David Grigg

I'm having similar problems with anchors in Affinity Publisher. I'm trying to set up a manually generated Table of Contents (manual, because it needs extensive customisation). But it's incredibly frustrating. Firstly, Publisher puts anchors in automatically where I haven't told it to, such as on sub-headings with classes I've created (so not inbuilt heading levels). It also puts unwanted anchors in running chapter titles generated from section names, filling in text boxes from the master spread. This results in a many-page article having many identically-named anchors. Secondly, the Anchors panel is almost useless. Trying to delete anchors in it is very frustrating because trying to put the pointer on the trash can icon is so close to the bottom right of the panel that the Mac constantly thinks I'm trying to resize the panel. Anchors in the running chapter titles can't be deleted at all. Also, trying to turn off the "Export as PDF bookmark" setting on individual anchors doesn't appear to work from this panel. And surely it should be possible to EDIT the anchors from this panel? Thirdly, something weird sometimes happens with hyperlinks to anchors. I've hyperlinked items in the contents pages to the appropriate anchors, but sometimes this doesn't "stick" and I get pre-flight errors saying the hyperlink is invalid. No matter how many times I delete the hyperlink and relink to the internal anchor (which DOES exist), it doesn't stick and ends up being hyperlinked randomly to some other anchor, which is invalid (I think it's one of the ones in the running chapter headings, perhaps because these fields are set up in the master pages?). It's all very disappointing.

Every single time I want to export a publication to PDF I need to remember to select "All Pages" rather than "All Spreads". Is there any way of making "All Pages" the default for this?

Oh! I get it! I was trying to use the Stroke property which you see in the toolbar when you have a single curve selected. That one disappears as soon as you select more than one curve. I need to use the Stroke Panel tab/inspector instead. Thanks so much for taking the trouble to educate me.

Yes, exactly. "Properties Panel from the Stroke Panel" If I select a single vector object like a path, I get this dialog and can change the width, etc. But if I select two or more vector objects (paths/lines) I can no longer access this panel. I want to be able to change the width on a bunch of different paths in one process rather than having to individually select them and change width individually, then go on to the next... the latter is way too tedious when I have many such objects.

In Affinity Designer, I have a whole series of vector lines, all of a particular stroke width. I want to change the stroke width on all of these objects (there are over 100). I can select these multiple vector objects, but then I can no longer access the properties panel. It seems like this should be simple, but there seems no way to do it in Affinity Designer. If there isn't, can we please have it? At present, I would have to individually select each line, change the width, go on to the next line, etc. And Designer doesn't have any interface, it seems to automation tools like AppleScript.

I was looking at Affinity Designer as a replacement for the subscription-based Adobe InDesign, but it's not quite there, mainly for this reason about text flow (though it's wonderful in many other respects). But if there's something called "Affinity Publisher" in the wings, I'm very excited!