Alfred

Thanks, Craig. Although you've copied from the original artist, you could probably quite reasonably charge some 'monet' for these! :D

Having come from using DrawPlus where I used several saved custom sizes (mainly for web graphics) I would like to be able to create these templates in AD but cannot see how. I realise that AD remembers the last document properties but I would like to create some of my own instead of having to go through the document setup process.
 
Have I missed something that's already there?

We'll be doing another one today, should be available in about 5 hours...

Thanks, Mark. Had I noticed that it becomes available if you have no selection, I wouldn't have said "permanently"! Anyway, as you say, it's not much use at the moment.
 
Will we be getting the next build this week?

Attached are a set of AD Textured Intensity brushes made from actual brushstrokes from the famed painter.

 

Usually I would not try to make strokes so literal. Nor would I borrow from such a famed source.

In that sense these strokes are a bit of a digression for me.

These are examples of brushes that use real strokes almost exactly. They carry the texture and variety of their source. Thick, skittering oil paint, and swashes of thinner oil run over uneven surfaces. 

 

I have become more and more a digital painter... but I love the texture of natural media. I find myself drawn to digital emulation of natural media. Or emulation perhaps of the texture of natural media - with a digital twist.

I have never deliberately tried to make a textured brush for such applications as Photoshop, Expression3, Synthetik Studio Artist or Affinity Designer - that looked exactly like a natural media brush stroke. 

The idea seems a little too in conflict with what makes digital art potentially its own (great) thing.

 

However. These are very nice, heavily textured oil paint strokes. Great for bold paint looks.

 

Enjoy.

CD_Monet_oilstrokes.afbrushes.zip

You probably won't see AppData listed in your %UserProfile% folder if Explorer isn't set to show hidden items, but you should still be able to go directly to %AppData% or a subfolder such as %AppData%\Serif\Affinity Designer\1.0 (Beta)\Settings.

When I tried to open the FF Chartwell 2.0 User Manual (available from here) Affinity Designer displayed the following error message: "This file could not be opened. Ensure it is a valid PDF document."
 
Upon examining the document properties in PDF-XChange Editor, I discovered that 'Content Copying for Accessibility' is allowed but 'Content Copying' is not. I presume this is the reason why Designer can't open the document, but the error message isn't as helpful as it might be.
 

Alfred's file was saved in the 1.5 version format. Currently, only the Designer 1.5 beta supports that format. If you have a Windows PC, you can download the Windows beta for free (it will expire when the retail version goes on sale). If you have a Mac, you must have bought a retail version of Designer to download & use the Mac 1.5.x beta.
 
The betas can be found at https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/32-affinity-beta-support/

There is no bug to solve. EPS is a last millenium's file format, even no longer supported by its inventor Adobe, and it has never supported any kind of transparency.
If you need transparency within an exchange format, use PDF instead.

No, they don't, but sometimes it seems as though they work 18 hours a day 6½ days a week!

No, they don't, but sometimes it seems as though they work 18 hours a day 6½ days a week!

No, they don't, but sometimes it seems as though they work 18 hours a day 6½ days a week!

Hi,
 
I love all the improvements to snapping in the AD 1.5 beta! Just to be greedy, I would like to put in one further request - would it be possible to add snapping during object rotation?
 
In particular I am thinking of a scenario where one wants to align two objects in arbitrary orientations, both of which have straight edges. When I am rotating the second object, I would like it to optionally (maybe with shift modifer?) to snap to "key angles" - the angles where one straight edge of object 2 is parallel to a straight edge of object 1. Is this feasible?
 
Keep up the good work!!
 
Oliver.

Affinity Designer is not a font editor.

No, they don't, but sometimes it seems as though they work 18 hours a day 6½ days a week!

For item 8 (stroke width displayed in document units) you can choose 'Preferences...' and then clear the 'Show Lines in points' checkbox on the User Interface pane.

For program Inkscape is a good solution for export eps . Please refer to http://primandras.hu/inkscape-ai-compatible-eps-exporter/. I tried this script and gradients are OK in AI - bitmaps are not created. Shutterstock and another microstock portals accept these EPS. Maybe it inspires clever programmers and invents something similar for Affinity.

Clive,
 
It's 2016. No one should make excuses for a general purpose vector illustration program (especially one purporting to be a "professional" application) on the basis of its not being a CAD program (which is not rocket science anymore, either).
 
 
As you undoubtedly know, the ability to simply and easily define a line in terms of length and direction should be considered among the bare minimal features for any serious drawing program. Silly as it is, too many mainstream drawing programs can't do this. One has to first draw a horizontal or vertical line of desired length, and then rotate it. Sadly, other than using the (problematic) grids feature, that's how it is with Affinity, too.
 
You mention familiarity with Illustrator. In AI you would simply click on the page with the Line Tool to invoke its dialog and then enter the length and angle.
 
In Affinity, try this:
 
Pen Tool>Line Mode (not Polygon Mode): Shift drag horizontally any arbitrary distance. Switch to the Move Tool. (Tap V key.) Transform Panel: Enter the desired Width (W field) and desired angle (R field). Not terribly worse than the more straighforward way in Illustrator and a few other mainstream drawing programs, but still needlessly tedious. Note that you have to switch to another tool just to put the path you drew into its normal selection mode in order for the Transform fields to become active. Such things get old fast.
 
The one advantage of Affinity's implementation in this regard is that because of its unrelenting bounding boxes, the path effectively "remembers" its angle.
 
For the same reason, it also remembers its length. But it's of course still labeled "W" ( width) which is not the same thing. So this can be either good or bad, depending on the particular circumstance. It is quite common to need to reference the rotated path's width and to perform numeric transformations on that basis. (Ex: scale it horizontally by the sine of its viewing angle in order to foreshorten it correctly in an orthographic projection--a very common task in technical drawing).
 
The program provides a "Reset Selection Box" button, but doing so only allows you to perform horiziontal and vertical scaling by dragging; the values in the Transform palette are still active, but they fail to update to reflect the displayed unrotated Selection Box. Pretty useless. There seems to be no way to actually reset the bounding box.
 
To put it simply: Affinity does not provide for performing numeric rotations or scaling on a set of sub-selected Nodes. Because there is no rotate tool, it seems one can't even do it by dragging. There is a Show Rotation Center button, but only when the Move Tool is active (and therefore, the whole path is selected).
 
I welcome correction on any of the above and I'm truly disappointed to say it, because I had really high hopes for this program. But unless I'm just overlooking a lot, all this is very sub-standard.
 
JET

What do I do if I need to place a guide on a node?

The mother of all panoramas! :D

It seems to work OK for me, Ken. I wonder why it isn't working for you! :huh:
 

If I am painting in Photo, sometimes I adjust Opacity for one stroke, or vary it for several.  If we're advocating for more options, let's not start by reducing those we already have.

Had a little fun trying out some new styles!
 

 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/c289kkpvnipx110/Assortment%20Styles%20Vol%201.afstyles?dl=0

Just a quickie, if you're scanning in original artwork and can't get the panorama to "stitch" from the scans, try an additional scan. For example, I'm scanning in 11 x17 inch artwork and using the Epson software (which is just a bit wonky-sucky on the Mac), I can scan in an entire page, sideways on my letter sized scanner. But the Panormama doesn't have enough over lap to do stitching, so I just scan in the Top, middle third and bottom. That did the trick. Fortunately the additional scan doesn't take that much time and the stitching results I got was just stunning! Usually, prior to AP, I would have to stitch by hand (as the "free" stitching app that Epson promotes is Windows only. Boo, hiss -- amateur programmers!) and that really soaked up the time, not to mention just being a speed bump. Now with the successful stitching that I'm getting from AP, the scanning itself is just a few minutes and the panorama stitching is just moments from placing the art on the scanner to seeing the complete page on my screen. 
 
I even did a scan of a huge (or yuuuuuge) original pencil drawing in 4 pieces and the resulting Stitched Panorama is seamless and looks like it was scanned in one pass in one of those $1K+ scanners! Not bad for a $100 scanner. :D
 
I may try the Image Capture app on my Mac and see if it can scan well and work in this workflow.
 
Mostly I'm posting this because the panorama stitching feature is just one of the most pleasant surprises I've found in software in some time. So thanks Affinity (and Serif)! I'm dangerously close to becoming an Affinity Fanboy for Life...

So I found myself wanting to come up with a basic stipple brush, of a more vector-style and less painterly variety. Going for that more retro-modern shading look inside of vectors that's quite popular these days. Pretty basic, but I think this is what I was going for! Works best sticking to applying with straight paths, no vector handles. The nice thing shading this way is you can vary the opacity and get quite a nice buildup on top of gradients. I threw together this trippy abstract to give them a go.   :)
 
Edit: Sorry, this post seems to have gotten mysteriously duplicated, and the attachment isn't showing up here consistently.

Basic-Stipple-Brushes.afbrushes.zip