Stokestack

Thanks for the info on this, everyone.
 
I must say that I share DavidMac's views on this issue, and I think it's symptomatic of several other major impediments I've faced using Designer. And I really, really want to use Designer, because I detest Illustrator (primarily because it lacks the only selection method I use: objects must be fully enclosed by the marquee to be selected).
 
But my work literally stops in Designer soon after I start each project, because basic functions are impossible to find. And while I think I should be able to find them after many years of using various drawing applications, I'm willing and committed to checking the documentation after fruitlessly hunting through menus and panels.
 
But the documentation has failed almost every time, lacking industry-standard (and hell, human-standard) terms for critical functions. "Skew" has been the standard term for this function as long as I've been using vector (or any graphics) apps, and that started in 1989. It seems like there are lots of these inappropriate terms in the application, and even when you use the exact terms from the UI, they don't turn up in a Help search (try searching for "snap to spread"). This came up in another thread, and the correct term in this case is canvas; that's what every other application uses and which makes sense.
 
The detachment from intuitive terminology is just one impediment to using Designer; non-intuitive design also plagues the UI. The Fill dialog is the best example I've found. We hunted around for the gradient-angle control, for example, only to find it's in a totally different part of the application's UI. Why doesn't it live where (or at least appear when) you're assigning the fill? And why does the Fill panel have a tab called "None," which has a bunch of swatches on it? That's just wack.
 
I've been a professional software engineer (on applications not totally unlike this) for quite a while. I understand that sometimes users' confusion can take developers by surprise. But you do need to take heed of it and step back and review your designs. I submitted a detailed analysis of problems with the Fill dialog and suggestions of how to fix it with a minimum of redesign, and got a defensive response and not a single aspect of this thing has been fixed. I know every user thinks his concerns are important, but I don't see how you can argue that a tab called "None" is good design.
 
Nor do I think this skew-control design is acceptable. The hit-points are invisible, tiny, and essentially undiscoverable. The cryptic "S" field on the Transform tab, way down in the corner, is not even close to an adequate substitute, since it only goes horizontally (as far as I can tell) and its increments are too coarse.
 
I really appreciate the cordial and frequent response from Affinity representatives in these forums. That goes a long way toward alleviating my annoyance and restoring my hopeful attitude toward Affinity and its products.
 
But... I urge Affinity to audit these applications for usability and fix the documentation; because now these design decisions are being propagated across two platforms, and the time to address problems is while the apps are young. If I were on Windows (and that day may be coming soon, with Apple's degradation of their computers), I'd still be using Corel Draw for sure. As it is, I have to fire up a Windows VM and do my work in Corel Draw far too often, because of something I can't find in Designer.
 
I hope that doesn't come off as too negative. I think we all want better tools, to take on the moribund offerings from Adobe. Let's go, guys!

Oh boy, this again. And, again, the answer: There is no "versionless" repository for outstanding issues, is there? If there is, please share it with us all so we can avoid this "mistake" and the follow-up snark.

Oh boy, this again. And, again, the answer: There is no "versionless" repository for outstanding issues, is there? If there is, please share it with us all so we can avoid this "mistake" and the follow-up snark.

As I found countless of similar threads it was hard to pick one and usually if something is solved years later you find it in the last entries of popular topics. I came here via google as i find searching inside the forum very tiresome so I make in site search with google which has better matches to my questions. 
But thank you for pointing out it deals with V1, I had not noticed. So do you know if this was issue was solved in V2? I would appreciate a link to an up-to-date info, anyone else who stumbles in here might profit from that, too. I am looking for solutions in V2 and info about resolving updates in the near future. 
Thank you!
 

That is an absurd comment. You should be directing this question to Affinity, not a user. Do you expect users to log in, year after year, and re-post their feature requests under new version numbers to herd them along in perpetuity?

The title of this thread is ' Objects to "No Print" '. It's not tied to any version number. It's a feature request, so it's still valid.

PLEASE enable "no print" as an option for objects, or at least for layers. Yes, some of us still design for print!

Just resized hundreds of images based on a specific height. I really, really needed this feature.

+1 for me.  Transform objects separately is a great feature that I just read about on this thread, but it resizes proportionately, and I would love to resize all to the dimension I type in the Transform text field.

I have also been resizing hundreds of objects manually.    Often it is quicker to copy and paste the amended one to replace the originals...
 
THIS FEATURE is a MUST.

That button has a different approach then this feature request thread. The existing button neither allows to
• set objects of different size or angle to 1 certain common value nor to
• add/subtract 1 absolute amount to multiple objects of different sizes or angles.

You're always quick, Will, thank you.
It may not have been on that screen, but I did select the "Save into original" multiple times and that didn't work.
Then I tried the "Save into" choice and selected the original folder, it wouldn't work that way either. I took a break after spending 20 minutes getting nowhere.
Finally, I tried a new folder. You can see from the "Save as" choices that I selected only JPG. They were finally saved, but there were also copies of AFPhoto created. And none of the JPGs had either Macros applied: files were still 144 dpi and RGB8.
I gave up after wasting 45 minutes and did the four files individually: total time was 5–6 minutes. But that will drive me nuts in the future, and I'll have to go back and use PS or my old standby, Graphic Converter.

Hi all.
I searched the Designer help for "kerning" and got zero hits. So that's the first major problem.
I selected a line of text, and examined the Character properties panel. In the kerning drop-down, everything except "Auto" and 0 was greyed out.
I also noticed the "Character" and "Paragraph" buttons in the toolbar. Clicking on them didn't appear to change the type of text I was defining. So why are they there?
In other vector programs, selecting text with the node-selection tool lets you adjust kerning by dragging a control point on each character. Not in Designer.
So is this functionality just missing?
Thanks for any insight.

Agree on all points, Stokestack.  I dropped PS/ACR/Bridge for similar reasons, but here we are again.  I haven't tried Gimp in a while...
https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/
"The photo editor you’ve been dreaming of....equipped with hundreds of timesaving tools and a completely redesigned UI to make your editing experience more seamless than ever."
Yeah....right.
 

It's a year and a half since "alazio" kindly provided the solution above, and this is still clear as mud in the app nor have I see this solution in the documentation.
I just lost a half hour trying to get a batch to work.  I had selected the 1st option, "Save to original location," plus "authorized" that location after having selected it.  "OK" remained greyed out.  After finding this solution, I used the 2nd option, "Save into," selected the path, and it's finally working.  (Or not.  I'm converting .dng's to .jpg, but the .jpg's are saving very underexposed, yet they individually export fine, so now I've another puzzle to solve. Exporting via batch is not an option.)
So, why does the 1st option exist?  And why did I just wasted a half hour plus put time into this forum because Affinity, a year and a half later, hasn't fixed or at least clarified this in the app, let alone the documentation?

Just saw your reply... Yes, they're doing annual subscriptions as well. I've been using CorelDRAW since version 1 of Windows when it came out, and later became a beta tester for it. I even won an honorable mention in the old Corel International Design Contest. I'm quite fond of the program because it's incredibly intuitive and easy to use. Having worked in hightech for over 25 years, I'm familiar with the notion of piling on with complaints about software development, but I also know that if you're competing again an "industry standard," and having to achieve market share over proven products, you really have to listen to your users. A good start would be to make tools behave the same across all Affinity products since one of their banner achievements is making them to interoperable. But again, things like nonprinting layers, muti-page spreads in publisher, easy masking, temporary tool choice, simply made keylines, etc., would go a long way toward that.

I really like Corel Draw, which I agree is far superior to Illustrator. What's your beef with it? Did Corel go to a software-rental scam too?
I don't use Draw anymore because I don't use Windows anymore. There have been a couple of disastrous attempts at Mac versions of Draw, which were quickly abandoned.

Ok, sorry. I did not check the post that was referred. I agree, print status (the status affecting also export) would be very useful.

I suppose the feature has pretty limited usage. It would be useful e.g. in showing alternative language layers in manuals, or some other information that needs to be hidden or shown on a global basis. Affinity apps (specifically Publisher) do not support global layers so PDF/OCG layers only have a page-specific scope when created from within Affinity apps, so the feature would mainly be useful e.g. in printing purposes, to isolate (show/hide) specific layers to simulate a process that is common when using PDF files containing native Illustrator layers (and which can typically be created only by Illustrator).

In versions 1 of Publisher and Designer there is a special layer with a capital letter L that shows appended to the layer name like this:

If the Designer document shown above is opened in Photo v2, it shows like this (the layer type is no longer appended to the name but only shows as a tool tip when placing the mouse cursor over the top left of the layer icon):

I agree, it is unnecessarily cryptic and definitely not intuitive, what is meant by exporting layers in PDF export settings, but it means that if the option is checked, these kinds of special layers are exported as "PDF Layers" (known as OCG layers = optional content group) that can be made individually visible/invisible in certain PDF readers (like e.g. Acrobat Reader). [It does not help at all that practically everything that appears in the "Layers" panel is a "layer" -- a kind of a container -- in similar sense -- or that in other apps layers are in many ways different creatures.]

Photo conceptually doesn't deal & support multi-page document files, thus it doesn't offer to generate these. - The best to deal with multi-page documents is Publisher here and to some limited degree Designer when using it's Artboards.

And keep it as feature : layers which don’t get exported.
 

When using templates, you often don't want the template to print. I can find no way to mark a layer as non-printing in Designer. I would expect to see this in the layer list.
Thanks!

Would be a welcome add. In CSP, we can set layers to "Draft". They will not print, but also, in the Export dialogue, we are able to "check on/off" Draft layers. This is handy for showing off process, but also for practical purposes, creating raster finals...

Not really a workaround. I'm trying to save myself the step of turning off and on layers to export, not add an extra step.