lineweight

I wish we could have some kind of on screen ruler, that could be made to match whatever scale we wanted, and dragged around the screen like a physical one.

Ah - changing wet edges from "don't set" to "off" did it. Thanks.

Yes...hence it's a bit of a mystery what it is that is adjusted to make it truly opaque.

At the risk of seeming stupid... where do I adjust Opacity for the "Round Brush" in the basic category? If I go to "edit brush" there is no adjustment for Opacity that I can find. Flow is already at 100%. There is an opacity setting in the top bar that appears when a brush is selected... but this is already set at 100%.

I want to create a raster paintbrush that will give me a basic, solid line. By that I mean, whatever colour I have selected, it lays it down exactly like that, with no adjustments to opacity. So if I draw one line with this pen, then draw another crossing it, the colour at the intersection is the same as anywhere else. In the attached screenshot, like the one on the right, not the one on the left. I can't figure out which brush setting it is that determines this. The brush I've used for the lefthand cross, is "round brush" from the "basic" category. What setting would I need to change, to make it do what the righthand one does (which is "simple pen" from the "pens" category)?

I'll add my name to the list of people who really struggle with how brushes work. It results in a constant level of background frustration/uncertainty in an application that I otherwise rather like. Firstly, the difficulty of finding what you want when it's so difficult even to see the names of brushes. Secondly, the thing about knowing you can reliably return to the thing you were using 2 minutes ago. It's especially anti-intuitive behaviour that you select a brush, change its width and then it becomes deselected and then you are somehow using another, unnamed version of it, with no way of finding out what its "parent" brush was, if you've forgotten.

I've come up against the same problem. I'm trying to move various processes that I used to do by hand on paper, into an entirely digital workflow, using a pen display. I'll often do hand drawings but to scale (architectural drawings mostly). In other words I draw them freehand but using a scale ruler. Currently i can do this in Affinity apps on the pen display - except the bit about using the scale ruler. Let's say I have a PDF, at a defined scale on the screen - I want to set it to "actual size", so that I can draw onto it in exactly the same way as I would if the same document were printed onto paper, where I can quickly use my scale rule to check dimensions. At the moment if I tell affinity to display the PDF at "actual size", that's not what happens. It displays at the wrong scale. If I choose "actual size" Affinity gives me a zoom level of 44% but in fact I have to set it to 35% to get it right (or near enough). I've read the discussion above about whether this is the "fault" of Affinity or the display. What I can say is that mac's native preview app gets it right on 2 out of my 3 monitors, and Affinity gets it right on none of them. It would be useful if there were some way for me to set this zoom level manually in Affinity preferences. I've worked out that 35% will get it about right, but it's a pain to type that into the tiny scale box every time I want to use it. I'd like to have somewhere in the preferences where I can say, if I ask for "actual size", via the menu or a shortcut, please set the zoom level to 35%.

Can anyone offer any help here?

I've recently got an XP-Pen pen display, and today have been doing my first real trial run on it, using Affinity Publisher and Designer. Unfortunately both apps are freezing very frequently (every 10-20 minutes) while I'm trying to use them to do some vector drawing. I get the beach ball, and "application not responding" in Activity Monitor. I've not had many issues with Affinity apps crashing previously, and therefore something to do with the pen display is high on the 'likely suspects' list. But also, I've not used them all that much for intensive vector drawing work until now. Obviously I may have to take this problem to the support for the pen display but I wondered if anyone here can give some advice that might help me confirm that it's the pen display causing the problem and not something else? I notice that Affinity seems to struggle with long pencil strokes, and certainly with strokes when I use the 'vector brush' tool - there is a very heavy lag. I don't know if that points to issues with my hardware, or whether there are settings that I can try adjusting. I'm on mac desktop (El Capitan).

It seems that I am able to change the document to "prefer linked", and then I can place linked files, but it's still not possible to change the ones that are already there from embedded to linked.

Can anyone help with this?

When i place a PDF into my Publisher document, it comes in as an "embedded document". I'd like to make it linked instead, so that when I update the original file, it updates within the publisher file too. I go to the resource browser but the "Make Linked" button for that resource is greyed out ... why is this? (When I try the same for an imported JPG image it seems to work fine)

It would be a funny old style of cooking, where you put stuff in the kettle, heated it up a bit, put it in the blender, blended it a bit, put it back in the kettle, heated it a bit, then stuck it in the microwave. Then back in the blender for a bit. Then the kettle for the final touches.

I don't see why it would lead to bloatware. The reason to suggest merging the programmes is not to change or limit any of their functionality at all - it's based on an observation that they seem, already, essentially to be variants of the same programme. They are already set up so they can all use the same filetype, so that it's seamless to switch between them, and so that once you are familiar with the interface of one of them, you are fairly familiar with all. They already have widely overlapping functionality. It just seems a natural next step to remove any remaining barriers between them. It seems to me to follow the current concept to a logical end.

In English we say "jack of all trades, master of none". But I don't see that a merged Affinity app would need to become this. It seems that the "Studiolink" concept already proves that what I am suggesting can work. I understand that there will be workflows where you want three files open at the same time. But they don't need to each be in a different app. You can open 3 (or more) files at once in Publisher. One of them can have the "Publisher" persona active, one can have the "Photo" persona active, and so on. It's not true that the app buttons are simply moved from the dock to the Publisher UI. If they are in the dock, selecting the app has a different effect. It doesn't open the file you are working on, in that app. It opens that app with whatever file you have open in it at the time.