Kal

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?

I completely agree. The undo/redo stack should be reserved for destructive actions only. This has been raised in the past and ignored by the developers. When it was raised as a bug here, they closed it as 'by design' without (it would seem) taking the time to understand why the behaviour is completely unnecessary and a frustration for many. It was also discussed here and requested again here. So I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for this to be fixed. In Affinity Designer and Photo, you have a Snapshots panel, which enables you to save various states and switch between them, but it's a pretty clunky process in practice—after saving each snapshot you have to select one with the mouse, then click a tiny icon, then repeat if you want to switch back and forth to compare them—you can't just click (or even double-click) on a snapshot to view it. (I know, it boggles the mind.) In any case, the feature didn't find its way to Publisher. What you can do, rather than deselect objects, is hold down the space bar to temporarily hide the selection boxes. However, this will not work if you have text selected, or the keyboard focus happens to be in some UI text field.

Ah okay. That's what I meant when I asked 'are you sure the ruler isn't off the edge of the canvas?' In that case, what you're seeing is just the standard behaviour, where a guide is removed by dragging off the canvas.

How very strange that this works for you and not me. I just tested in all three apps, and the behaviour is the same for each—if I'm zoomed in on the page and quickly drag and drop a guide to (or beyond) the ruler, the guide just ends up off screen at the point where I released the mouse button. This was mentioned earlier, in response to the original question. At this stage we're discussing how the task of deleting guides could be improved. If you happen to be zoomed up on a page, I think you ought to be able to drag a guide back to the ruler to remove it. That just makes intuitive sense to me. You know, I just assumed this is how it worked in Illustrator, but I just checked and no—it only works that way in InDesign! I guess in Illustrator, I was just in the habit of selecting a guide and hitting delete. I think InDesign gets it right in every way. You can delete a guide by any of these means: Drag a guide to the ruler Select a guide and press the Delete key Select Layout > Create Guides and check 'Remove Existing Ruler Guides'. This just makes it all super easy. In addition, you can place guides off the edge of the page should you wish to—although the value of that might be debatable. You can also trigger auto-scroll by dragging a guide off the page and beyond the ruler—although the value of autoscrolling for guide placement is also debatable IMHO.

I can't get this to work. Even if I do it quickly, so as to avoid auto-scrolling, the guide just moves under the ruler. When you do it, are you sure the ruler isn't off the edge of the canvas? I think both of those are good ideas.

Thanks Dan. Yes, very helpful. Coming from Illustrator, I don't find it intuitive to select the object that I'm not moving or modifying. But in a way it makes sense… It allows you to see the node you're trying to snap to.

I want to grab a bunch of objects, and move them as a group. This is easy with the Move Tool, but I need to use the Node Tool, because I need to snap a node on one of these objects (a curve) to another node in the artwork. These are the steps I'm trying: Select all the objects (a combination of curves and geometric shapes). Drag a marquee selection around all the selected objects. (I'd expect at this point, to see all the nodes/dots on all the objects to be filled, but the geometric shapes still have unfilled dots.) Click and drag on a selected node. (Only the curves move, not the geometric shapes.) The Node Tool works for selecting and moving normal curves, and it works for selecting and moving geometric shapes—just um, not at the same time. I'd call this a bug, but I’m posting it as a feature request to preempt being told that it’s the expected behaviour. PS. As a side-note, If you select a geometric shape, then drag a selection marquee around it multiple times, it alternatively deselects and selects it completely, indicating that there is some kind of invisible selection at work. If you then try the same on a normal curve, it does a funky double take, and the marquee vanishes. It's all a bit weird.

I must be missing something here surely, but I can find no way to snap to a smooth node on a curved path. I have an end point on a simple line that I wish to snap to the node of another path. With 'snap to object geometry' turned on, the point will stick to the curve as I drag it around, but it will not snap to the actual node in the middle of that curve. I've tried turning each of the snapping options off and on, but with no joy. Any ideas? Or is this a shortcoming of Designer's drawing and editing tools?