MaxClass

Being a Mac user, I always work in ‘Dark Mode’ as it’s so much easier on the eyes, especially at night. The problem is my 27 inch 5k Studio Display can be exceptionally bright, especially at night, so, I turn down the brightness. This tends to make all the text in the Studios and top display area so it can be hard to read. I suggest that the default display text color be a ‘Settings’ option such that we can select any color that works best for us based on our personal preferences. I’m including a screen shot of the overhead panel of a Boeing 777 when lit up at night. It’s not super clear but it shows how I would like to be able to use a similar green shade as in this image, or to select any other color as my default display text colour. This would obviously change for each user depending on what works best for them. Since it appears the color ‘white’ is obviously set internally as the default, it should not be big problem to add a ‘Settings’ option to reset the default ‘white’ to whatever colour makes the display more readable and easier to see depending on the brightness setting of anyone’s display and the time of day or room situation. In the included image it’s easy to see why commercial aviation uses the colors they use against dark backgrounds, especially at night so that there is no confusion about what switch or setting they are choosing, even in a totally dark cockpit. Thank you for listening. Hope this see something akin to this in coming versions.

I use a 27 inch Apple Studio Display, which is capable of brilliant colors and extreme brightness, but, many times the ‘White’ text displayed in the toolbars, studio, etc., can become difficult to read without going to full display brightness, especially under bright room conditions. It would be nice to have the ability to use the Settings panel to select the Text Color for all background text from the default ‘White’ to maybe and nice bright ‘Green’, etc., such as might be used on the display panels of commercial aircraft for greater visibility, or any other preferred color a user might find visibly easier to see. As a Mac programmer I would set a default color, either a static or variable value, that a user might choose, to display all static background text throughout an application, so, I can only imagine that something similar is probably used in the Affinity applications. I’m only asking if it might be possible to have a Settings option to allow the end user to select any specific color or their choice as a user default for all the default display toolbar, context menu, studios, etc., text Thank you for listening,

Using Find and Replace in Publisher v1 (I also have v2) — Studio Mac M1 Max Totally by accident, on many occasions, when I thought I had a word to paste into the Find Field after I had done a select all and copied a large amount of text that I had pasted into a new document and not realizing it didn’t copy so all the pervious text was on the clipboard I clicked in the “Find” Field and did a “Paste”. Turns out it was trying to Paste the entire text of the document I had just copied, into the “Find” Field and it just sits there for maybe a minute with the beachball spinning until it is all selected, whereupon I realized what I had done but was locked out until it came back to life. To avoid this happening you might consider truncating Find text by setting a limit to the length of text allowed to be Pasted in the “Find” Field to avoid this. Probably not a bad idea to limit the length of text in the “Replace” Field also. if ( LengthOfTextStr > 20 ) then LengthOfTextStr = leftStr( LengthOfTexStrt, 20 ) // something akin to this to avoid the problem This is also something to consider in V2 I imagine the idea of Find and Replace was never mean to try and find an entire paragraph in a document so the number of characters to find should probably have some limit for uniqueness. Thank you for listening. I couldn’t work with my Affinity Applications. MaxClass

I’ve been using Affinity products for five years now. My main daily application is Publisher of which I make extensive use of the Data Merge feature to do specialized documents for people. My first request is to be able to open two (2) separate TSV/CSV files and allow the data from a merged combination of both sets of Fields and Data. I a Mac programmer I would imagine adding the second data files fields to those of the first dictionary or array, however they are used internally. This should be an easy, but very powerful, addition to Publisher. As for the “Fields Studio” General Information> Date and Time would you please consider adding the options to add and individual way to insert the current individual Day, Month, or Year as individual selections. Also, the ability to add, using the existing Date and Time option, the ability to make a Date field in a document as auto-updating so that field in a document will automatically display the current Date. This would allow be extremely helpful. I love the speed of the Find/Replace Studio and the only suggestion I have regarding it is that is show the number of ‘matches’ by showing a visible number, possibly in a non-editable text field to the right of the ‘Replace All’ button. So many times I’m looking for how many matches are found to the Find criteria and not necessarily to change them and currently I have to physically count the number of entries found. Internally a simple incremented counter would do the trick. Lastly, in Find/Replace it would be nice to have the small ‘x’ inside the circle dosplayed on the right side of the fields to click on and instantly clear the field. This is standard on almost every Mac application that uses “Find”, such as in Safari. I have recommended the Affinity applications to everyone I know and could not do what I do without them. Thank you all so much in advance for what you have given us. It’s appreciated far more than you might realize and easily worth a lot more than you ask for this amazing applications.

Version 1 always had unique icons that showed up when selecting any of the built in “Special Characters” in the Find Studio Version 2.1.0.1709 no longer displays an icon for the following selections not letting you visually see something to “Find”. Without something showing you have no idea visually if there is actually anything in the “Find” text field. Odd and Even Page Breaks show identical icons. should probably be unique. Non-Breaking Space Soft Hyphen Zero Width Space En-space Em-space

I love Data Merge and use it everyday for personalized documents and it never fails. But, on so many occasions I not only need the Data from a Client TSV file but also specialized data from another TSV file which Publisher does not allow me to do. I know I can have multiple TSV files open at the same time but can only do a Merge from one at a time. Since Publisher knows and has the data fields from both file if they are both open in the Data Merge Manager why is it not possibly for Publisher to access and insert the data from both file is they are both open. Publisher will not allow for the selection of both TSV file simultaneously which is what I really need. Also, if you have data fields from both files in the document a “Generate” will automatically wipe out the fields that it doesn’t find in the other, non-selectable TSV file, even though it is also open in the Data Merge Manager window. It would be perfect if there was a way to allow Publisher to “Add” a second, or third, or why restrict it to that, TSV file and let Publisher use all the data fields and data form multiple TSV files at the same time. Just add the next set of Fields, and Data to the array used to do the Merge. As a programmer I don’t see this as outside the realm of possibility nor that difficult a task to add/append one array of data to another used for a merge. Data Merge in Publisher is 98% perfect. Thank you in advance for any consideration.

Without going too deep, “Old Bruce” said it in a nutshell. If the last entry in a document is a Merge Field without a “return” following it that last Merge Field will fail to fill in on a “Preview with record”. You must have a “return” character following it in order for the Merge Data to appear in that field as “Old Bruce” mentioned above. The only time this happens is if the last Merge Field followed only by the section character “§”. This should be very easy to duplicate. It doesn’t so much cause a problem if you add the “return” character so it’s only a partial bug in that sense but should be fixed for the next release. Great work guys. The Affinity application are amazing. Max Taylor

I have a Data Merge Field as the last entry in a file. There are no characters after the last field except the § indicator. When the Field tag is the last character of a block of text the data will not show when “Preview with record” is checked, but, all other data fields will show the correct data. As odd as it might seem simply adding a ‘return’ character after the last field to move to the next blank line solves the problem and the merged data appears. Remove the return so only § character follows the last field and all the other merge data will show but not the last field. I have been able to repeat this time after time. This only happens if a field is the very last entry in a Text Frame so I consider it a bug that should be easy to fix. MaxClass

Here’s the URL I was referring to. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/ It clearly shows “1.10.3” as the latest versions. That’s the only thing I was referring to. As for the pages being “Mac-centric” we all know the Affinity group created all these wonderful application on Mac Platforms as their base requirement.

I have all three Affinity Applcations and have had them since their first release. Love them. I have my “Home Page” in Safari set to the Affinity page so I’m always aware of any new Affinity news. What I didn’t understand is that all may Mac versions are at “1.10.4”, yet the Affinity page always only shows the most current versions as “1.10.3” which is obviously not correct. I don’t know is this is just an oversight or intentional. Am I missing something here?

Carl123, Thanks for that trick and it does work, but for an overall solution it’s cumbersome. Say you have a twenty page documents that your working through and would like to lock all text frame and still be able to edit them. This would mean that you have to go to every page and select any or all text frames on the page and lock them in the Layers Panel or would like to unlock all of them at the same time. As you know you can’t do that to my knowledge. Thus having a Text Frame Lock icon in the context tool bar as a Toggle On/Off option that would allow you to lock all text frames with a single click on the icon would be very handy to have. As you know, not all pages might have identical text frame(s) and positions so being able to lock all throughout an entire document with a single click can be very useful. We’ve all accidentally moved text frame when we didn’t want to. Also, this should not affect a text frame locked in the Layers Panel as it would be an internal editing flag only. Thanks again for your option which works but only locally. I stand by my original request and the reasons why I think it’s a viable option for Publisher. MaxClass

Walt, Thanks for your response but many times I have multiple text frames on different pages that would make putting them on individual Master Pages unreasonable to work with. Not all my document formats use a strict Master Page regiment, although your point is well taken. I do make judicious use of Master Pages where I feel they are needed. Just that many times a single text frame may need to be created that would interfere with the Master Page currently in use so a text frame is added onto the document page and that can not be lock into place without loosing editing capability. Publisher is all about allowing the user flexibility to do whatever they want whenever they want anywhere they want so I still stand with my original post with the idea of being able to temporarily lock a text frame into place and still be able to fully edit it. The locking feature (icon) would be a toggle On/Off option. —MaxClass

I know I’m not the only one who works with Publisher on a daily basis and accidentally moves a text frame that was not intended. I would like to see a way to allow the user the ability to lock a text frame into place and still be able to edit the text with it. I know it can be locked in the ‘Layers” panel and I do use that when needed but for every day documents but for projects like books where the basic layout is well established being able to lock the page text frames while making editing adjustments would be a boon. My suggestion would be to possibly add a lock (toggle) icon in the contextual bar above the view area like just to the right of the “Frame text ruler” icon that would allow one to simply click on it when needed to lock text frames from moving during editing and unlock it if needed to move or adjust the text frame as required. This seems to me that it would be a unique, but very handy, addition to publisher for all those who love a text frame unintentionally when they didn’t want too. Thank you for listening. MaxClass

I agree completely with the ability to password protect our document if needed. Businesses need to protect their work, especially for copyrights, and documents one would not want their competitors to get hold of to take away any advantage they might have. This is essential. I also realize that the Affinity application themselves are in a proprietary format that other applications can’t read but anyone with Affinity’s applications has full access to the documents if they get their hands on them. Just as Serif does not want their source code to get out, Affinity users need to have access to the same sort of protections, especially for documents that go “out of house” or that might be copied and passes to those who have no right to them. Thank you in advance for considering this possibility. MaxClass

First off, much of the work I do using the Data Merge Manager (DMM) requires the merging of the same Data File information into many different individual documents. These documents may not all be done at the same time or within one output source. Some are individually merged at different time but not all together. Here’s the problem. Every time I finish the Merge of data into a document, and I need to select another document to Merge in some of the same data the DMM closes and I have to manually reopen it and reselect the same TSV Data File in order to do the merge on a second, third, or fourth document going through the same process with each one. It’s tedious. The simple solution would be to simply allow the DMM to remain open with the preselected Data file still selected, even if I had to click the “Update” button in the DMM each time. That would be minor. My solution would be to simply leave the DMM window and selected file in tact when a document that was just merged is closed so the only thing required to merge the next document with the same Data would be to open it, possibly click on the “Update” button, if that would be required, and your all set to do as many other mergeable individual documents as one might require using the same data source. Answer: Simply leave the DMM window open between documents and let the user close it as they would any other “Studio” type window if not needed. On another point. It seems the when you Merge a document and go to close it it always asks if you want to save it even thought nothing changed. I think this is due to the it knowing the Data file it just interacted with. It’s bothersome to be constantly asked that if the Data source is not linked in some with with the merge document. For each client I work with I create an individual TSV file instead of having all clients in one data base and having to pick out one of hundreds of clients data to merge. I only have to open the data source of the client I’m dealing with. Keeps it simple and straight forward and makes updating their personal data short and simple. Maybe a checkbox control in the DMM like “Link with data file?” If not checked, that data file is not linked in any way with the merge file as the next time that file is open to be merged it will be with another clients data. Hopefully this explains what I’d like to see and the reasoning behind the request. I’ve been an Affinity user of all apps since the beta of Designer, almost day one and recommend these application to alsmot everyone I deal with. MaxClass