Michael Sheaver

Just to see if it made a difference, I opened this file in my fave text editor (Atom), determined that the only font used is Bitstream Vera Serif, and downloaded and installed that font family on my system. Alas, when I open it in Designer, I get the same result. Given that this was created way back in 2005, my gut tells me that there may be some non-standard entries in there, and as a result causing Designer to say "Huh?" I don't know enough about the mechanics of the SVG standard to be able to find the offending bits, though. If I do figure it out, though, I promise to let everyone know!

Greetings! I found a beautiful set of playing cards in SVG format @ http://svg-cards.sourceforge.net/ that I want to work with. However, when I try to bring it into either Designer or Photo, the results are, let's say, a bit less than desirable. Here is a screenshot of how it looks in Designer: As you can see, the layers are there, but the layout is completely unworkable. What am I doing wrong here? How can I bring them in so I can edit them? If we can bring them into Designer, is there an easy way to export them out as separate image files, one for each card?

Designer can handle 28 pages, no problem! In fact, it has a lot of the same tools as InDesign, so you should have no problem. The only thing you won't have is an easy way to manage text flows, where a block of text flows one page to the next, but other than that, the character, paragraph and text tools in Designer are robust enough to handle most of what you will likely encounter.

First off, I think your closing comment on Scrum is spot on. I saw it used in my organization, and we had the same experiences as the others here, and it all goes back to the cultural environment. Ours was not healthy nor happy, and they have jumped from one methodology to another in search of the illusive "thing that works". It is management using them as band-aids instead of doing a deep dive into what the real issues are. Does anybody here remember the really old days of STRADIS, with its shelf-long set of pretty binders? It makes me cringe to know how much money, effort and training was expended on it. Regarding your comments about style guides and formatting conformance, there is a tool that actually does all of those things very well. It is called Scrivener, produced by a small shop called Literature and Latte, and it allows you to use whatever organization you want want when collecting your research and writing your drafts. then you compile your work into whatever format you n need, and whatever style guide you are following. Its genius is that the research and writing are completely divorced from the final output, giving you complete freedom while at the same time giving you the assurance that the final product will be properly formatted. Then you can drop it into an app like Publisher to do the post-production tweaking and cleanup. I have used it for years and absolutely LOVE it. I haven't used an infernal word processor for years now because of Scrivener. You can find it at https://www.literatureandlatte.com, and the trial is good for 30 days of actual use. Check it out.

I recently discovered BMD Fusion myself, and I absolutely LOVE it. The node-based approach they use is actually quite easy to use, very flexible, and they built animation capabilities into just about every conceivable option inside every object, tool or asset. The level of control that they give graphic artists in actually mind-boggling. You even have the ability to set up custom slider controls that allow you to fine tune animation effects on any property of any node. AND they give you all this insane capability in the free version with no limits. So yes, I suggest anyone to give it a try.

Honestly, I am not worried about that at this point. In my mind, the first thing that I think I need to do is to remove every constraint from every object in the original 11x17 artboard. Then I can (hopefully) coax everything back to where they belong, and then it should be much less of a problem when I go to the 20x30 layout, which of course won't have the same proportions. So, my first question is: Is there an easy way to remove or reset the constraints on every element, or do I need to do it manually? Then my next and more general question should be, what are constraints intended for? My guess is that my paradigm of constraints has been tainted by my prior experience with other unnamed design tools, and that in the Affinity universe they have a completely different use. @Wikinger, I DO appreciate your reaching out to me on this, big time!

I have been working on an educational poster, on and off over a few months time. Until now, I had kept it at one size (11" x 17"), and have it looking fairly nice in that size: After printing some test copies, it became clear that this was going to be way too small for what we are trying to do. So I tried to scale it up to 20" x 30", and it quickly got ugly fast: It does not matter if I try to scale the whole artboard up or create a new, larger artboard and paste everything into it, I get the same hideous results. I have been messing with this for a week now, trying different things like adding or removing constraints, and it seems like I am only digging myself into a deeper hole. In some cases, when I try to remove constraints, the objects jump clear off the artboard and/or resize themselves to crazy proportions. Every element in this poster is a vector element that I created myself, and there are no imported images. It is apparent that I am doing something wrong, and it probably has something to do with constraints. Can anyone offer suggestions on how I can get myself out of this pickle? I am willing to share the project file if need be.

Ain't that the truth? And it's such a beautifully phonetic one, to boot! My favorite one is how the Brits pronounce "aluminum": al-lu-min-ee-um. The first time I heard that, it was on a Youtube video, and I was like, "What is that?" LOL

A couple of good alternatives are PDF Element 6 Pro for Mac/Windows, or PDF Expert for Mac/iOS. They are both just as good as, if not better, than Acrobat.

There is another EXCELLENT program that is right under your nose, and you missed it! It is called Fusion, and it is made by the same folks who develop DaVinci Resolve, Blackmagic Design. In fact, it is older and more mature than DaVinci Resolve, and quite honestly, its node-based architecture makes it MUCH easier, both to learn AND to use. It is simply amazing, and has a VERY active support community. around it. There is a TON of YouTube videos available for Fusion, as well as full-blown tutorial courses. I recommend this one to get your feet wet: http://tale2tell.com/fusion-tutorials/. Of course, you will need to un-learn some things, but once you get the concept. flexibility and power of nodes, everything else will fall into place for you rather quickly. It is also rather intuitive to use, but not as much as the Affinity family, though. As for InDesign, I have been using Affinity Designer very effectively, even for posters and multi-page spreads. It does most of what I used ID for previously, and it does it MUCH better. The only thing that I have missed is the ability to manage text flows for long documents. But if you are not dealing with long documents like books, but truly are using ID primarily for graphic design, then you really need to move to Designer, really! One of the many surprising things I learned after using the Affinity family of products, is how much I was being handicapped by the crappy design of the entire Adobe suite. Designer is so much more intuitive, responsive and a pure joy to use. It also makes for a quicker workflow, too!

Did anyone else notice in that preview video, when they were moving an image block around the document, just how quickly, cleanly and smoothly the text flowed around it real time as it was moved? With this being in only alpha mode, I would say that is already an amazing feat! However, I will say that I am NOT surprised by this at all. The reason is that I have seen just how much attention the Affinity team pays to every little aspect of the UI and how it provides such intuitive feedback to the user. We have been spoiled in their impeccable design and performance of AD an AP for the Mac, and we have no reason to expect anything different in Publisher. I will even bet that the initial public release of Publisher will be way better than the initial releases of Photo and Designer, since they will use all of the lessons learned from those applications to guide and inform their design and engineering choices. The fact they keep pushing out the expected release date tells me that they truly are exercising an extreme level of discipline by not giving in to the pressures to release it before it's truly ready. And do you wanna know what the real irony is? If it were Adobe developing this software, the current alpha state, as we all saw it in operation, will already be good enough for them, and it would already be in general release. So kudos to the Affinity team for doing the right thing with all of their products! I am willing to wait patiently until they make it truly worthy of bearing the Affinity name, for I already know that the wait will have been worth it. Like I have shared here before, anything of exceptional quality always takes expert skill, patience, hard work, long hours and many years to produce. It is so refreshing to finally see companies like Serif that are dedicated to producing truly exceptional tools that not only work well, but they are pure joy to use!

It is not readily apparent in the screenshot, but what is the color and/or opacity setting for the middle gradient stop? Is that one at 50% opacity and the same color as the third opaque stop? @JimmyJack and @owenr, the suggestions from both of you were just what I needed, and they combined to give me the overall effect I was trying to achieve. Now I have a much better grasp of what is going on, especially with the outline effect, and I have successfully used it on several test objects of complex shapes. Many thanks to the both of you!

@JimmyJack Your third image is exactly what I was trying to get, and your method of drag-and-drop masking in the Layers panel was exactly what I was trying. Unfortunately, I had to drop this to work on a fun vectorizing project, but I will get back into this one over the weekend. I will look at the edges to see if I get the same results you did, and yes, the edges do look kind of sharp and abrupt on the screen, but we know the screen cannot always be trusted, huh?

Using Designer 1.6, I have a rectangular shape with a non-uniform (gradient) fill and some text inside, represented by shape #1 above (without the text, of course). I would like to apply a transparency effect where the edges of the shape fade off into being completely transparent. In order to try and describe what I am trying to do here, I made shape #2. I want the inner edge of the black border to be completely opaque with whatever is directly under it, the outer edge be completely transparent, and a gradient transition fill in between. In shape #3, I tried to use the Outline layer effect, as shown here: ...and kind of got what I am trying to do, but not quite. Maybe I need to use a duplicate layer and use it to mask out the border of the original shape? I have a feeling I am really close with this, but missing some step somewhere.

Oh my goodness, this is EXACTLY what I was needing! Kind of like virtual coaching, huh? I will try this tomorrow, and let you know how it comes out. I am serious, really, this is what I needed. I can already envision in my mind how each step will work, it is just amazing. And I haven't even begun the work yet. Again, many thanks!

I have created this scene that contains lots of individual blades of grass, with the sun in the sky: If you look at the left half of the grass blades, I tried to apply an effect using gradient overlay, but it really does not look that great. I would like to have it look like the sunlight is being reflected off the right side of each of the blades in a somewhat realistic appearance. I know there are probably many different ways to achieve this in AD, but can you share a way that has worked well for you? Another question - is this the appropriate venue to ask questions like this?

Great, and many thanks for this!

I am using a Logitech mouse with this exercise; I do have a Wacom tablet, but not using it at the moment though. I do have the tool handle size set to Largest. I do have a number of utilities installed and running that may have an impact on this, including Capto and Logitech Options, and will either disable or install them as part of further troubleshooting. Another Possible Avenue for Investigation Your questions have sparked another possibility that I had not considered before. Let me explain what I have been struggling with some time now. For quite a while I have been using a wonderful and incredibly powerful Bible software called Verbum (www.verbum.com), but beginning perhaps a year or two ago, I began to notice a particularly odd bit of behavior with regard to mouse-clicking. Extensive troubleshooting determined that if there was any movement in the mouse pointer in the split (nano) second between click on an object and releasing the mouse button, the application would interpret it as a mouse drag and would produce the behavior that the mouse drag event should produce. I found that to avoid this, I had to focus on my hand and make absolutely sure 1) not to move the mouse, and 2) make the. left mouse click-and-release as quick as possible. Even with this extra care, I found it to be a crap shoot, taking multiple tries to get the desired action. After some more digging and tweaking, I (perhaps incorrectly) attributed this hyper-sensitivity in mouse behavior to the Chromium framework upon which this application is built, and resigned myself to the possibility that it might never go away. I did eventually find a "workaround" for this, and that was to use my Wacom tablet instead of the mouse while using this application; it gave me much better and more consistent results and all but eliminated the mouse click issue. Until I read this comment, I had never tied the mouse behavior in Verbum with the current issue with option-clicking handles in Designer, but now I wonder if they are really different manifestations of the same problem. Now that I know this, I will pursue this line of troubleshooting, and most certainly report my findings here. Side Note on Wacom Tablets I have a Wacom Bamboo Create tablet which I love, but it has become increasingly difficulty to keep functioning on macOS, due to their unwillingness to continue support for it. Since my post on StackExchange about it: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/252307/wacom-bamboo-create-driver-for-macos-10-12 They have finally just recently updated their drivers for macOS 10.13, but alas, these new drivers do not recognize my Bamboo, and the release notes do indeed exclude the Create from the list of supported devices. Because of this, I have begun to search out alternative replacements.

I am digging deeper into the Pen and Shape tools in Designer 1.5 on macOS 10.13, and really loving them both. I am exploring and practicing as many of the different options as possible, using them over and over again in the hope of mastering them. However, there is one operation that I cannot seem to master, no matter how many times I try. While in the Node tool, and one or more blue handles are active and visible, I will try to delete a specific handle using the cusp mode alt/option-click. I always hover first over the handle until the arrow turns black, and then holding down alt/option key left-clicking on the handle. The context help on the bottom clearly shows it is in cusp mode, and the arrow is black, but way more often than not, the handle does not delete. Very rarely does the delete occur on the first option-click, and usually it takes multiple attempts before I can get the delete to work. I have tried all different sorts of sequences, such as single-click, wait one second without moving the pointer, then option-click, and nothing gives me predicable, reproducible results. It seems almost random, and I do not notice any pattern in what actions the successful deletion operations. I even went into the mouse settings to slow the pointer speed way down, and that didn't help at all. Are there any undocumented "tricks" that produce better, more consistent results when deleting node control handles in the Node tool? I have a personal goal of gaining complete mastery over this simple operation, to the point of being able to delete a node on the first click, every time; I do hope someone can help. As a side note, I have used the pen tool in many different applications, and the one in Affinity Designer/Photo is the only one that I actually enjoy using. Every aspect of the use and response of this tool feels so natural and intuitive; I have no idea how they did it, but the devs really nailed it with their implementation. It just feels right!

Matt, I have sent an email to the support mailbox with the dropbox link to this file; let me know if you are able to retrieve it.

Your wish is my command! I exported the file in PDF as it is multiple pages, and here it it, for your viewsng pleasure. Clipping vs Masking v2.pdf Please do let me know if you still need me to export it as a PNG, and I can do that later for ya!

Export to JPG I created a brand new project in Designer 1.6 b11 running in OpenGL display mode, created a single artboard with several layers that have multi-step linear gradients in them. Then popped this project into Photo 1.6.6 b6 to get a more realistic perspective. I then went back into AD and exported it to JPG, and noticed vertical lines in the image. I immediately did a second export, and this time got more of those lines. I did notice those lines appearing in AD as I was working on the project, but they went away pretty quickly. I have not done anything more with this project, and will be willing to share the project file with you for troubleshooting, if needed.

Greetings! I had to do a bit of study and homework in order to wrap my head around the clipping and masking operations in Designer and Photo. In the process, I developed a one-page infographic (attached), and it apparently has already helped some folks on the Affinity Designer and Photo Group in FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/AffinityDesignerPhotoPublisher/. I will be updating it shortly, but wanted share the first version here for comments and suggestions. Enjoy! Clipping vs Masking.pdf

Your assessment is spot-on, and because my iMac is 5K and i5, it was spared some of the grief. Please don't let this snafu with Metal being released on macOS before it was ready for prime time get you down; know that all that work you are doing now WILL pay huge dividends down the road! Just from the little experience I had using it in AD, I can tell that it will be a huge game changer for those devs who choose to embrace and use it. The only problem I have now is how much it pains me to have to use other apps that don't use Metal, especially those that use the Chromium or Electron frameworks. They are so jerky and clunky, that they remind me of why I don't use Windows any more than I absolutely have to. Given all this, is there any particular area that you want tested in beta 11? Do you want/need us to continue testing Metal?

Not to add confusion to the issue here, but I have been using AD beta 10 on High Sierra (both beta and release), on a mid-2012 MacBook Pro Retina 15" and a late 2015 iMac 27", for about a month now, with absolutely none of the performance issues you describe above. In fact, I switched to using Metal exclusively in AD on both platforms, and saw a big jump in performance and transition smoothness. App response is much zippier and snappier in Metal on both platforms, and I almost never get the checkerboard effect when zooming or panning quickly around the canvas. Is there some kind of system report I can give you to see why it is working so well for me? I am a registered developer with the latest Xcode installed, so if there are any system diagnostics I can run for you on my computers, let me know and I will be more than glad to help. I will hold off on downloading beta 11, just in case you need any data off the current configuration. The only thing I might have different than other folks is that both of my. machines have 16 GB RAM, if that makes a difference.