Norway4T

A feature that I am missing time and time again, is to be able to crop a picture, and then be able to crop a batch of photos the exact same way.

MikeTO, I do use shortcuts whenever available, but for some reason Cmd+L / Shift+Cmd+L didn't work on my mac. I looked to see if one of my many other apps used them already, but no luck. BUT…!!! When I gave it another try right now, it worked!!! Thank you for the nudge! If you hadn't suggested it, I wouldn't have bothered to try it again — PROBLEM SOLVED! Thanks buddy! 😊 👍

So, you have a design with a multitude of objects, and you accidentally move an object you weren't supposed to move. Maybe you discover it way down the line, and then you've got a real headache trying to reconstruct the original design. You can of course click the object, then use lots of time finding it in the Layers Panel, lock it, do the work in the area, safe in the knowledge that the object(s) won't accidentally be moved when you select and manipulate other object on or around the locked object(s). Then comes the time when you need to unlock the locked. Back to the Layers Panel, spend a whole lot of time locating it/them and unlocking said object(s) for editing. HOW ABOUT adding two menu items in the 'right click on object(s) menu'? You select the object or objects you want to preserve from your butter fingers, you right click, select LOCK in the menu that pops up, and Robert's your Father's Sister's Brother! And when you need to edit the object(s) again… Hey presto! Just right click and hit the UNLOCK item in the popup menu, and you have saved SEVERAL METRIC TONNES OF SWEAT for your Designer Customers, yours truly included! I spend an awful amount of time looking up objects in the Layers Panel in order to lock them from editing. And I spend an almost equal amount of time finding them again, in order to unlock them. Im locked in the unlucky locking and unlocking unluckiness… This Quick-Lock / Quick-Unlock system on the right click menu is so basic that I have expected that they'd be added at any new update of Affinity Designer, Photo and Publisher, but here we are — way into Version 2 of these brilliant Graphic Design Tools, and we're still sweating over this locking lack, quite unnecessarily. I imagine it would be a breeze writing this functionality into the Right Click Menu. I also imagine that if you at Affinity are afraid of cluttering, you could offer a toggle in the settings menu, so that those of us who wants it, may have lock/unlock in the right click menu, and those who wants to take the detour via the Layers Panel may still do so? So, how about it, you Cracking Brilliant Affinity Team? Is next update the lucky number? Hope so! Thanks! 👍

It's such a bummer that this relatively simple, yet essential functionality is still not onboard in Affinity Designer V2. Sure, you can do it online, with mixed results. But it's a lot of back and forth, potential security issues and general nuisance. I'm not too impressed with the image recognition functionalities in Affinity Photo V2 either. I can't see any (significant) difference in Inpainting, Background Removal and such from V1. And since this is tangential to the Algorithms used in AutoTrace, converting Bitmap into Vector, the question should be asked; Will Affinity continue to be competitive with ever new graphics capabilities following new Softwares, Hardwares and even AI? Affinity is affordable for hobbyists as well as professionals. And let's hope they always will be. And to be able to stay at this user's comfort prices, with good and at times great Software, we cannot expect everything. Adobe's packages are great. But it's VASTLY overpriced software, which even slaps on a 50% increase in the price for European users, and you don't even get to own the damn thing. That's abuse of privilege and it has moved me to chuck Adobe overboard! But still, an AutoTrace function is yesterday's technology in this scope, really. So, it beggars belief that it is still not included in Affinity Designer 2, Affinity Photo 2 and Affinity Publisher 2. It's hard as a user to judge how much such functionalities would influence the price in a negative way. But inching ever closer to Adobe in functionalities and keeping retail prices down could potentially torpedo Adobe. I know there has been A LOT of grumblings about Adobe's insane prices in photo and graphics fora I'm following. The fact that you don't buy, but rather just rent Adobe Software and the discrimination against European Customers all are points that don't sit well, even with profssionals. With an "Adobe Reputation" and with comfortable prices for hobbyists as well as professionals and a bit of marketing, the Sales VOLUME of Affinity has the potential to explode! There's a huge market tired of the Adobe Extortion, waiting for something new, better and much cheaper. I believe firmly that Affinity is in the lead to cap this market. But it needs a more solid core of functionalities in order to get there. And I can't see that with V2. Yet…

Lately, laying out books and papers, I find myself back in horrible, old-fashioned highly limited word processors because of one fundamental deficiency with Affinity Publisher: The lack of footnotes. When producing a long document with a lot of footnotes, and updating and rearranging those footnotes continuously, it is nearly impossible getting it correct without an automatic footnotes system, keeping tabs on footnotes numbering. I would love doing this work in Affinity Publisher, with its richness of layout elements, but I find myself confined to my old-fashioned word processors, simply because of that simple, but fundamental feature. If I may suggest one fundamental, major improvement of Affinity Publisher it is a automatic footnotes system. I imagine three different modes: 1) A system where, when activating the footnote function, it adds a consecutive numbering in superscript at the point of insertion, adds a delimiter (which can be preselected such as a no line, short line, medium line, long line, or customized string of lines and/or characters) at the bottom of the page, then add the same consecutive number in superscript and place the cursor right after it, ready to add the footnote text. 2) A system as the above, but with the ability to change numbering from latin characters to roman numerals or any other character the user may want to input to denote a special footnote. 3) Same as the two above, but with numbering starting from 1 for each new chapter. In addition, footnotes should also have the ability to be collected in a common field at the end of the document with the possibility to expand on each, and manipulate them as any other index. But a very good start would be implementing the above until and including 1). The rest is just icing on the cake. Although such functions would be very nice to have — a basic system as 1) is absolutely basic and essential, and I do hope the Affinity team focus on getting this added ASAP, as it is a MAJOR headache not having this basic feature in an otherwise complete & brilliant DTP such as Affinity Publisher!

One thing I have missed for a long time is the ability to copying and pasting individual Layer Effects. What I mean is that I have a set of Layer Effects which I have spent a long time tweaking saved in a Styles Group. And I have another set of Layer Effects which I've also spent a long time tweaking saved in Styles. I wish there was a way of copying some elements from one style and combining it with elements from the other style. When copying and pasting styles and effects they overwrite other styles and effects already applied to an object. Especially gradient outlines and overlays in the Layer Effects panel are a nightmare. There is no way of copying them as far as I know, and so the only solution is to make new gradients from scratch, which is enormously time consuming. It would be an enormous time saver to be able to copy, say an outline gradient from one object and an overlay gradient from another object - and of course other effects as well - on an individual, effect by effect basis. I envision an "effects palette", where you could pick for example the 3D effect settings from one object, the overlay gradient settings from a second object and the outline effects from a third object, apply them all to the object you're working on, and when you're happy with the result, maybe even be able to save the settings of this "palette" as a new style or as an "effects palette preset", where the individual settings can be tweaked further, enabled, disabled and combined with new effects picked from other objects and/or styles.

PS: And thanks for the tip on the "Factory" asset, loukash!

Thank you very, very much, loukash! I managed to move my assets over into a document and start afresh. It took a couple of days work. I never want to do that ever again! So, I have made an automatic backup of the assets file regularly! Again, a HUGE THANK YOU! When that assets file became messed up, I was beginning to despair, because I use assets quite a lot. It all worked out in the end with some hard work and your invaluable help!

Wilco! Thanks a bunch, loukash! I really appreciate your kind (and quick!) replies!

Alright. I've got probably in the thousands of assets, so that is going to take a while. I really, really hope this works. It'll give me a chance (perhaps) to see if any object in one of the categories is behaving strangely. Are the "factory" assets also stored in that container you listed, or are they stored in a separate container?

App store version.

I dearly hope someone has a solution to this. I use Assets A LOT, and I am really lost with this problem. I had lined up lots of elements ready to be stored in new categories, but that is all but impossible with the problem that has arisen.

Dear Ash & the Amazing Affinity Team! I bought all of the apps at full price - but I'm not complaining since this is AFFORDABLE software! I think this discount is a great gesture. Some are lucky and win the lottery, some don't. That's life. I commend Affinity for your warm hearted GENEROSITY! This gesture only makes me appreciate you even more, and please, please don't take a blind bit of notice of a few negative reactions! Thank you, Affinity! You're the BEST! All the best from a loyal customer!

Yesterday my Assets panel just went haywire. The Assets Categories are fine all the way down to a certain point. The content match the title of the Category as it should. After that, the 13 categories at the bottom have the wrong titles. When I open one of them and select Rename category... the name that pops up in the dialogue box is the correct one! When I try adding a new category and rename a previous one, the last category disappears! When I make another category, the content reappears, but under the wrong Category name...! If I create a new Category and rename it, no name shows. The field where the new name of the new Category should show is empty. It's like trying to design in the Twilight Zone...

I see. Thanks, anon2! Haven't had the time to check it out yet, but I will! Much appreciated! 👍

Firstdefence & wonderings, THANK YOU for all the kind help you have provided. Yes, I realize in the future, it will probably be easier and yield a better quality to export them on a transparent background. These were just some old, high res renderings I had laying around, and I wondered if I maybe could use them for some illustrations to a children's book I'm writing. Thanks a lot to all of you, Firstdefence, wonderings and anon2! MUCH appreciated! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 👍

Thanks anon2, I will try that macro out.

Sure firstdefence, but I'm not sure how that's going to help. The resulting fractals are merely jpegs and tiffs with a black background, just like any other picture with a black background. I have used Fractal Architect 5 to create these. The problem described above is in order of the last picture to the first. All I need to know is to remove everything that is black in the picture below.

I have a collection of fractal images that I've made that look like flowers. The fractals consists of the multicolored fractal "flowers" on a black background. I import the fractal images into Affinity Designer (I eventually want to make vector brushes from various arrangements of these fractals) and arrange them, slightly overlapping each other. Now the black backgrounds on each image obscure the image on the layer underneath. So, I select all the images and change the blend mode to screen. Now I can see each flower through the layers of images, and so far so good. Now I want to remove everything in the images that is black, so only the color of the flowers are visible and export that in a .png with transparent background. I have tried absolutely every and all combinations that may remove the black frames when I export. I opened the Affinity Designer document in Affinity Photo to see if there was some way tweaking the alpha channel to remove the black. No luck. I am fresh out of ideas after plodding around in this for two days. A fix to this problem would be most welcome!

The solution presented itself with something thomaso said, I should check my language settings in Character Styles. I had made several Character Styles, but I hadn't done anything to set the language options in these styles. Simply setting them to English resolved (most of) the problems. There are a few error messages left, but I figure they are down to sloppy formatting on my part, so once I have formatted with correct styles, I should have a "clean slate" as to those pesky errors I got at the beginning. THANK YOU THOMASO & WALT!!! 👍You're the best, guys!!!

I have a customized Mac with an English MacOS version and a Norwegian keyboard, since I am Norwegian. However, much of the DTP work I do on Affinity Publisher is in English. A big project I'm working on at the moment is entirely written in English. However, when I run the Preflight check I get a mile long list stating: I have followed the instructions here but the problem is that I cannot find any dictionary named (en-NO). And I have switched on every Norwegian and English dictionary in System Preferences in my MacOS and restarted Affinity Publisher, but the error messages persist. Now I just want to exclude that type of error message, because in the first edition of the document I was working on, some important error messages had snuck in between the enormous amounts of "Missing dictionary for language (en-NO)" which I didn't notice. I enclose two screenshots, and as you can see, it is extremely difficult to spot the real important messages in the sea of nonsensical "missing dictionary" messages that reports on every page over and over. Since the missing dictionary message isn't important, and the spell checking of the English text in the document works just fine, I would very much just get rid of the dictionary error messages so they don't inadvertently hide actual important error messages. How do I do that? Is it even possible, or is there a workaround?

Murfee - Then I guarantee you will absolutely love "Primal Panacea" by Dr. Thomas E. Levy! It is a Gold Mine of information. I've worked with Orthomolecular Medicine since 1997, but even I picked up new knowledge by reading it. We've got nothing to worry about with this knowledge. Now I am working on pushing this message by using Affinity Publisher, Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer! Thank you again for your help with the tabs in the TOC! Have a great & healthy weekend!

Murfee - You too, Brother! As a matter of fact, the white paper I am working on is a synopsis of Dr. Thomas E. Levy's LIFESAVER of a book, called "Primal Panacea", with additional notes of my own. "Primal Panacea" explains the various properties and routes of administration of Vitamin C (Ascorbic Acid), and how medical doctors (trained in Orthomolecular Medicine) regularly use Vitamin C to prevent, put into remission, and even cure AIDS/HIV, Ebola, Encephalitis, Hepatitis, Herpes, Pneumonia, Polio, Shingles, Swine Flu, Corona vira including COVID-19. Research now suggests that Liposomal Vitamin C is even slightly more effective than intravenous Vitamin C. You should read the book. I have studied Medical Biology and Medicine, and even I find this book solid with nearly 1,300 references! If governments weren't bought by the pharmaceutical industry, the Corona virus COVID-19 would have been stop cold in its tracks with Vitamin C treatment.

Murfee & GarryP - KUDOS! Using the combined tutoring from bot of you, the result was: PROBLEM SOLVED! I had to select both tab stop right alignment and tab stop leader character, and there it was! THANK YOU! You guys really saved the day!!!

I bought my third Affinity product a few days ago (GREAT, AREN'T THEY!), and I'm right at it with creating my first white paper. I have watched all the video tutorials, but I cannot for the life of me remember where I saw (indeed IF I saw) how to format a Table of Content. I went back to the TOC video tutorial, but all the presenter showed us was two TOC styles, but nothing about how you actually tweak them and nothing about how to add a dotted line in a Table Of Content between a content (Heading 1) and the page number. I thought maybe the answer lay in the Paragraph > Tab Stops section, but when I went there (while my TOC paragraph text was selected), the box where you can add characters to fill between tab stops was greyed out, making it impossible to change. Besides, in the greyed out field it looked like there was a "." there already. I know there is probably a simple solution and that I'm asking a lame question, but there you are: I'M A NEWBIE!