4dimage

I already posted this with the "normal" boolean operations.
 
But the error also applies to a montage group
v2-vector-montage-boolean-compound-pathes-fail.afdesign
I have the same path objects for the "VIP". The rectangle is set to subtract and the letter "P" disapears. Additionally i did some basic shapes. I built the "donut" before by hand. Subtractiong two simple circles. The "VIP" instead is artistic text -> vectors (In Kurven umwandeln).

 

The other boolean modes also produce some weird results for the "P". The handmade donut behaves as expected.
 
 

Have a similar bug with the normal boolean operations and the montage boolean operations. There seems to be a difference between compound pathes created from scratch and those created from text -> vector.
 

Are you getting any crash reports, Margaret?
You can press the Windows key and R, and paste this into the Run box: %USERPROFILE%\.affinity\Designer\2.0\crashreports\reports
For v1 opening to a blank screen, that kind of sounds like a problem with NVIDIA Surround. See this FAQ:
 

While I am all with Serif for the huge undertaking they have been carrying on since years, I have to share Kal's frustration. What I can start to see with V2 is this:
- Photo and Designer are strong competitors to the Adobe equivalents. They still miss things, but do so many things well. AI features don't compel me. All considered, I was already mostly happy with the first version.
- Integration with the Mac's UI is even worse than before. This may seem a little thing for our fellows using Windows, but it is extremely important for us Mac users. We chose the difficult way of living out of the crowd because we love the comfort and elegance of that UI. Programs interfering with our lifelong meditation can't find good reception.
- While adding some extraordinary features, like side notes, and continuing to have the older, like live preview of changes, Publisher is very far from being an InDesign replacement. It can already be fine for someone working in isolation, but not for people working in a team or with collaborators, due to the lack of any way to be integrated in a production flux. It still lacks some fundamental things for long projects, like cross-references. It can't deal with RTL and CJK languages, that are all part of my everyday job. And then, there is the same issue of the application frame breaking the usefulness of the clean, multi-window Mac environment.
I was sincerely hoping to be able to finally trash InDesign in the next few months. But at this point I fear it will be several years away from now. The only two solutions, in the meantime, are to either keep a machine (real or virtual) with a current Mac OS just to use InDesign CS6, or to switch to InDesign CC. This latter solution repels me, since it would mean making all the forthcoming documents hostage of Adobe and its aleatory price and plan policies.
Not a great situation, in the freelance/small shops publishing world.
How bad I feel? I'm considering alternatives to using page layout software, entirely.
Paolo
 

Exciting times. With precious little in the way of recent updates, some users wondered if Affinity was dead—but no, we were promptly told that they were just focused on the next major version. And four months later, here it is!
A common expression amongst users has been 'hopefully in version 2', so here's my list of hoped for changes. I'm about to fire up my new V2 apps for the first time and see if all the hopeful waiting has been rewarded. I've divided my list into two main categories: 'UI frustrations' and 'Missing or broken features'.
 
UI frustrations
Window management (Separated Mode)
Ever since MultiFinder appeared on the Mac in 1987, we've been able to run multiple apps and see their document windows side by side. Over the years came other improvements like drag and drop between apps and documents. You lose some of those benefits when an app takes up the whole screen with a solid background. For this reason, many of us preferred a separated workspace (turning off Application Frame in Adobe apps), but after switching to Affinity, quickly discovered that Affinity's Separated Mode was pretty broken, with document windows and Studio panels seemingly having no knowledge of each other's existence.
After much criticism, Affinity finally responded in June 2020 with a help article titled 'Increase your efficiency with Affinity’s Separated Mode'. There was no admission of any issues though, and I parodied the unhelpful article in this forum comment.
Changes in V2
Affinity seems to have finally acknowledged the issues with Separated Mode. Their solution? Remove it altogether! The new 'Float View to Window' command kind of gives us the worst of both worlds… separate windows that still aren't aware of your Studio panels, and a big old solid-grey app window obscuring every other background app. It looks like Affinity might have just put this one in the too hard basket.
Panel management
Resizing Studio panels in V1 is somewhere between painful and impossible. To be fair, this was never a perfect experience with Adobe either, but Affinity takes the pain to a new level. Can't see most of your Paragraph panel? Hover your cursor very carefully over that one-pixel hairline between panels… Nope, there's the 'no entry' cursor telling you the panel can't be resized (for some unknown reason). Double-click to minimise a panel or two to make more space… only to find that it added several inches of completely empty space to a different panel instead. Try to resize that one. Nope, there's the 'no entry' cursor again. Start double-clicking ALL the panels until you can finally see the one you want. Utter frustration.
Changes in V2
After playing around with panels for just a few minutes, the results are mixed. Firstly, I can resize panels (without seeing the 'no entry' icon all the time)—great! Secondly, the hover-zone seems to have expanded from one pixel to around two—I'll take it! Beyond that, things are still quite unpredictable. For example, I currently have a massive Swatches panel full of mostly empty space, and a tiny Text Styles panel below it which is showing me only two lines. I can resize the Text Styles panel to my liking, but if I then minimise and reopen it, it's right back to the way it was—tiny and useless. Whatever algorithm is determining these panel sizes is clearly not fit for purpose.
On a positive note, on the Mac the Studio panels are now listed under the Window menu—exactly where they should have been all along!
Oh one other thing… I lost the Swatches panel in Designer. As in, it just totally vanished. 😳 I can hide it and unhide it again from the menu, but it does not reappear. Restarting the app doesn't bring it back either. This could be a bit of a problem!! (Edit: Found!)
Working with guides
Creating a simple guide the normal way, by dragging out from the ruler, works fine. Unfortunately though, Affinity apps lack the power and flexibility of other drawing apps like Illustrator, which let you select and manipulate guides like normal objects—positioning them numerically for example, or hitting delete to remove then. Illustrator even lets you convert normal vector objects into guides.
With Affinity apps, you have to drag a guide off the edge of a page to remove it. The issues with this approach are (1) you have to be zoomed out so that you can see the edge of the page, and (2) it's inconsistent with the behaviour of other objects, which can be safely dragged and positioned beyond the edge of the page. This creates confusion for users as discussed on threads like this one.
Instead, Affinity gives us the Guides Manager. It's a useful tool, but it would be less necessary if guides were more flexible in the first place.
Changes in V2
There appears to be no changes to the way guides work in V2.
Working with colour swatches
In my opinion, Affinity seriously dropped the ball in V1 with the way colour swatches are handled. Here are some of the features that are missing or broken:
There's no obvious place to put your custom colours. You have to find the 'Add Document Palette' command first, which then creates something called 'Unnamed'. Other actions may trigger the app to add a second palette named 'Document'. Once a swatch is created, you can't convert it to or from a global or spot colour. You can't select more than one swatch at a time. You can't drag and drop colour swatches between palettes or between different parts of the UI. There's no obvious way to add a Pantone swatch to an existing document palette. (You need to apply the colour to an object on the canvas, select the object, switch back to your document palette and click on one of the two 'Add…' buttons.) New global colours are given generic names (Global Colour 1, etc). Pantone colour names are not preserved when added as global colours (the most common requirement!) and need to be typed in manually. Global colours are not transferred between documents when copying and pasting objects. (You need to explicitly export a palette from the first document and then import it into the second document.) Global spot colours are not added to a Publisher document palette when placing a Designer file (unlike InDesign and Illustrator). There's no search field in the 'Add Global Color' panel or edit colour pop-up, making it almost impossible to select the one you want from a large list of swatches. (They aren't displayed as a list, even if you set the panel appearance to 'Show as List'.) There's no command to find and delete unused swatches from a document palette. There's no option to merge two global colours. When deleting a used swatch, you're not asked what to replace it with. (If you delete a global colour, all instances just get replaced with a non-global version.) Yes, colour swatch management in Affinity V1 is bad—really bad. In one forum comment I wrote, 'That's one thing Adobe got right, and something the Affinity devs would have done well to replicate, rather than trying to get clever and do their own thing. Gosh I hope version 2 starts to take this seriously.' Well let's check out V2 and see…
Changes in V2
(1) The 'Add Document Palette' command now displays a pop-up which asks, 'Please enter a name for the new palette.' It still defaults to 'Unnamed', but it's a small improvement over the previous behaviour.
(9) Both the 'Add Global Color' panel and the edit colour pop-up now feature a search field, making it much easier to select from a large list of swatches. (They also now respect the 'Show as List' setting.)
Aside from those two improvements, very little seems to have changed with colour swatches across the Affinity suite. That's a big disappointment, and seems to communicates that the Affinity team don't share the view of many users, that this really needed an overhaul.
Undo/Redo
In Affinity apps, the action of selecting or deselecting an object gets added to the undo/redo stack. This is counterintuitive, goes against years of established practice, and (if the user is not familiar with it) can lead to data loss. Only an action that alters the artwork in some way should be added to the undo/redo stack, as discussed here.
Changes in V2
Nothing has changed.
 
Missing or broken features
1-bit black and white artwork (line art)
Graphics applications have, since the beginning of time, supported true 1-bit black and white artwork, so many professional users were understandably shocked to discover that Affinity V1 apps offered no support at all for 1-bit files. The only workaround is to work with grayscale and manually compress your lightness levels. This is anything but reliable, as compression algorithms at export time will not recognise the difference between a faux B&W image and a grayscale one, downsampling line art to an unacceptably low resolution and adding unwanted antialiasing.
Changes in V2
Incredibly, there's still no support for 1-bit black and white artwork.
Turning off antialiasing
The ability to turn off antialiasing of exported graphics is an essential feature for any professional graphics application. Affinity V1 apps lacked this feature entirely in the beginning, but in response to a forum post in 2015, one of Affinity's developers added highly-customisable, per-object control of antialiasing. Then, in 2020, it got better, with a simple on or off option, which you can apply to multiple objects at once.
This is a huge improvement already, but some of us would still like to see a simple on/off checkbox at export for outputting something like a raster print versions of a logo. As I explained in the same discussion: 'it's about tailoring the artwork to different output media. That should be an export function, not something I have to hard-code into the design file.'
Changes in V2
Turning off antialiasing cannot be done globally at export—it must still be hard-coded into each object of the file.
Reliably exporting for print
Affinity Publisher's default PDF export settings for print-ready artwork ('PDF (press-ready)') turns black (K:100) to a CMYK mix (e.g. C:71, M:66, Y:66, K:76), which would be a disaster if not detected before your job goes to print (something which is difficult when there are no pre-press tools provided). There are other issues too, like line art being downsampled and antialiased (related to the previous two issues).
Changes in V2
This has not been fixed. The 'PDF (press-ready)' export preset still has an all-or nothing 'Embed profiles' option ticked by default, and still causes black artwork (like text) to get converted to a CMYK mix.
Previewing colour separations
Affinity has no alternative to Acrobat Pro. For print professionals, this means no way of previewing and checking colour separations before going to print. When combined with the issues mentioned above, the chances of poor quality artwork and printing are high.
Changes in V2
There are no new apps or built-in tools for checking colour separations.
 
Summary
V2 may have brought some cool new features, but it has only brought modest improvements to a few of the features which matter to me the most, while other issues have been overlooked completely. Having waited so many years for the first major update, I have to say, I'm pretty disappointed.
I'll still purchase all the apps, and I'll still recommend them to family and friends. They do a lot of great things, and you certainly can't beat the price.
Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of the issues I have with the Affinity apps—just a few that frustrate me the most. If I've left out some of your biggest issues, feel free to add them below with a note on whether V2 fixed them for you.

You may need to Reset your brushes, but this would affect all 3 apps, I think.
Close all the Affinity V2 apps.
Press and hold Ctrl while starting Designer 2. When you get the Clear User Data dialog you can release Ctrl. (Note: you may need to watch the Windows Task Bar for the Designer 2 icon and click on it to get that dialog. But keep Ctrl held until you have the dialog.)
Uncheck everything, and Check "Reset Brushes". Then click Clear.
You will have to reinstall any brushes that you installed manually. And if you've installed any via the Account dialog you may need to use Account again and tell it to reinstall them.

My concern is if they ever add an actual lock feature, what that icon is going to be... double locked maybe? 😂
Edit: BTW, the dots for visibility makes more sense with the busy-ness of the new Layer's panel, so they might've thought "oh this is one area we could simplify... because it's a dot who wouldn't want to click it and find out what it does"

It's still there and can be accessed via Edit Document in the context toolbar but it is 0px by 0px in size and can't be resized easily so does not display
But you can copy all Layers from the Embedded document and paste directly to the Master page, so any document received in this state would appear to be recoverable
But it's still a bug and one for the Devs
 
 

This is a pain. The problem is caused by a stroke on the outside of the curve(s).
In essence you have to have a centred curve (of twice the width) for this to work, after expanding you move the red curves layer to the back and subtract the black (a copy if needed) letters from it.

That's right, but hmmm - one might see this as a feature. You can design a symbold, use it multiple times in your layout. But every instance might be warped individually. It's like individual position and rotation. Isn't this rather a bonus than a bug. Or didn't i understand the problem?
New approach
v2-symbol-warp-usecase.afdesign

 

We should ould be able to do both.
If the Warp is inside the symbol (and the symbols are Synced) then it should affect all symbols. 
If you want to warp symbols individually then the symbol should be in the warp. 
Anything else is inconsistent with existing behaviour. 

Separate Curves seems to work fine for me. The layer must be Curves Layer, not a Curve (not plural) layer.

2022-11-26 09-21-59.mp4

Hi François, I believe this issue has been logged already. I agree, it would be nice if it worked in wireframe mode.

This is most likely due to a design choice where all data is placed at the end of the file by default, even if there is space in the middle - or that there is no free contiguous space inside the file for new data. If data is stored in chunks separated from each other in the file - i.e. not contiguous - then the file as a whole is messy - fragmented. And that costs performance.
At some point, the file is so fragmented that it reaches a pain threshold (numerical value) set in the application for when the file MUST be defragmented. Then all the data is saved all over again in a coherent order. This is clearly what can be seen when selecting Save As. Obviously you assume that the customer is ok with a little extra waiting time.
I guess Serif has chosen the current file architecture for performance reasons, but as you can see, it's not a free lunch. And there's some problem going on, because the file sizes mentioned make it sound to me like there's something else wrong on top of what I've explained.
But as described, file sizes do not reflect 1:1 how much document data they contain. They merely reflect how much data the application has spent on storing that document data. There are many explanations for file sizes: document standards, compression or no compression, effective compression or light compression, binary data or text (XML for example), performance considerations, laziness, incompetence and bugs. And more.
Spending GB after GB in files in a cheap application occasionally run on expensive hardware (MacBooks etc.) has spawned some unhappy posts in here. It adds up, of course, when customers have multiple publisher documents stored.

The Spacing and Divisions options for the Automatic grid Mode are irrelevant in V2 (and disabled) because the Automatic grid is now a pixel grid, as mentioned above – it only puts a grid between the pixels.

Make sure your document units (Document Setup) are the same as the drawing scale you want to assign. So set your document units to meters if you want to assign a drawing scale in meters.

Thank you for the suggestion but this does not solve the issue that the app crashes when typing units in the scale field. Eitherway if there is a tool to measure something and configure a scale it should be possible for the tool to use different units than set for the document.

The Settings app is the more modern way of the user controlling the system, and is updated for more modern Windows technologies such as Windows Store and MSIX apps. Control Panel is old and not being updated. Just my opinion, based on what I've seen.

@Frank Jonen it would be nice to use less f… words in this discusion 😇

@Frank Jonen it would be nice to use less f… words in this discusion 😇

@Frank Jonen it would be nice to use less f… words in this discusion 😇

Should be optional.
For my use, I compress from an uncompressed, flattened master file. Saves a lot of time. So there that'd hinder me as well. For people who want to go straight to final and tinker around with each image, it could be useful to wait around and fiddle. It doesn't even have a region of interest selection, you always have to wait for the entire layer stack to render.
I now shudder at the prospect of having to do actual work in Photo which also has this crap now. I have composites of several GB. If I have to wait for that shit, I'm done with Affinity. That's atrocious.

I really wish there was some way of locking a layer so I couldn't change anything about it. 

For some file formats and use cases the export preview is essential:
 

Hi,
i guess the actual common export dialog still needs significant improvements (all three Applications). I use the Affinity suite mainly for web design and web programming. Overall they do a good job in this area of application. But when it comes to export for web and reproduction of layout with HTML/CSS i often have to switch back to Photoshop, to render the final Bitmaps for use in web.
First of all: we finally get a measurement tool !!! I always need to measure the exact pixel values from my design, to finally reproduce/program the exact appearence in CSS. But why only in Designer and not in all three apllications - this is an absolutely basic feature ?!
Designers export persona with it's slices is fine for SVG and uncompressed PNG. It also suites for most small (average) images (JPG).
And even WebP is now availlable in the export persona as well as in the common file export dialog. Thanks for that😍
 
But when you have to optimize e.g. huge hero images to a file size as small as possible neither the export persona nor the common file export offer a really handy preview of the resulting image. For lossy codecs like JPG and WebP this is highly recommend, because no preview means time consuming guesswork.
Yes, the actual axport dialog offers a simple preview for the bitmap file types with some estimated target file size. But you have no direct visual comparison between original and exported image. Especially when you have to tweak the compression rate to as high as possible for huge images you have to carefully check critical areas. But at the moment WebP does not even allow a 1:1 pixel zoom ???

 
A good example of how the export dialog might work is the good old Photoshop CS dialog "save for web". Why Adobe marked it as "legacy" is a mystery to me. I still use this since 20 years...

What are the key features:
1) You have a side by side preview of the original and the compressed bitmap. The preview areas have a synchronized zoom and pan so you can always see the same image area in original and result. There is a 1:1 pixel:display preview. If you check the typical problematic areas with JPG and WebP (red areas in general, soft gradients like in the sky, artefacts around Text and thin lines) you allways have to tweak the compression strength until it's just visually bearable. No algorithm can do this automatically and every image is different. By the way - the Designer pixel preview (view > split) is rather useless because an A|B split/slider does NOT show the same image area in parallel! You only see the vector OR the pixel preview 🤔
2) The estimated filesize is more prominent. At the moment in Affinity this is somewhat hidden in the upper right panel under the export settings.
3) It should be possible to strip all metadata from the exported file.
 
EDIT
OK - This is already integrated for some scenarios: uncheck to strip meta data