Kal

Apparently not.

I second this feature request. Designer allows you to edit pixel artwork in situ (which is great), but the lack of an info panel makes me feel like I'm flying in the dark. @gurudon: What you can do is grab the eyedropper icon from the Swatches or Colour panel and drag it over your artwork. Not as convenient as an ever-visible info panel, but useful sometimes.

Nope. I guess when the devs closed this bug report as 'by design', they really meant it. Affinity has a pretty 'unique' idea of what constitutes good UX design at times. 😕

I hear you. Developing software is hard, and I have to assume the developers are doing their best. But I too feel so frustrated by this software sometimes. It was a hugely ambitious task, to create new software from the ground up to compete with (or even improve upon) Adobe's very mature (and noticeably ageing) product offering. It's like they got 90% of the way there! But it's that 10% which can end up costing you hours of time and frustration, hey. I still recommend Affinity's apps to those who are looking to escape from Adobe… but I do have a love-hate relationship with the apps for sure. 😕

4 years later and Designer (version 1.8.3) still has this bug. See this thread.

This happens in Designer as well.

With text sizing, both the shortcut and the menu commands work as expected. Although I intensely dislike that Publisher changes the increment by a factor of 10 when you cross the 10 point threshold. (Above 10 points gives you a 1 point standard increment, while 10 or less gives you a 0.1 point increment.) This is a classic example of when software oversteps the line in trying to make 'helpful' assumptions better left to the user. I want complete control over these kinds of settings (like I have in InDesign). I guess this is the approach Affinity has taken to give us a bare-bones preference pane.

Creating a custom bullet looks easy in that video. In practice (at least on my system), it's a freaking nightmare. I click in that text field, and hit delete (like he does in the video), but mostly I just end up deleting all the selected text in the document. Occasionally the active cursor/selection will stay in that text field, but more often than not it jumps back into the text. Another bug I guess.

Yep, pretty much the same result for me on macOS (comparing Option-Up to Command-Option-Up). The so-called 'precise' option is ever so slightly less, but both are a massive adjustment. Curiously, if I choose 'Paragraph Leading > Decrease' from the menu, it moves about half as much as using the shortcut! Not sure I've ever seen a menu command with a listed shortcut behave completely differently to the shortcut itself—in any Mac program ever. Seriously strange.

Yep. Well, the truth is, you shouldn't have to waste your time doing backflips and contortions to try and get basic window management in a Mac app. (Affinity, are you listening?)

Well that's me as well. If you've given up, I can only assume Keyboard Maestro wasn't enough to make this workable.

I want to add my support for this. My most common use case is to export raster print versions of a logo. For logos (and similar hard-edged graphics) antialiasing just makes them print with a fuzzy edge, so I always export high-res raster logos with no antialiasing. This is easy to do with Adobe software, but I've yet to find a simple way to accomplish the same thing with Affinity software. Adjusting a 'coverage map' graph on individual objects is crazy complexity for replacing such a simple feature, and it didn't work predictably for me anyway. Please, can we just have an antialiasing check box in the export settings?

Seconded. It's great that you can set a global color swatch to overprint, but sometimes you need more granular control than that. In Illustrator you can set individual objects to overprint using the Attributes panel, and you can target just the fill or the stroke.

It's great that you can set a global color swatch to overprint, but sometimes you need more granular control than that. In Illustrator you can set individual objects to overprint using the Attributes panel, and you can target just the fill or the stroke.

Seconded. It should also be mentioned that this happens even when 'Show in both panels' is not ticked in the paragraph style. So Publisher is performing this action contrary to its own user guide which states: PS. How can Garrett get this thread moved to 'Feature Requests & Suggestions > Feedback for Affinity Publisher on Desktop'? He asked if the moderators would do that previously, but is there something more he needs to do? Edit: I have done as summersara suggested below.

I'm going to have to do the same if my commercial Hyperlinker script needs any future updates or bug fixes, as CS6 will die with macOS Catalina. I don't do big typesetting jobs these days, so Publisher hopefully meets my needs now (usability frustrations aside).

Okay I didn't realise. I never moved off CS6—refused the subscription-only ransomware.

And therein lies the problem. Text styles in Publisher are confusing to understand and cumbersome to use—and much of that seems to stem from this totally unnecessary feature that allows you to use a paragraph style as a character style. Granted, Publisher does some things better than InDesign. For example, the 'Sum space before and after' option is easy to overlook, but it's such an inspired feature! It's like collapsable margins in CSS—something I'd wished I could have in InDesign CS6. But when it comes to simply managing and applying these styles, Publisher gets funky at the expense of usability. The fact that we're having such a long discussion on this, which is now delving into the nuances of 'Base' style inheritance, tells me something is very wrong. We shouldn't have to wrap our heads around this stuff. We should be able to apply a paragraph style, choosing to either keep or strip character-level overrides, and the app should do exactly that.

Right. In InDesign, you need to hold down Option while clicking on a style in order to clear any overrides. As a long-time InDesign user, I can confirm that it's an uncomfortable adjustment… but not for the reason you gave. I can't speak for the workflow of others, but one of the very first things I do with any sizeable document is to convert meaningful character formatting (italics for publication names, emphasis, etc) into character styles for two good reasons: To lock them in and avoid losing them. This isn't just about accidental removal—it's about removing all other nasty artefacts from the client's text, while not losing the important stuff! For consistency and the ability to change formatting later if required—basically the same reasons you use any text styles. So in practice, it's actually pretty rare that I want to apply a style and NOT remove overrides. It's also pretty rare that I want to remove all the character styles (once they're applied), and the main reason I find myself wanting to do it in Publisher is because Publisher is applying these sodding "Heading 1 + Heading 1" duplicate paragraph-cum-character styles all over the place! I think I'm starting to confuse myself even as I try to understand and work with Publisher. So I agree with you here… InDesign really does get text styles right… from separate panels for paragraph and character styles, to the much simpler way they work. I think Affinity would have been far better served to keep it simpler and just imitate the behaviour of InDesign in this regard.

Hear, hear!!

The big problems start when you want to change the paragraph style. Now you have two conflicting styles applied—one as a paragraph style, and one as a character style. This is really driving me nuts now. I think the feature is a huge mistake.

Yeah, good point about pixel selection. I guess pixel selections are, in reality, a kind of artwork in themselves, and it's common to perform various (and in my vocabulary, destructive) actions on them (adding, expanding, feathering, etc). I just checked, and Photoshop does indeed include pixel selections in the undo/redo stack. I think I intuitively knew this, but didn't think about it in the context of this discussion. Yes, indeed. I hadn't really considered that either. The CS3 behaviour I mentioned before, if I remember correctly, just included every little thing in there, which really was the stuff of nightmares. Affinity's approach seems more considered at least.

I agree, it is disconcerting. If you're someone who just likes to work 'clean' (to avoid the unexpected), you learn to take notice of those potentially pesky '+' symbols in the styles panel. I suspect that the end result is exactly the same, even if there's some murky code lurking beneath the surface. That still bothers me. I was really looking forward to Beta testing Publisher when I had the chance. But as it turned out, I didn't delve in deep enough… only found time to scratch the surface, after which I raved about it. It's when you start using it for production that you start to bump up against these kinds of frustrations. My feedback on this feature (of being able to use paragraph and character styles interchangeably) would have been: interesting concept, but probably a solution looking for a problem—and one that complicates the things that are really important, like we've seen here. Guess how many times, in my 20 years of using InDesign, I wished that I could double-up and use a paragraph style as a character style? (Hint: somewhere between -1 and 1.) What I have occasionally wished I could do was apply multiple paragraph styles to the same paragraph, like you can with CSS. This would create its own set of headaches though, so the hierarchical approach (having one style based on another) is probably the best solution. But I digress. My feature request for Affinity would be this… Change the behaviour of the 'Apply [Style] to Paragraphs and Clear Character Styles' command so that it applies only the paragraph style as a paragraph style, and removes everything else. If you could do this by simply Option-Clicking on the style name (the way it works in InDesign) that would be even better. (Edited: That's how to remove overrides in InDesign, not character styles.)

Well I learnt something new. Thanks Walt! If you'd asked for clarification on how I defined 'destructive', you might have found a percentage of agreement. I meant any action that alters the artwork, and that would certainly include moving or reordering layers/objects. Selecting or deselecting an object alters nothing. Moving an object alters it. Choose a different word if you like, but now, hopefully, we're at least talking about the same thing. That's the way Affinity seems to think… Let's add another panel feature or 'Manager' window to fix a problem that never existed before. Look, these kinds of apps weren't invented yesterday. There's no need to reinvent the wheel. I've used design, layout and drawing apps for 20+ years, and I've never once in that time wished to 'undo' a selection or deselection. This 'feature' adds nothing, but removes something very useful. Adobe tried it with the release of CS3—including non-destructive actions (switching to preview mode, showing and hiding guides, etc) in the undo/redo stack, and it was a nightmare. People hated it, Adobe recognised their mistake and restored the previous behaviour.

Yes, the whole 'Heading 1 + Heading 1' thing really threw me, and it took me a while to realise that it was the 'Apply [Style] to Paragraphs and Clear Character Styles' command that was the culprit. It's one thing to get funky and allow paragraph styles to act as character styles—quite another to make that the default behaviour for such a standard command, and end up with the same style being applied to the same text twice. What were they smoking when they thought this was a good idea?