Kal

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.

Designer needs an Info panel. In addition to displaying the area of a closed shape (which I agree would be very useful), it could (among other things) display the length of a line as its being drawn (using the Pen tool in Line Mode—something Affinity Photo already does).

You might want to add your support to the area of a shape feature request.

I'm a bit late to the party here, but as @AbePralle said, it's the Info panel you need to be looking at, not the Transform panel. If you click and drag (with the pen tool in Line Mode), it shows you the length (D) in realtime. I can confirm it works beautifully. If only Designer had an Info panel!!

I find myself wanting to do this sort of thing every so often, and wondered if there was a way in Designer. In Illustrator, I would use Pathfinder > Outline. Then Select All, deselect the bits I want to keep, Delete. However Designer's 'Geometry' commands don't include an Outline option. Ideally what we want is something like Designer's Rasterise & Trim option but without the Rasterise bit! That would be a killer feature methinks.

No worries. My first few comments were confusing with all those edits. The truth is, I don't use the Affinity apps regularly enough to remember all the little gotchas, so they tend to get me all over again. 😄 I did find this thread from 2017, where the OP's very first suggestion was the 'ability to convert swatches from and to normal/global/spot'. I agreed and added my own suggestions: So yep, totally agree with you that swatches need a rethink. There are quite a few things which frustrate me about the Affinity apps, but working with global swatches is just one of those essential features for professionals, and they really dropped the ball on it. If you're choosing your colours on-screen (and your display is beautifully calibrated of course), yes, you can use Lab and get reasonable results with different output methods, provided you use colour management every step of the way. I say 'reasonable', because the final CMYK separations will be somewhat unpredictable. There have been many times where I've wanted a process colour to have a solid component (say 100% cyan), so that small details will look sharp when printed (and not a hazy bunch of dots). Call me old-school, but I like having that level of control. 🙂 A less technical form of colour management is to choose colours according to the method of final output. So for full-colour offset printing, the ideal would be a big CMYK swatch book that was printed by your printer. Since that's generally not available, the next best thing is one of Pantone's CMYK guides. I like the Pantone Color Bridge guide, because it gives me a side-by-side comparison of a spot and its best CMYK equivalent (as determined by Pantone). Will the colours shift slightly between different offset printers? Potentially, but in my experience, most professional printers will deliver a solid result with the 'dumb' Pantone CMYK defaults. (The not-so-professional printers probably won't respect your tagged files anyway. 😉) Will the colour shift on the client's desktop inkjet? Yes of course. If that's important to them, and they know how to work with colour profiles, by all means, use Lab (or even RGB) with tagged files. Will spots print any differently? No, since they are mixed by the printer. No single colour workflow is perfect, but for professional printing, I still reckon it's hard to beat. (You can, and should, still have tagged RGB photos in your PDF artwork of course.)

Yes, that's basically what I've always done with Illustrator and InDesign. Not so easy in Designer, as I tried to explain, because you can't change a process swatch into a spot. That's not my issue—I've not had trouble maintaining colour-consistency between Adobe and Affinity apps. The issue is Affinity's lack of flexibility when working with colour swatches. I'll explain in more detail… Some years ago Pantone switched their Pantone Solid definitions from CMYK to Lab. They did this to achieve better colour accuracy on screen when dealing with spot colours. That's fine and dandy for people who choose spot colours on screen—I get why they did it. But I didn't like it because it means you need to use a different colour library depending on your output (or accept some unpredictable CMYK seps). That just adds complexity and opportunity for errors, particularly with something like a logo which is used everywhere. I'd rather use just one library for print work, and I prefer CMYK because it gives you more control over process printing, especially when you want a solid ink in there for sharpness and legibility. (And the only downside is that your spot colours look a little washed out when previewed on screen.) For this reason I switched to the Pantone Color Bridge library, which has all the same colours as the Pantone Solid library, but defined as CMYK. Then, I'd just set each swatch to a spot in Illustrator. Since InDesign can still output a spot as CMYK, it means you can leave that decision to export time—much like an RGB workflow with photos. This workflow has served me very well over the years. It would work with Affinity apps too if they allowed you to change a a process swatch into a spot. And that's where it all breaks down. The Pantone Color Bridge library swatches are not spots, and unless I'm mistaken, there's no way to change them into spots because they've already been defined. The only way I've been able to achieve a similar result in Affinity apps is to recreate each swatch from scratch (and tick the Spot checkbox). This is painful though because there is no way to search for Pantone swatches in the 'Add Global Colour' window—you have to find them by eye, hovering over the tiny swatches until you find the one you want! If you do know an easier way, I'm all ears.

Thanks for the super quick reply @Mike W, so quick in fact that I was editing my comment just as you posted. Yes, I made a mistake with the colours not actually being spots in Designer. I'm still not sure how to easily grab a colour from one of the Pantone libraries and add it to the document colour palette as a global spot. Any tips would be much appreciated! 🙂 Edit: Ah, I see what the problem is in my case. I'm using the Color Bridge Coated library because I want the logo colours defined as CMYK for print work. With Adobe, this workflow worked well and gave me the best of both worlds… I could use the one colour library for everything and predictably export to process or spot separations depending on the job. But with Affinity (as I understand it) a spot colour can only be defined when you create a new swatch, so there's actually no way to take a swatch from the Color Bridge Coated library and make it a spot. Sigh. I guess I'm going to have to reconsider this whole workflow for Affinity.

Yes, as I've just discovered. I searched the forum, and your comment was the only one that I found on this issue. (Edit: I since found this post.) So there goes a 25 year workflow for working with spot colour logos I guess. 😕 Anyone know what the Affinity way to handle this is? Saving the EPS out to a Designer file didn't fix it. I tried manually changing the colours to the Pantone spots—but the logo is still CMYK in the exported PDF. Placing a Designer file works if you manually recreate the swatches as spots (my first attempt didn't work as I used the 'Add current fill to palette' button, which preserves the Pantone name but doesn't preserve it as a spot was working from the Color Bridge Coated library.) Working with spots in Affinity sure is painful!!

A heads-up everyone… Affinity has heard our cries! They have released an article, ironically titled 'Increase your efficiency with Affinity’s Separated Mode'. Therein, they extol two of the benefits of floating panels: working with multiple displays (big focus on this), and seeing two views of the same document side-by-side. At the bottom is a kind of FAQ section titled 'Separated Mode window management tips', which starts by addressing some potential confusion with the full-screen view in macOS. But they finally get to the point here… They left out a few minor details in those instructions so I'll flesh it out for everyone: Hold down the Option key and double-click any corner of the first window. Click Command-Backtick/Tilde (`~) to reveal the second window (which will have been completely obscured in step 1). Hold down the Option key and double-click any corner of the second window. Drag the left edge of the second window to the centre of the screen. Click Command-Backtick/Tilde (`~) to switch back to the first window (which will have its right edge obscured by the second window). If the right edge of the first window is obscured by the Studio panels, press Commmand-Shift-H to hide the Studio panels (or the Tab key to hide the entire UI). Drag the right edge of the first window to the centre of the screen, until it snaps to the edge of the second window. Select the second window and drag its right edge to where you estimate the Studio panels won't obscure it. If the top edges of either window are obscured by the Toolbar, press Command-Option-T to hide the Toolbar (or the Tab key to hide the entire UI). Select the first window and drag its top edge down to where you estimate the Toolbar won't obscure it. Select the second window and drag its top edge down until it snaps to the top of the first window. Restore the visibility of the Toolbar and Studio Panels with the same shortcuts you used to hide them. If parts of your windows are still obscured by parts of the UI, repeat the above steps or tweak as required. So there you have it folks, the official response from Affinity on the recommended way to view two windows side-by-side! I hope that's cleared it up for everyone. 🙂

Fair enough. If I'm doing colour correction, I've always just switched to a neutral grey desktop. Only takes a few seconds. Some people like being able to switch away by clicking on the desktop or another window, so that's a matter of personal preference I think. (I usually Command-Tab to switch apps these days, but sometimes it's nice to switch between apps by clicking their windows.) Haha. Okay, we're probably the same vintage then. 🙂 Well on that we certainly agree. It's my main frustration with Affinity's 'Separated Mode' and the reason I don't use it, despite my dislike for full-screen, tabbed interfaces.

If the whole app is contained within a frame, then it's not what most of us are asking for here. Ever since MultiFinder appeared on the Mac in 1987, the whole point was that you could run multiple apps side by side and see both windows at the same time. With further improvements over the years came things like drag and drop between apps. You lose some of those benefits when an app takes up the whole screen, so you know… some of us old-timers still prefer the old multi-window approach. If seeing your desktop is a distraction, maybe you just need to clean it up…? 😉

Are you sure you're using the same colour profiles when comparing conversions from app to app? If, for example, I use sRGB and FOGRA39 in both Designer and Illustrator, I get consistent conversions (aside from a bit of rounding). I beg to differ. For photos, sure. But for something like print logos, I never switched to an RGB (or even a Lab) workflow. When Pantone switched their Pantone Solid definitions over to Lab some years ago, I started using the Pantone Color Bridge library instead. Why? Because I'd much rather know and control what CMYK breakdown I'm getting for print, especially when I need a solid process ink in there for sharpness and legibility. Call me old school, but that level of control works for me, and I reckon I get less surprises that way.

😃😃 Great news! Will it be rolled out to Designer and Publisher at the same time?