Oval

Asked and ignored since 2018 … basic for layout, could be made in minutes.

No, you don’t need new glasses. Just the transform panel. Have a look into Affinity Designer Help. AD has a very powerful field input.
 
View ▹ Studio ▹ Transform

Sehr traurige Einstellung. Trifft wahrscheinlich auch auf die Klimaänderung zu. 
 
It is the same argument: Serif publishes half-baked stuff. Every time we see that “AFFNTY” on top, we can’t believe it.

And we even don’t want to discuss other apps here. We want a solution that works for all. Really stupid, that you have to create thousand of values that an algorithm could do. This is not a feature for most users. We will see more and more bad margins because users think it works. Terrible, that one presents such a thing here at all: the C optically too far outside, the N too far right, the kerning completely ill.

We don’t want to discuss your best option, kerning and editing hundreds and thousand of values, that would be needed, but it shows that you even had no time to bring the “A” and the “E” on one optical line. Your picture shows that the manual options don’t work for many users: there is no correct optical margin alignment!

All the pictures show that even users that seem to know what they do, do not get correct results.

Mike even had no time to set only four letters visually correct. So how should this be economical, if you have to work out huge tables for every font, every used letter and finally different styles and sizes?! Impossible! Especially not for laymen. This optical alignment does not work in real life! (The letters are not even based on pictures and graphic elements that are in the grid.)

But you call it optical alignment, but it is not a bit of that. Laymen think that it works correctly.
Hoped the letters would at least be oriented to the outer margins and Serif would do it properly and better than others. But even that does not seem to have been implemented. So texts are too far inward in APu.

It is the same issue: Serif, which ran into many problems because developers seems to be not informed about basic graphic knowledge.

intelligent_rulers_upd2.afdesign
 
Because some are waiting tooooooooo long for better rulers including a “change origin point” feature,
we made a flexible ruler for dm, Berthold points, Pica points, Didot points, DTP Cicero and other units that you can change easily for your own needs just in seconds. Even if you need furlong, light-nanoseconds, Fournier point … no problem.
 
Now you can have many rulers with different units at the same time. And they even can measure curves. Some backgrounds can be found somewhere.
 
Have fun and help to improve Affinity apps.  
 

 
The old ones:   intelligent_rulers.afdesign  intelligent_rulers_upd.afdesign

I hope you can find a tutorial (like this) that is helpful for you.
 
You don’t need a dash. Only one tab stop at the position of your desired length. Advantage: You can change the length of many selected objects at once!
 
Here is a simple AD example:
dddd.afdesign

Many of them will not pay for something again that was announced for their paid old version.

Serif has a list online! And if this is not enough they could use https://affinity.help/ or the (90-day) trials.

There are fewer public fixes currently, but that is typical in that we make a major release 1.7, 1.8, 1.9, 1.10 and after each do a series of releases that are mainly bug fixes with fewer fixes in each till the next major release
Obecnie jest mniej publicznych poprawek, ale jest to typowe, ponieważ tworzymy główne wydanie 1.7, 1.8, 1.9, 1.10, a po każdym wykonujemy serię wydań, które są głównie poprawkami błędów z mniejszą liczbą poprawek w każdym aż do następnego wydania głównego
I have not seen that and it is not true. All the developers who worked on 1.7, 1.8 1.9 etc are still employed by Serif. We have an amazing retention rate, and have recently taken on a number of new staff. 
Nie widziałem tego i to nieprawda. Wszyscy programiści, którzy pracowali nad 1.7, 1.8, 1.9 itd., nadal są zatrudnieni przez Serif. Mamy niesamowity wskaźnik retencji, a ostatnio zatrudniliśmy wielu nowych pracowników.
Work continues apace, to fix bugs and add new features, both of which take time. Have faith, Onwards!
Prace trwają szybko, aby naprawić błędy i dodać nowe funkcje, które wymagają czasu. Miej wiarę, naprzód!

We will hear very much. (the launch of APu was announced for 2015 and years later we still had no suite …)

Very sad that AP has “the best third party PSD import engine” and is still the only app among many others having problems with (the import of) paths.

This is a feature request. Perhaps there will be a new red button in future.

Rright!
perhaps a virrus

Rright!
perhaps a virrus

Serif generally doesn't comment on when they will be doing something. Nor what it will fix nor what enhancements it will contain.
There were new Windows beta versions of Photo and Designer released yesterday, but Mac has been quieter. The latest Windows versions are marked RC2 (Release Candidate 2) so we can guess that 1.10.5 is close to being released as a retail version, and presumably it would be released on Mac at the same time.
But it's all a guess unless/until someone from Serif can tell us something. There was a hint earlier that they're hoping for a fix from Apple for some problem that affects the Affinity applications, and perhaps they're still working with Apple on that. There are several issues on Monterrey, which may be related to this.

last but not least: (different) grain

This is not a software product or a common generic tool, it is rather a proof of the concept on its own by reusing some vector warping routines (algorithms). - So actually nothing that people without some programming- and in-depth SVG-knowledge could currently easily use in order to reuse/exchange SVG code with Affinity products.
Text for example isn't handled in an editable SVG text format, it has to be transformed/converted to SVG paths in order to be distorted in a good behaving manner. The SVG bounding box for to be loaded in SVG code has sometimes to be manually tweaked (as other SVG code too) in order to be handled and manipulated the right way by the actually used distortion routines. The to be loaded in SVG code also has to be kept in simpler form, aka too much nested groups and matrix transforms etc. aren't actually handled that well and thus can influence the mesh bounding box and handle points orientation for loaded in SVG graphics etc. - So the whole is more a personal playground for testing and performing some vector distortion operations with some vector related code.
 

screencast_glyphs.mp4  

screencast_zwei.mp4

What one realy want's here is more like this, plain vector warping, which I personally use for workarounds ...

screencast-distort.mp4

NO, since it's not vector based (still rasters all on export) and doesn't support all kind of free distortion transformations (warping etc.).

No news are bad news :-)

Any news on this Chris, using designer on the 12.9 ipad is almost unusable for me with the current size and darkness of the ui?