A for Design

True. That's a very professional attitude btw. I'm very pleased with the serious an quick follow-ups. Something I rarely experience elsewhere. My compliments.

Thanks dor the extensive research. Please note, that I picked a random pdf which just happens to be made by Sketch. It was the first pdf I tried, so I thought it would be the same for any pdf-file. It's not very likely many people would try to import a pdf from Sketch. Today I tried another pdf with the same font, this time made exported from InDesign CS 6 and it worked perfectly. Also the result of the import was much cleaner. The pdf from Sketch was a bit of a mess, with strangely oversized text-frames and hard to select items. The converted InDesign pdf was very VERY clean and easy to edit. It only had some issues with texts with applied letter-spacing.

That's quite bizarre. Turning them off (when possible) is no big deal to me. I didn't expect it would be that hard / impossible to fix.

Here's the original pdf. It was created by the export function of Sketch v51.3 tablet_768 Pagina - De vereniging.pdf

I did, you stated IDML support should be desirable on which I agree. To be succesful though this propably isn't enough. I disagree on your focus on solely be able to deliver a good pdf. This will only be sufficient for individuals / freelancers who don't cooperate with others. For businesses it will be very important to easily adopt / transition to another worflow. Atm the ability to import AND export to an inter-exchangeable format is essential. Layout-software is relatively complex and targeted at a (more) professional market, therefor I think the needs of that market can't be ignored. I would love to see Affinity Publisher succeed. It would be a shame if all the effort that went into development would end in a discontinued application. True and that's a big reason why Affinity Publisher will have a harder time to succeed then Adobe did at the time. Oh wait... there are more big issues...: Adobe products are adopted by individuals at large scale. Students learn Adobe at school (without alternatives) For them Adobe is super cheap, so most will not look further. It costs time to master layout-software, so it has to be worth the investment.

This is just plain silly. Affinity Publisher is doomed if it does not at least support a flawless import/export of .idml files. If you want to be a serious player in the graphic industry, you just can't ignore the biggest player in the market. There will be at least a long transistion time before Publisher will be picked up. Dig a bit deeper in the history of InDesign and you'll know why. At the time InDesign was introduced, QuarkXpress was the industry standard. Yes, Adobe was well known, but their former layout application(FrameWork) was mediocre at best. It took Adobe a lot of effort and many years and tricks to get users to use InDesign. Adobe was in a waaaay better position to achieve this then Affinity is now and here's why: Quark had been ignoring user's needs for years and were very arrogant towards them. Apple forced it's users towards OSX, which wasn't compatible with OS 9 at all. There was a crappy transition period, but in the end every application needed to be replaced anyway QuarkXpress was extrmely late introducing their first version compatible with OSX (v5). They didn't even bother to add significant new features. They did bother to charge the full update price, which was very high at the time (say, the prce of the entire Creative Suite) Adobe did have a good reputation and allready Illustrator and Photoshop were the industry standards. Well.... there was heavy competition for Illustrator, namely Freehand, which Adobe took over InDesign was added tot the Creative Suit without any additional cost. As allmost every company in the graphic industry allready used Ps and Ill, it was technically a freeby. Remember ... it took QuarkXpress a few years to release it's first version for OSX (5.0) and it bugged like hell until 5.1.x came to market. For which they charged another huge amount of money. Still... it took Adobe 4 versions of InDesign (CS2) to overthrow the former reign QuarkXpress. At the time, InDesign CS2 was in allmost every part of it superior to QuarkXpress. Oh and you know what .... InDesign CS 2 was the first version with a flawless import of QuarkXpress documents. Not a coïncidence. Please don't make the same mistake as Adobe and support .idml (and .indd) as soon and as flawless as possible. This is essential for success. Btw, the ability to open pdf-files is need, but this is also far from flawless. Even if it was perfect, you'd still be missing paragraph, character and object styles chained textframes, layout pages etc.

When you open a pdf-file in Publisher which contains ligatures, they render incorrect. The ligatures are not recognized and/or displayed correctly. Also they are not replaced with/edditable as the original letter combination. For example: original letter combination of liguature -> lettercombination shown in Affinity Publisher 'tf' -> 'Ō' 'ti' -> 'Ï ' or 'ti' -> 'Ó' 'tt' -> 'R ' The real characters could not be copied in this post, but this is how they look.

Sure. You'll have to set the thickness to 0% and the hideous arrow looks a lot more appealing. You can still use the stroke weight to set the thickness of the arrow.

How do you make an arrow with a dashed line segment? I tried this, but the arrowhead also gets dashed, resulting in a big mess. Btw. quite a strange way to set up arrows. The options to style the arrow are quite good, but it's very non-intuitive.

+1

I was wondering if this feature is still coming and when. Today I received an e-mail about the latest 1.6 update and I was hoping this was finally implemented. This is the first thing I check in every update. Alas, no preview. I really love the software, but I just can't use it yet without this.. It's going back on the shell until the next update.

The lack of an option to preview the output quality is THE main reason I'm still using Photoshop today. I bought Affinity Photo because I love many features of it. Not being able to judge the image quality before saving renders the whole app allmost useless for me. A lot of my work is internet related. Getting the best compression / quality ratio is essential in this field. Especially since screens with high pixel density are pretty much mainstream.