Stokestack

This also happened in Designer. You search for a term in Help, and then select a hit. Instead of the relevant topic, you just get the starting page of the entire help file. But... not always. Sometimes the previous action, or the presence or absence of a selection on your canvas seems to play a role. At first I wasn't able to get a screen grab, because simply the act of starting Screenshot and coming back to Photo jolted it out of the bug. I haven't figured out what the pattern is, but the problem occurs frequently. AffinityHelpFail.mov

I was trying to find how to convert artistic text into paragraph ("frame") text. I pressed the "paragraph" button in the toolbar, but it did nothing. The ToolTip says, helpfully, "Paragraph." Come on, guys.

Thanks for the info. Yes, definitely seems like a bug. The fill UI remains impressively and unnecessarily obscure.

Thanks for taking the time to post that. But then... what was I changing when selecting the color in the color well? Why is it enabled?

I think I'll just wait for Affinity to fix the UI... and run Corel Draw in a VM in the meantime.

I didn't set it to 0. And... that's not the problem. Thanks for the reply, though. That does seem like a dumb default. nopacity.mov

Hi. I often encounter situations in Designer where a control or setting does nothing, despite being enabled. Here's one example: I had an object selected, and went into the Gradient Fill panel. I picked a color in the color well; and although the fill color changed slightly, it was not the color I picked, and subsequent picks had no effect. gradientNoColor.mov

Ah, platitudes. So helpful.

That does seem like the best workaround so far. Thanks.

This, for one: And then Legarto discovered that his suggestion didn't work after all. The others that involved drawing objects behind the others weren't what I was asking for either. In the end, the artboard color strikes me as the best one; but it still requires you to use artboards.

Actually I did, but then after reading other posts hurriedly, I couldn't remember which ideas panned out and which didn't. I will try what you suggest. Thanks again!

No. People are still floating ideas for workarounds, and then discovering that they might not work after all. I can't control the process that other people undertake. I didn't say I wanted anything; I was answering a question from someone else.

So what? I listed the things I had already tried, in order to head off ineffective suggestions and save time. I also mentioned the document setup, but for some reason you're ignoring that: Translation: Here are two things I tried, and they didn't do the job. More importantly: Why are you quibbling about that, when the title of the post tells you everything you need to know?

Because other people suggested them as a workaround to not being able to change the color of the canvas! It's in the title of this thread.

Thanks for all that info, guys. It seems we're back to the original solution of putting a colored square behind your work. And I still think that's lame. Also... I don't use artboards. I'm not necessarily against it, but I've never had a need for one yet. But while we're discussing them: Why is there an artboard "tool?" What is it for? It doesn't seem to do anything after you create an artboard, which could easily be done with a menu item, hotkey, or button. Thanks, but what if you want some kind of template or guide design? Non-printing layers are basic functionality for an app like this. Having to go and disable it, then re-enable it after every print is ridiculous and pretty much guaranteed to waste lots of paper and ink as you forget to do this once per session.

Thanks for taking the time to put that together, Legarto. That's probably the best suggestion at this point. The printing/non-printing flag is another feature that one would expect. The "personas" strike me as asinine, especially to have one devoted entirely to exporting. But maybe I'll change my mind.

Thanks, but that doesn't do it. It only changes the color outside the artboard.

Thanks. It was a sequence of coincidences to produce a perplexing result, for sure. While I find that there's a lot of counter-intuitive UI in Designer, this isn't an example. All of the behavior exhibited here is potentially useful and implemented reasonably.

Thanks for the reply. In my third post above (probably easy to miss in this long thread) I already note that I figured out the opacity issue. And I'm not selecting the rectangle at all. I'm using the Text tool to place text on top of the rectangle. I'm not using a selection tool; I'm using a Text tool. I expect a text tool to add text, not select arbitrary other objects. I don't expect anything to be converted from one kind of object to another, either. I'm just adding elements to the canvas.

Nice analysis, gents. However, we still have the fundamental problem of the text not being added...

Well, thanks for your time! I appreciate it.

Indeed! Version 1.7.1, Mac OS 10.14.6 Using a mouse.

Thanks, but please note that I didn't get any text to appear. The rectangle's fill simply disappears, but we now know that this is because I happened to hit a numeric key and changed the opacity. Yet another video, with history panel: rectangleMan.mov

Thanks. The layer list still just says rectangle. Here's the sequence again with all relevant UI. I draw the rectangle, then click with the Text tool and press the "1" key. stillRectangle.mov

Thanks, but where does it show me "doing" that? I never took any action to do that, and the screen shot of the layer list was taken after everything else occurred. So if it was changed into another type of object, that should be indicated in the layer list. And it wasn't; nor is it ever. I've repeated this sequence many times now. Nothing ever says "shape text."