Ted North

@walt.farrell You asked : "Are you intentionally avoiding upgrading to the 1.9 (now 1.9.2, soon to be 1.10) release?" Yes, intentionally. On Feb 5 I've posted that I am "Unable to rollback from 1.9.0.932 to the previous version". I made an upgrade and worked on it for a while. When the bug in printing was found I attempted to rollback to the previous version but... the upgrade resulted in converting my very big file to a new version/format.Rollback failed and I huge amount of changes made to my afdesign file with new version was lost with catastrophic consequences to my project. So since then I am reluctant to make upgrades. At some point I obviously will have to but with all the precautions and archiving of all my stuff. But that was the first time in several years when Affinity let me down so brutally and caught me off guard.

I second this report. Dragging of symbols to the page works for a while but at some point it stops. Restarting AD and reopening the same file helps - dragging of symbols starts working. This effect is not reproducible but it happens repeatedly in unpredicted moments. AD 1.8.5.703 Win 10

By the way, why not to add a useful feature to Affinity software.. The moment AFDesigner and AFPhoto are going to make irreversible changes to user files to automatically make a backup copy of the files. That will make roll back possible in cases like this one. Or at least to make a loud suggestion to the user to make a backup copy manually. It will save us a lot of time and money.

I am not sure that printing is the only problem, just the opposite. it was just the first encountered. But it shows that this release 1.9 is not ready for production use and anybody who upgrades right now can expect much more problems along the way. So I prefer to rollback to the previous robust version 1.85. But the problem remained of how to rollback the file that was kind of "corrupted" by version 1.9. I partially solved it in the following way: - in version 1.9 I exported the whole file as .svg - I unistalled version 1.9 - I installed version 1.85 - I opened this .svg in version 1.85 and saved it as . afdesign file. It looked like it's resolved but it turned out that during export from .afdesign to svg all Artboard structure of original file was lost (each artboard was converted to a layer and during printing it's now impossible to define a particular "range" which defeats the whole point. Probably I will need to manually recreate all 23 artboards of my document and to copy all the contents into them. So this Affinity Designer upgrade (that was absolutely unnecessary for my purposes) resulted in at least a few of days of lost time. Bummer... Affinity products started to look to me more and more like Adobe products that I never upgraded earlier than 6 months after their release when a lot of bugs were already found and fixed.

Installed v. 1.9.0.932 Opened an existing ,afdesign file Made a lot of changes and saved it. On attempt to print AFDesigner immediately crashed Uninstalled v. 1.9.0.932 Attempted to open the same file and got an error message that the file can't be opened because it has some components created by a later version. Now it's impossible to use a good and clean previous version because the file was being already modified by the latest version and impossible to use the latest version because it crashes. This is a time sensitive project that that is stuck. Any suggestions on how to proceed before 1.9 is somehow fixed? Thanks.

I can confirm. My files created by the previous version of AFDesignher were printed with black background. What Steve Casey suggested (setting Model to Tiled AND Layers to Screen ) solves the problem. The actual cause of what happened is subject for research for your developers but till it is fixed this Steve's method is a good workarond for everybody who has this problem. Thank you, Steve!

I second that. We often have a set of several colors for our design and for each color we need several tints or shades. It would be great to be organize those swatches as a matrix with several lines. Each line will contain one color and all its shades. Working with such color matrix constructed of swatches will be much more efficient than with what we have today.

I guess what was suggested is to make a search by layer's name and I strongly support this idea. In addition to the quick search of the needed layer it will also give a designer an additional incentive to assign layers some meaningful names. I can imagine that implementation of this feature might not be extremely simple but in my view it is definitely worth the effort.