Alfred

On a related note:
Text > Insert > Maths > "Less Than or Equal" and "Greater Than or Equal" but Select > Select Same > Stroke Width / Width / Height > "Less (or Equal)" and "Greater (or Equal)". I understand the use of parentheses given the need to hold down Option to access them but perhaps they should include "Than" like the text ones for consistency?

Sorry for the late reply - Covid struck! Just a quick note to say thank you for all the advice - I managed to get it fixed. 

You can apply a stroke without converting to curves.

You can also use Links to be able to achieve the same thing by switching between Photo and Designer.  Another reason why this feature needs to exist in all 3 programs.

 

Try the font Segoe UI Symbol, which has at least the first 2 in that chart.

I think the suggestion may have been to install the Trial of V2, so you can see. But as it's only a 7-day Trial, and as I don't recall any V2 changes in this area, I don't think I would suggest that.
Your problem is that you have two objects overlapping each other, and so when you try to click on the text at the top of the circle you're selecting the top object, which is the text at the bottom of the circle. Instead of a simple Left-click, try Alt+Left-click.
That's covered in the Help; see the box describing the Modifier Keys: https://affinity.help/publisher/en-US.lproj/pages/ObjectControl/select.html

Well, fine, unsurprising, but that is just because of the two cultures thing that C P Snow wrote about.
If the culture in this country were different, maybe chapter 10, say, of the text book learning some French would have had the topic of adding Sodium Carbonate solution to Copper Sulphate solution in a test tube and using a filter paper and a glass funnel and a beaker. So integrating what we did in chemistry class as a practical with our knowledge of how to express things in French.
I appreciate that at the café is important but all the examples were sort of arts based, did we have the same text book? I remember Le prestidigitateur.
When I was young I would have just loved to have tried using Affinity products using the French versions once I had got used to using the English versions.
William
 
 

Given that you mean
it seems unsurprising to me that you didn’t learn things like ‘basic chemistry’ terminology.

Hi All,
I'm pleased to let you know we have now added the ability to save a Default Grid Setting and is available now in the 2.5 beta...
 

Assets: Grunge Inlays Part II

Assets: Grunge Inlays Part I

Grunge Brush Vector Inlay Experiment

🇬🇧 A little tribute to the graphic designer Michel GRANGER, French author of several album cover illustrations by Jean-Michel JARRE including the 4th, “Equinoxe”, released in 1978. The character on this cover is called “the Watcher”. He is adorned with the three Serif colors and looks into the future, saying to himself: what will I become?... And what will we become?...
🇫🇷 Petit hommage au graphiste Michel GRANGER, auteur français de plusieurs illustrations de couverture d'albums de Jean-Michel JARRE dont le 4ème, “Equinoxe”, sorti en 1978. Le personnage de cette couverture se nomme “l'Observateur”. Il est bardé des trois couleurs Serif et scrute l'avenir en se disant : que vais-je devenir ?... Et nous, qu'allons-nous devenir ?...




😉

The feature seems to be working 'by design', as Serif would say.
The auto-close threshold is a constant distance in screen space rather than document space, and so it becomes smaller in relation to the object's displayed size as the zoom increases. Notice that the red loop symbol is about the same length as the pencil pointer at the moment it first appears, regardless of zoom.
The 'harder to see' is simply the poor contrast of red on the black of the stroke. As you zoom in, the black becomes more expansive until the red loop is never being presented on white.

The COLR table was added in OpenType 1.7, in 2015, (for the COLRv0 format).
The COLRv1 format was added in OpenType 1.9, in Dec. 2021 (so that part is newer).
Color fonts using either COLR format can be variable.
Color-SVG fonts cannot be variable - so they really do not belong in this discussion.
Proposed changes and updates to the OpenType spec can be followed on GitHub.
Here: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/typography-issues
Future font technology is also being developed on GitHub, and in an ISO group.
The code development and specs are here:
https://github.com/harfbuzz/boring-expansion-spec?tab=readme-ov-file
They have been interacting with the ISO for developing the Open Font Format specification.
There is a newsgroup set-up by the ISO where this is discussed.
Note: the Open Font Format will actually be open, unlike other ISO "public" standards which must be paid for (people made a lot of noise) so you can download the current version from the ISO "free" standards page.
No patents involved as far as I can tell.

As noted above, this feature isn’t available on Windows.
 

I just wanted to say thank you for adding the ability to move width profile points along the curve. It's the little things that make such a difference. It's especially welcomed while working on an iPad with an Apple Pencil.

CleanShot 2024-04-19 at 13.43.24.mp4  

I am generally excited about this feature.
One specific feedback: I would like to pick for each pressure node whether it is a sharp, immediate transition or smooth transition, such as in this mockup:

In this mockup, the sharp version is the current behavior, while I faked the smooth behavior by expanding the curve and then converting the nodes at the peaks to be smart curves.

Hmm. I tried with Mesh Warp tweaking to get this effect.
 

Mirror Twins with Shadows wip.svg

I've just done it. Thanks Alfred.

So it would seem, sadly.
I’ve no idea. And ditto.
Definitely an area to keep a close eye on.

Thanks Alfred and Walt. That indeed appears to have been the case, as the original file was from Publisher. I worked around the problem by exporting to a jpeg, which I could  then crop. Looks like I'll have to brush up on that vector crop tool.

Done it in AFD using @Alfred's technique.
Cheers Mate.

Blond Bully AFD.svg

Support for Indic scripts (most of which are LTR, although there are some RTL variations) would be yet another game changer.

Getting Variable Typefaces out, as promised, on next week's beta would be a great sign. Getting colour OpenType-SVG by the end of the v2 cycle or at the beginning of the v3 cycle, an added sign of consolidation on that front. Getting RTL support would be a game-changer market-wise and show that Canva is really serious about this.
I know I sound too hung-up on typography, and I'm obviously biased, but, as I've said before, eschewing entire markets and cultures based on technical constraints and… on having bet mostly on certain text/cultural-agnostic professional niches, such as digital illustration, that are pretty much well covered already by competitors (either by Canva itself, which is no longer a competitor, or by other products such as Pixelmator, Procreate, etc.) feels, in hindsight, a bit misguided but arguably still necessary in that earlier context. I didn't personally like it, but I understood that it was necessary for Serif's Affinity's continued survival. 🤷‍♂️
Yes, Serif was trying to secure a few of those niches as their cash cows (and indeed sort of succeeded at it) while they were, as it turns out, strapped for cash (or at least not rich enough to properly tackle Adobe). Conversely, with Canva's backing, they can now go head to head with the proverbial 80lb gorilla and start chipping away at their legacy feature set and keep introducing novel features, i.e. they can walk and chew gum for a change instead of dragging on with development.
Again, I know fully well of the Mythical Man-Month fallacy, but it did feel as if Serif was biting more than they could chew, and I do believe that instead of having a tiny team spreading itself thin over three apps on three platforms, having a separate typography team, a separate vector design team, a separate pixel manipulation team, while keeping them tightly-knit – also unlike whatever the hell is going on at Adobe, with their sprawling thousands-strong team and dizzyingly comprehensive family of apps – is not only feasible, but the best way of going about developing a suite like this.
That's the optimistic view, which I know many – including myself – don't 100% subscribe to, but we have to at least consider it as a possible scenario. Does it assuage our fears or preclude us from pursuing asset and portfolio migration plans? Sadly, no. Does it at least provide us with a glimmer of hope that we will not only end up in a better place than we are in right now as DTP suite customers, but also better than we were even back when Macromedia MX was still a thing (i.e. not eleven, but twenty years ago)? Maybe…
By the way, and while on the subject of Macromedia and competition with Adobe in general, Flash and Dreamweaver, which were the main drivers behind the infamous acquisition (remember GoLive? Yeah, me neither 😂), are now relics of the past, but way before all that went down they did try to go head-to-head with Adobe also on the digital photography editing side of things with their Macromedia xRes product, and failed miserably and promptly threw in the towel by their very first and last attempt, v3 (because, mind you, they didn't even develop it in-house, instead having acquired it from Fauve Software, the true pioneers of layers before even Adobe)… Serif, on the other hand, managed to not only stay afloat for all those years with their Plus suite and then produce something competitive with freaking Photoshop v16 (the 25th anniversary, CC 2015 edition, which had been, by then, an actual verb-worthy product for around two decades and a half, and now for around 35 years), and stuck to it; they have to be commended for that.