SirWillibald

I don't think this is possible yet (correct me if I'm wrong), but I would love to be able to toggle the visibility of certain layers with the data merge feature.

This is possible in Photoshop, where you could add a boolean type field in your excel sheet with "TRUE" or "FALSE", which was linked to the visibility property of a certain layer. Hope this is understandable.

Would open up some nice possibilities...

I don't think this is possible yet (correct me if I'm wrong), but I would love to be able to toggle the visibility of certain layers with the data merge feature.

This is possible in Photoshop, where you could add a boolean type field in your excel sheet with "TRUE" or "FALSE", which was linked to the visibility property of a certain layer. Hope this is understandable.

Would open up some nice possibilities...

That usually happens when someone hits Tab, and then starts individually Showing things from the View menu until they think they have everything back again  
 

Ok, thank you all, and sorry, you're right, I was referring to those buttons from the status bar. But somehow I managed to hide the status bar but show everything else:


But Walt was right, after hitting TAB two times, everything went back to normal. Sorry for the fuzz and thanks!

It's possibly opening on a second screen somewhere
Switch on all screens to check, including Laptop - if lid is currently closed open it

You can set that up in the preferences Preferences > Tools

 

That is the Colour Replacement brush, you want the Paint Brush.

If you are seeing purple/magenta outlines left after deselecting objects then you're not seeing a bug, but a feature called Snapping Candidates.

By default Affinity will let you snap to the last 6 previously selected objects. These are called 'Snapping Candidates' - to help you better identify which these last 6 objects are is an option called 'Show snapping candidates'. When this is enabled you will get a purple/magenta outline on those objects - this is likely what you are seeing. Simply disable this to remove the outline.

Please see the Snapping help topic for more information on the snapping features:
https://affinity.help/designer/English.lproj/pages/DesignAids/snapping.html

Sounds reasonable, thanks for the explanation!

Doubleclick the title bar again would have been a good advice, but not if the window was closed once. Otherwise there is no way to resize the window indeed. Is there any reset for application windows possible or only just this hacky way?
Close APu and edit "C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Affinity\Publisher\1.0\Settings\Window.xml" and change the width and height values for DataMergeManagerDialog to 0. Next time you restart APu the window gets it default size of 680 x 470.
 

This is by design. Font substitution is temporary: it allows you to work on a document even if one or more fonts are unavailable on your computer, but because it doesn’t replace the original fonts they will appear correctly when the document is loaded on a computer which has those fonts available. For permanent replacement, use the ‘Find & Replace’ feature.

You're a genius! Thanks a lot for this workaround, even though this shouldn't be needed at all...

At least I can work again...

Vielen Dank vom Niederrhein! 😊

Hey Pauls,

actually I've been able to solve this just before trying out your suggestion: I simply released the table panel from the left dock and attached it again. Works perfect again!

Thanks for the reply and for this great piece of software!

Hi there,

I'm using Affinity Publisher for more and more things and I think it's already really great. But a few things are still annoying.

I wanted to create a huge time table for family member's video conferences (we desperately need this at the moment...). 

I came up with a big table, every second line highlighted in grey (took me a while to figure out how table formats worked, but got it). Then I've started to highlight different (partially merged) cells with 2pt borders in different colors. Turns out, this is annoying. It's kinda hard to describe, but the "Stroke and Fill" property window doesn't really work very intuitive:
- Each feature has to be selected very specifically, for example, simply clicking the box frame and then a solid line produces very different results, seemingly depending on what the cell looked like before.
- Choosing a specific color doesn't allow to choose a recently used color, this part of the window always shows black, grey and white
- ...

Is there a way to improve this behaviour?

If desired, I can try to illustrate this with a little screen video.

Cheers,
Christian aka SirWillibald

Hi @Dan C,

yeah, I've found a bug! Very glad to hear it's seemingly not my fault...

Regarding the borders, the issue is really hard to describe, perhaps my words were chosen poorly, I'll have a go again and see if I can come up with something more useful!

THANK YOU for data merge.
I was just checking it out and it works and its easy and it's amazing.
One last feature to make it perfect for me is probably a bit hard to implement because of the way it works in publisher. I was using Photoshop variable replacements to create .psd files. There I was able to have one field in my csv for the filename. When I export my files in publisher i get numbered files and it's hard to find the right file.
 
(I am using this in a broadcast environment to create on-air design like lower thirds sometimes for hundreds of people. Good to have the persons name in the filename to quickly find what i am looking for)

Set your Publisher document to have a transparent background. It is in the Colour section of the File > Document Setup... 

Hi,
been using Designer for quite some time now and couldn't be happier that I left Adobe Illustrator behind. However, I have a minor problem and I can't find a solution in AD for this. A picture says a thousand words.
In Illustrator, there was an option to have each dashed/dotted line be drawn the same way at the start and end point (don't know, what it was called, hope you understand what I mean). I've tried to recreate this behaviour in AD, but I can't find a solution, the joints always look somewhat messy. I know, it's a minor and mostly cosmetical problem, but it bugs me...
All lines in the picture are seperate, joining them doesn't help, obviously.

A very mighty feature of Photoshop that's buried somewhat behind the shiny surface and isn't really implemented very user-friendly, but it's so unbelievable useful, that it would be an awesome addition to both Photo and Designer. Instead of a lengthy explanation, I'll let others do the talking, couldn't say it better (hope that's OK):
http://www.designeasy.co/2014/08/easy-way-to-automate-photoshop-with.html
I use this a lot myself, and it's really mighty and saves a ton of work.
Affinity would even have the chance to add this feature in a somewhat unified way to Designer, Photo and the upcoming Publisher, while Adobe only supports PS and ID with this, Illustrator not (if I'm right). And PS and ID handle it completely different, which is kinda annoying.
If anybody likes me to elaborate more on the topic, feel free to ask!

Hi SirWillibald,
 
This isn't possible at the moment and i'm not sure if the Dev team have any plans to add this feature.  It would certainly make for a good feature request

Hi everybody,
just stumbled over Affinity looking for an alternative to Adobe Illustrator (really loathe the subscription model) without any real hope of finding something useful. What can I say, I couldn't have been proven more wrong, Affinity Designer is absolutely awesome so far!
I had no intention to look for a Photoshop alternative at first, but after being blown away by the Designer, I thinks it's at least worth a try.
One question: Is Affinity Photo able to work with variables and data sets like PS? If you don't know what I'm talking about: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/creating-data-driven-graphics.html
I really use this a lot(!), this would be the killer feature for me, if Affinity Photo isn't able to do this, I have to pass.
Or perhaps the upcoming Affinity Publisher will have such a feature (InDesing has it, as well)?
Thanks for any infos, and congratulations on the great programm, I suppose it's only a matter of days before I buy Affinity Designer, really great!