thadeusz

- When changing a picture frame to an outline (to change a ractangle picture frame to a freeform frame) the image disappears from the list of placed images. It's just gone. - I had some jumping in text flow, when changing a picture into a picture frame (containing an image). Text was reflowing incorrectly. When chnaging something in the text body, it somehow came back to it's correct flow. - Not a real bug, but for me it feels like one: When I change text frame scaling behavior to none, please make it none. Why is it moving the image, when I change the text frame's height or width? I don't get. And suddenly, after some rescaling of the image inside the picture frame it changes it's behavior to what it should be from beginning. Very weird. Please make it consistent and not moving, when selecting none as property. - and, as we are talking: Please consider a tab "color space" in ressource list. That would make it much easier to find incorrect ones already there. All Mac Publisher Vers. 1.9.2.

PDF 1.4 is reducing transparency. That is still required for some print shops. Some are accepting PDF 1.7 too. I had some issues with Affinity PDFs using PDF 1.7. There is a small chance, that when rasterising it in a print shop, results are msiinterpreted. I guess, it's when print shops are using old versions.

Now I'm back. My screenshot below is from Export - PDF export settings - more... Above "honor spot colors" this selection should be not chosen. This is by the way my export setting for a regular print job with two spot colors, without any CMYK color. To your other question - unfortunately I don't know any budget tool to check if sepations are correctly. That's why I and many others are trying to push Affinity to give us at least some kind of separation preview inside Publisher. I'd even pay for another Affinity tool which would compare to Acrobat - having preflight, separation and overprinting preview/check. At the moment I'm using my good old Acrobat CS4, but I'd love to get rid of that.

Just to make sure (and because color palette in Affinity sucks) - there needs to be a spot color defined in the color palette (see image, color symbol with dot). Maybe you have this correct anyway... On export to PDF you should tick honor spot colors, but not tick the one above (separate to CMYK or so - sorry, I don't have the english UI at hand). In my case it worked the best with PDF 1.4 or PDF 1.7, but not the X profiles. Just check (and of course it depends, what you need for output). Where are you checking separation? Acrobat? Make sure to select correct embeded profile. In my case it's normaly jumping to a wrong profile and sometimes messing up the correct separation. To get this running in my case was a bit of a nightmare. There was even another weird thing going on - in program preferences there is a point where you can change gamma for whatever mixdown with text. It was set wrong, even I never deliberately changed it (must be 2.2). This caused all spot colors to be CMYK. This can also be done also in every layer, which is another risk to break spot colors. As there is no overprinting possible (only for a whole color in palette), I use layer mode "multiply" to get objects/images overprinted. But as for now, it works solid.

That's really missing here. Using eyedropper is especially useful with character styles, like you have a certain size, width or spacing and want to apply it to a few words later on without creating a new style. Hope this function is coming at some point. For bigger projects it's of course better to work with many styles.

Hi MxHeppa, this works correctly when using greyscale images or K only from a CMYK image. You can recolor your image using a spot color (best to define it in swatches panel before using). I think, you also need to be in an CMYK document. You should be careful, when outputting. It's easily broken and CMYK separation again. You can search in forum, many have posted on this topic already.

Hehe, this started in 2015. So let's recap - it will not come, even if we are many users wishing for it.. Just found this on Youtube (forgive me, if it was already mentioned somewhere) - with the help of two small apps, it's possible to go from SVG to editable motion shapes. So there should be a more direct way, if serif would like to dive into it...

Yes, for CMYK this seams to be a good way to check overprinting. But just to make clear - there is no such workaround for spot colors. I'm using them quite a lot in my projects, so that's clearly missing. Last year I switched completely to Publisher (still need Acrobat for output check), but it has been hard most of the time. Once you are there, it's kind of ok, but it could be more fun, missing a lot details in the app. Still, I hope it will improve over time, but for my taste it's just too much missing, too badly implemented and improving really slow..

Happy new year, non-existing separation preview!

Overprint can be done using blend mode multiply. For any object. But you need to be careful with your output settings. Especially spot colors are easily changed into CMYK. It did work with PDF 1.7 and 1.4, but not with PDF-X versions. There is a hidden gamma setting (whatever it is for?) in each layer setting, that can ruin proper spot color output too. But not going into much detail here, just saying, that multiply works quite well for overprinting elements.

You're welcome...

Haha, I think you have to push more often. I'm a bit sad, that there is no reaction or roadmap from serif on some of the more important issues for professionals. Some issues are around for years now. And you are right with needed softproof/separation functions. I also had enough trouble with this, especially using spot colors. I stopped recommending Affinity for now, but I'm sticking with it and shout out from time to time. It just takes more time, I guess.. So, let's push together!

Wow, that was quite hidden. Many thanks for finding out! I just found, that I had this 1,45 gamma in my preferences. That's why even new text boxes din't keep my spot color. Maybe it would be good to have at least a warning in the preflight checklist? I hope, working with spot colors would be more robust. They easily break into 4c when doing something. But finally I found a way, even the print shop is ok with it. I'm also hoping, there will be a preview for overprinting/separation at some point. Or you sell us a little Acrobat substitute app.. But anyway, many thanks!

First I had created a new document in Designer - with my artwork. Saved it. Then I placed it inside a new document, where I placed the stairs image before. After that I duplicated this layer with mask for each step. To change color or anything in my artwork, I pushed "edit document" (in the upper panel right under menus). My artwork opens and I can make changes. And yes, this workflow can be done with symbols as well. Maybe even better.

This is because we are in the "Feature requests and suggestions" section here. Maybe it's a bit problematic, to have everything in one place. I mean there are bug reports, help for beginners, dicussing shortcomings, all here in a wild mix. I see this thread more as a "demand" towards developing a professional tool. I think (and hope) this is recognized by serif, so theay find a good way to speed up things.

I'm with you, @feste, there are a lot of things missing in the style management. Even the available minimal version of a nested style - "first word(s)" in paragraph attributes - is badly documented. At least you can use a tabulator to define, where the style is changing. I was just settting up a document with around 30 styles, which depend on each other and I feel never confident, that they travel through. Never felt that way with my good old IndesignCS4 by the way. I have the feeling, that erasing all attributes also doesn't apply sometimes. But it's really difficult to describe problems exactly. It feels not ready at the moment, only for light works. Really light works. Also on the simple side of things, still there is no way of just copying a text and past it's attributes - without the need to create a style. Argh..

And here as a bonus is a good old fashioned movie - showing the way I've described above. I'm using Affinity Designer, but it works also in the other programs. Sorry for the german UI.. And one extra - if you need to refine the masks you could break them up into a path (from beeing a rectangle). previs.mov

Haha, that's a great idea to show those steps.. And there are of course different ways to reach the result.

I guess you are talking about previsualizing it, not preparing for print? The easies way would be to place an Affinity file containing your artwork onto your canvas. You should get away with it without having to distort for perspective, as looking at the stairs from this angle there is almost no distortion of the printed image. After this you should place a mask for a step, duplicate the layer (with the placed artwork and it's mask) and do this for every step. Of course you need to refine masks and position. Should be done in a couple of minutes. The good thing would be - you can change your artwork in the placed Affinity file.

Wow, that looks really bad indeed. Does it help to turn on hyphenation? Could it balancing the leading a bit? Maybe you could also look into word spacing of paragraphs, bringing min and max value a bit closer or full justification settings. But it shouldn't look so different, for sure.

I recently had a problem, where at some point I had one text frame separating correctly as a spot color and an exactly the same looking text frame was separating only in CMYK. The problem was, I didn't know, how I created this difference and how to fix it. I wrote to this forum anyway and maybe it is a bug. After your "declaration of truth", this bug is not allowed to exist. As much as I understand your will for a clear question, sometimes it's not possible. And I think this should be ok. No one is forced to answer. But there should be enough room for those who want to share and help each other. I found the starting question very good described, even I couldn't recreate it. So it would be interesting to know, how it could happen.

But guys, really, I'm asking again, why scaling of the text box makes any difference, how you think of it? If you have an (unconnected) textblock, scaling can be quite useful. But as soon as it's connected, do you really want to have your perfectly prepared text styles to be scaled? And then - only a few lines of text? Maybe the text which was in the box when scaled, maybe some lines of text from the first paragraph? I have never seen such a weird behaviour and - if you don't mind - I call it a bug, others might call it a strange feature. Again, what's missing here is, that there is no indication, that a text frame is scaled at all. That would be helpful to not run into unnotified scaling issues. In Indesign scaling parameter is also not shown, but only the text which is in the textbox when scaling is done, will be bigger. Makes more sense to me.

Great, thank you!

What you point out with the UI and how things work is exactly how I feel about it. I'm a more from the professional side of things, working for many years in all the programs which came before Publisher (Indesign, QuarkXpress et cetera) and I wished, serif would have chosen a way of redifining the UI for the better. As it is, it's more of a dumped down version of Indesign. A good example would have been something like Final Cut Pro X, where you can easily start as a beginner without knowing too much, but also use it as your main professional tool. The idea there is to hide complex details from the basic functions, but still have them around, if needed, and have them accessible in a very fast way. But maybe I'm going a bit off-topic here..

But why are only the the first three lines scaled up? I understand, what you want to say. Helping would be a status information actual showing the scaling of a text box. Which is not there. Also, is it really useful to scale text in a connected text box? But hey, you could make a great lens effect in your book. All text on page 12 is resized for people with limited vision..