jmwellborn

@Lusus welcome! Could you try this: Go to the Forum section NEWS AND INFORMATION then scroll down to the topic “We Want To Help” then in the first entry by Ash, click on the “90-day free trial” words underlined in blue. That will send you to the Affinity web page where you should be able to download the trial version of Publisher. Hope this works for you!!

@thomaso! It feels like 1001 (actually almost 1002) years of experience these days! My son's early childhood motto was "Mothers don't cry. They do things for people!" And yes, all documents would have been affected. But I have been sewing medically-approved anti-virus masks instead of working at the computer for the past few days and had just started a new document to create a single page instruction sheet. Placed some Guides, wrote the stuff, printed it, closed down Publisher, wrote my "bug report" and went back to the sewing machine. Are we having fun yet?🙃

Welcome, @Bobanian! Just in case somebody else doesn't help first, there are a few things to do first before you can cease being a "giant B." Affinity waits until a new forum member has at least 3 or more posts, and 3 or 4 days before this is permitted. That was established to prevent spammers from taking advantage of the Forums and new members. Once you have passed that stage, you can then sign in and click on your giant B at the top right of any forum page, and you will arrive at your own page. Then click on the little square icon inside your giant burgundy B on the left, (see picture below) and you will open up the area where you can upload a photo, resize it, etc. Hope this helps! !

Thanks @thomaso! Problem solved. My attorney son was fiddling with Publisher while visiting during stay-at-home-coronavirus time. Evidently he unchecked VIEW>Show Margins, which I have never unchecked since August 30, 1018 with the first Publisher Beta. Since I have never changed the setting, it never occurred to me to look there. In fact, I must confess that I didn't even know that there WAS an option to turn the margins off. Anyway, you are a trooper and thank you again. Got to see what else he turned off!!

Well, @thomaso and @walt.farrell if I were stupid enough to have Preview Mode on I would eventually figure it out.😖 I may be the village idiot, but I am not that stupid. The process works perfectly with Photo. It does not work with Publisher. Just tried it again. Here, for your delectation are screen shots from Publisher. Not from Photo. The perfectly blank canvas (second screen shot) is NOT in preview mode. It is after clicking on the Preset "basic letter with margins" which I created to demonstrate the problem. In my humble opinion, this is a bug in Publisher. That is why I posted it here. Cheers!

If you use FILE>NEW and under the section "Document units" choose inches, and save it, then the next time you open FILE>NEW your document should still be in inches. At least that is what I have done on my MAC. Also, if after you have established your setting for the new document and click on Custom you will get a preset box outlined in blue in "My Presets" which you could then rename to something such as "Default document" and then test it out. Should work. Hope this helps.

I have tried several times to create a new template with specific margins. All settings appear to be fine, I click on Create, then click to open the new document. Blank canvas. No margins. When I try using the Preset the same thing happens. Every other setting is there. No margins.

@Alfred and @walt.farrell. Sorry gang. I did buy Designer for iPad from the Affinity store. I was NOT redirected to the Mac app store. The only app I have purchased from the MAC app store was Photo back in 2017. I decided to uninstall that version last year and purchased it again from the Affinity store. Now every app on my computer comes from the Affinity store. Maybe Affinity has changed its procedure since last year?

@AJW. Welcome!! An excellent place to start is with the very thorough article in affinityspotlight.com, “Jump Into Affinity Photo.” It has the advantage of being able to be read as slowly or quickly as you would wish wish as you work your way around. Hope this helps.

@SPMH if you spend $20.00 for the two iPad apps, then you will have the superb qualities of the Apple pencil, plus you can seamlessly move your work to your laptop to use all the extra bells and whistles those versions provide. I have both the Apple pencil and an XP Pen Deco 03 which does a very nice job. But I am not an artist. I just fiddle for fun.

Did you try to buy Affinity Photo for iPad from the Affinity store? I successfully bought Affinity Designer for iPad that way.

Checked the patterns. Very sophisticated!

I am a rank amateur at brushes, but I have made some image brushes and found that they could be created and worked properly when I made them from a PNG which had been Saved Without Background. Perhaps you could try that?

@firstdefence Great minds on the same path! In the meantime, having downloaded a medical school pattern for making face masks, I shall "improve the shining moments" (to quote a Victorian-era and very smarmy book) by sewing same with sheeting fabric. Lots of them. To donate to the nearest hospital. Under the circumstances, probably a better plan than sitting here, fiddling with fabrics Styles!! Stay well!

I did, and they work perfectly.

@Hanko Welcome! Tap on the word Affinity Photo (or Designer, or Publisher) then click on Preferences then click on the arrow beside the little box with the tiny black squares, and choose User Interface. Then you can not only change your interface to light gray, but also by using the sliders at the top, choose just how much gray you wish. Below are my settings. I use the light gray interface. I am using a Mac but hopefully this is the same for Windows!

Since all of the Affinity personnel are working from home, they may be a bit slow to get to all of the questions on these Forums. Perhaps you could email them, and ask for help sorting this out. Here is what they say re Customer Support: "To contact our Customer Service Team online, Affinity customers can email affinity@serif.com." Hope this helps. I am sure your remote friend would be really delighted with the gift!!

@Maphco perhaps the biggest difference is that artistic text can be manipulated in ways that frame text cannot.

Thank you @Old Bruce and @R C-R. Looks as though I might be well advised to upgrade first to High Sierra, go through the aches and pains, and then move to Mojave when I am stuck with another Safari deadline. I think Apple usually supports Safari for at least one OS before the current one. The dreaded INTERFACE looms for my 2017 iMAC. As for loading time, the Affinity apps are already taking some time to load, because they are up to their necks in fonts, palettes, assets, styles, brushes, and goodness knows what other goodies. (Goodies dutifully backed up on a flash drive.). Never mind. They are still tons times faster than I am!! I have a 2013 MAC currently on Yosemite which might be a good candidate to check the trials and tribulations of Mojave first. H’m’m’m. Decisions, decisions.

Really excellent point @R C-R! The howls of anguish would probably be legion from people who bought new hardware. Which reminds me, could you tell me how you have fared with upgrading to Mojave? I am desperately clinging to Sierra because everything works so seamlessly, but sooner or later Apple is going to deep-six supporting my compatible Safari.

@boughton editor have you entered "Linking Text Frames" in HELP? You say "clicking on the circle above the box" - do you mean the little circle attached with a line at the top center of the text frame? That circle allows you to turn the text frame to the left, right, on a 360 degree circle. Actually, you click on the small blue or red triangle about 3/4 the way down the right-hand side of the text frame. It will be red if you have overflowing text, blue if the text is all within the one frame. When you click on the red triangle, it will link to a new text frame. If you have already drawn your text frames and want to link them, you first click on the right hand blue triangle, and in the next text frame you click about 3/4 of the way up on the left side of the frame. (Clear as mud). See attached. If you have not already found it if you go to TEXT>and scroll down and place a check-mark beside Show Special Characters you will be able to see all that all your links are correct. I have attached a small portion of the Publisher HELP section so you will see what you are looking for. Hope this helps.

Are you on Windows? If so, I cannot help you. I just tried this with three separate single-page documents created with Publisher, and did not have this problem. I used FILE>OPEN and selected all three documents at the same time. They all three came into Publisher and I checked each document to see whether I could use the Text Frame Tool and change something in one file without disturbing the others. Does your Context Toolbar look like the attached? (except, of course, for the name of the files).

What a great site! They seem to have a very precise search engine as well. Enter "tiger" and you get stuff with stripes. Not pictures of bazaars in Calcutta (or wherever).

@Engine44 Here is a way that I have done this. (And a bit sloppy around the edges, because I left out step 6 for File One.) Not nearly as sophisticated as the method @GarryP has shown! Two separate files: File One: 1. Place image (either PNG or JPEG) on a new transparent document. 2. LAYER>New Mask Layer, and be sure that the mask layer is a child under the image layer. 3. Select the Brush Tool and a brush from the Textures category (I used Grunge pattern 01). 4. Paint with black around the edges of the image with whatever size brush you choose to remove all sharp edges, while bobbing and weaving to get the desired irregular look. 5. Use Crop Tool to bring the image down to a size that includes all of the brushed area, but eliminates as much of your unwanted canvas as possible. 6. Zoom in on the image layer and if you find any remaining hard edges, rasterize your image layer, then use the Erase Brush Tool and either with a soft round brush setting, or with your same Texture setting, carefully erase any bits and pieces of hard edges still showing. 7. Group all layers in the Layers Panel. 8. Export as PNG, Selection Without Background. File Two: 1. Create New Document. 2. Place the PNG created in File One. 3. Use the Rectangle Shape and draw a rectangle over the image layer. 3. On the Layers Panel, drag the rectangle layer underneath the image layer. 4. With the Move Tool, click on the rectangle layer and drag it to the correct size to frame your image. 5. Go to the Context Toolbar, click on Fill. 6. Select the color you want and optional noise. 7. In the Stroke box, choose the size you want for the stroke and any color you wish. (Or if you want a paper texture, you can use the Gradient Tool, go to "Type" on the Context Toolbar, select Bitmap, and locate one of your texture files.) 8. With image layer highlighted, go to Layer Effects (fx at bottom of layers panel) and choose Gaussian Blur to soften the edges between the image and the rectangle. 9. Highlight all layers in the Layers Panel. 9. Export as PNG without background.

@Don Lee At the rate the stock market is going, it would be a ver'r'r'r'y long time at best! By then, I will possibly be too old to totter off to the beach. Think I will just have a "pretend" cottage such as yours.😇