Kal

Wait, unless I'm missing something, this doesn't make sense… Why doesn't resizing the panel above (in this example, Swatches) just move the other panels up? The ordering of panels shouldn't lock you out of the ability to customise your workspace. If it's 'by design', then I think your designers need to sit down and rethink how this works.

Sounds like a decent app, but like many of the other similar suggestions, it doesn't appear to do what the OP was asking for related to pre-press. Checking spot-colour separations seems to be the feature most lacking in these apps. Check out the full conversation for some options.

There's a project for a keen bean. Not sure you could charge any money for it though, depending on Ghostscript's licensing. Do we need Acrobat Pro to see the separate layers? 😝

That's brilliant. Yes, not nearly as convenient as a desktop app that shows all the seps as a bunch of layers you can selectively turn off and on, but a great option for all us starving artists. Thanks again for testing and reporting back. I'm getting the 'Sorry, you cannot add any more reactions today' forum alert, so here, I'll award you with another of these… Most Helpful Comment of the Month™️ award… 😄 🏆 Ah, okay. I didn't see any pricing on their website, which did lead me to wonder. 😂 😐 😭

Hey, not bad for a free tool! Thanks for testing!! No worries! Yes, I'd be willing to pay for something like that too. Of course, we'd all be even happier if Affinity could roll that sort of functionality into their own apps.

Like others, I long used Acrobat Pro (good old 32 bit CS6) for checking spot colour separations before sending off that print-ready PDF. I'd check on-screen that each of the spots was on a separate plate and knocking out or overprinting as expected. The three apps listed here are just absurdly expensive when that's all you need to do: Adobe Acrobat Pro 2020: US$449 + tax Callas pdfToolbox: €500.00 + tax Enfocus PitStop Pro: €735 + tax So I went searching. This is what I found: A command-line tool called Ghostscript. Someone on Stack Overflow asked about extracting CMYK and spot separations from PDF with Ghostscript. The answer included a one-liner for generating all separations. (Installing on a Mac involves building from source, and I haven't gone to the trouble at this stage. If someone else does try it, perhaps they can report back here.) An app on the Mac App Store called ExtractPDFSpotColor. This one I did try, and I'm now waiting for Apple to refund me the $30 or so. It simply doesn't do what it says on the tin. It failed to find spots in one file, and when it did find spots in another, it crashed as soon as I tried to export them. An online demo of a JavaScript-based SDK called PDFTRON Webviewer. This isn't really a standalone product; it's something developers can license for their own apps. But by golly, the demo is pretty darn useful! It finds all the spots and lists them (alongside the CMYK inks) with checkboxes that you can turn off and on, just like Acrobat Pro. And it runs in a web browser. So I'm not sure what makes this feature so elusive for all the devs of those cheap PDF utilities out there.

🏆 @Lagarto, your comment should be pinned to the top of the forums permanently and turned into an official tutorial. Or better still, Affinity devs could fix this whole mess!

Yes, reminds me of the days of needing to support Internet Explorer 6 as a front-end web developer. My face regularly looked like your profile pic back then. And yes, a great shame that Affinity didn't get this one thing right—it was kind of important.

Colour swatches are the singly most ill-conceived, poorly designed aspect of the Affinity software suite. Working with spot colours is an absolute nightmare (and I don't use those terms lightly.) That's one thing Adobe got right, and something the Affinity devs would have done well to replicate, rather than trying to get clever and do their own thing. Gosh I hope version 2 starts to take this seriously.

@JGD, try rereading my comment with your irony detector turned on! My point exactly. I was clearly too subtle for some readers, so here's my irony-free summary… I find it concerning that Affinity published that article. The title implies that Separated Mode works just fine, offering increased efficiency. The FAQ section titled 'Separated Mode window management tips' appears to be their response to user frustration, which doesn't address our concerns at all. It leads me to think that fixes to Separated Mode aren't coming soon, if ever, and that's disheartening.

According to Affinity 'this is intentional behavior'. See this comment on another discussion. They gave no explanation as to the logic the program uses to determine the actual 'distance from text', nor Affinity's rationale for making it behave this way. IMO, this makes the text wrap feature virtually useless when we don't wish to snap to a baseline grid.

Excuse my bluntness, but this isn't a very helpful response. It doesn't help us understand what logic the program uses to determine the actual 'distance from text', nor Affinity's rationale for making it behave this way. Could someone from Affinity please explain how it is supposed to work so we can understand this unusual behaviour? Background: I'm an InDesign user since version 1, and Quark Xpress user before that. When I turn off baseline grid snapping, I expect text wrap to do exactly what I tell it to do—set text the distance I specify from the object, not jump to some imaginary grid based on leading or something else.

If I were creating pixelated icons for a retro UI, yes, I'd want to see the effect while I work. But as I explained earlier in the thread, my typical use case is very different… In this instance, it's about tailoring the artwork to different output media. That should be an export function, not something I have to hard-code into the design file.

Matt, this is good news—thank you! Many of us are requesting an even simpler implementation, where we can just set the antialiasing for the whole document at export time. I've wanted to do this many times, whereas I've rarely (if ever) needed to apply it selectively to individual objects. Not saying others won't value the highly flexible feature that you're adding… I'd just love to see this as a simple off/on feature at export. Any chance we can have this too?

I just discovered this too. It's a nice plugin, and free. Since it's very easy to copy and paste an object from Designer to Illustrator, it's one of the most efficient methods. The only thing you have to be careful of, is if you have a stroke on your object, it may come into Illustrator as two separate objects, and even though they're aligned, one atop the other, the Patharea Filter plugin will give you the total area of both objects if they're both selected—in other words, your result will be twice what you want. Easy to fix if you're aware of it. Download from here. Double-click the downloaded archive, drag the 'PathArea (CS6).aip' file to Illustrator's Plug-ins folder, and launch Illustrator. The command appears under: Object > Filters > Path area.