zimmt

That's an interesting solution. Not sure how well this works with an effect to reduce a font though. Another workaround is creating a copy, converting it to curves, joining them all, adding an inside stroke, removing the inner fill, and then setting the filter to Erase. But that is too much work for production files where text is frequently changed. I have also moved away from FX on fonts as it causes color shifts for me once they get rasterized.

Thank you Thomaso. Unfortunately a stroke is not an option for cursive fonts as it will surround each letter instead of the word as a whole.

I'm trying to jerry-rig together a workflow to avoid this issue. Right now the best bet would be exporting each design to a TIFF. Unfortunately I can't do that as I rely on N-Up to print my files. I am also too heavily invested in Affinity Designer with over 1000 files. So switching to Photoshop is not an option plus Affinity blows it out of the water in pretty much every way. Again, the best solution in my estimation is to built in a function that completed rasterizes the file before sending it to the printing. This bypasses all the issues with having vectors and raster elements in the same file.

I've removed all FX from my fonts. Thought that would finally give me peace of mind. Turns out even having raster elements close by will cause the same effect of the color printing lighter. Are the developers active during this time?

It would be great if there was an option in Affinity to rasterize the entire print job before sending it to the printer. Sure one could export first but that complicates the workflow if a lot of prints are made. It particularly doesn't work if one relies on the Document Layout (N-Up) function which other programs such as Mac Preview do not have.

Tried it on 3 printers: - Canon Pixma 100 Pro with Canon Drivers - PageWide 452dw with PrintFab drivers - HP M553 LaserJet with AirPrint drivers. Inkjets have the problem. The laser seems to be fine. Also tried another Mac, the Canon had the same issue but the PageWide using AirPrint didn't. It seems then AirPrint may not have this problem but all other drivers do.

Thank you for the clarification. It would be nice if higher resolution thumbnails would be an option at some point.

Of course... here is the test file. What brought this to my attention in the first place was I have a color palette of colors used for text, and with certain text the colors print lighter than with others. What is causing this is when an FX effect is applied to the text it must get rasterized (similarly to exporting to PDF where unsupported properties are rasterized). And thus the text with an FX applied prints brighter than the regular vector-based text. I replicated this by applying a color to a simple vector square and printing it alongside its rasterized version. There too the raster prints brighter. Within Affinity, using the color picker, the colors are identical. And they are to the eye as well... just not on the printed version. I assume it is simply a printer driver quirk on how vector and raster graphics are handled. I tried this on 3 printers: a Pixma Pro 100, PageWide 452dw, and LaserJet M553. All exhibit this behavior. This is using OEM, Air Print and Third Party drivers. NOTE: Before submitting I printed the test file and noticed it printed fine. After a little tinkering I figured out the issue only occurs when there is 1 or more artboards. So I added an artboard to the test file. I have another forum post on another issue with printing which is related to artboards as well. The other issue is not quite as severe as this one as I've spent a lot of time trying to get my color palette and this has created a lot of headaches and time and material wasted. Test.afdesign

I've tested this on 3 different printers with all producing the same effect. I assume this is an Affinity bug then. Can anyone confirm this is the case on their end as well?

I've noticed that a vector and raster square with identical colors print differently. Is this an expected behavior?

Very good sleuth 😉 But the file I uploaded just has Arial which ales exhibits the issue.

Just saw the post. File is uploaded. When zooming out to about 25% the effect becomes visible.

Another little bug is when saving (Command + S) and quickly hitting print (Command + P) is causing Affinity to crash in most cases if the saving process did not end quickly enough.

Would like to know if this is a bug or only affects my computers.

To further troubleshoot I successfully replicated the issue on 2 Macs, using 3 printers with AirPrint, OEM, and 3rd party drivers. I tried this with old and new Affinity Designer files and the issue is without fail reproducable every time. If an artboard (used in the previous print job) is not present in the currently open file, then the pulling up the print dialog will immediately crash the app. And it will continue to crash it unless one opens the previous file (containing the previously printed artboard) and does a dummy print to overwrite the default print settings with something else (not using the artboard). For those with this issue there is a temporary fix by activating "Reset Presets Menu to Default Settings After Printing" as shown in the screenshot (found under "Show presets.." in the Presets dropdown menu). It still crashes from time to time even with this setting, but at least when reopening Affinity Designer the print dialog is reset and one does not have to go fishing for the file used for the last print job to get out of the crashing loop.