962p04.pdf

Walt, Thank you. I was assuming that some kind of global setting was taking place through the Preferrence/ Autocorrect setting. So I suppose that this screen is "just" to be used to Add/Modify spelling check/replacement definitions. I am still a little bit confused: within Text/Text styles you can define language/hyphenation settings either through Character or Paragraph style settings but on the Studio you can only use the Character settings, NOT the Paragraph ones to manage language, etc Regards, Philippe

Dear, I think spelling check does not work properly with languages other than English (UK). I am using Affinity 249, with Windows 10. I use primarily French and English dictonaries as available through standard Microsoft set-up. I am planning to add Dutch and German, as I produce pages in these four languages. Note: As far as the user interface is concerned, I plan to use only the native English version of Affinity, regardless of the language used in my pages/printouts. Regarding spelling check, if you select a language in the Preference/Auto correct screen, results vary depending on languages selected (see below). By that I mean that Affinity finds some lists of wrong spellings (left column) and correct spelling (rightcolums) . With French, at the top of this list I see: échaper (left column - wrong spelling) / échapper (right columns - OK) and so on With German, I see first änlich / ähnlich With Portuguese, I see nothing In French, If I spell a word wrong (a word as existing on the Affinity list), whatever you do, the checker always underlines the text in red (all wrong). If you go back to Preference/Auto correct, it shows English. Conclusions: 1) it seems that there is a list of 7 languages (in this "strange - non alphabetical" order: German, English (UK), English (US), Spanish (Spain), French (France), Italian, Portuguese (Brazil) 2) Four word llists seem good enough for tests (English (2) , French, German). Some are incredibly short and useless (Spanish, Italian). Portuguesse is empty and useless) 3) it seems that there is no way to use the spelling check for any language but English(UK). If you select another language, Affinity goes back to English. 4) I am not keen to load myself dictionaries, as this is prone to mistakes. Standard sets should be provided by Affinity to start with the tests of spelling check abilities (the 7 languages mentioned above ?) 4) It would be wise to add some warnings/explanation as part of the first screen describing the beta (not for production, etc) Regards, Philippe