SamMN

Updated for Publisher 2.4 (February 2024)
This free in-depth manual is filled with steps, tips, and recommendations for:
Documents, Pages, Master Pages, Sections, and Baseline Grid Character and Paragraph Formatting Text Styles (paragraph and character) Text Frames, Text Flow, and Stories Images and Picture Frames Books and Chapters Cross-References, Table of Contents, and Index Notes - including Footnotes, Sidenotes, and Endnotes Fields - including Page Numbering, Running Headers, and Custom Variables Anchors and Hyperlinks Printing and Exporting Settings This manual does not cover objects, drawing, photo editing, or the other artistic features.
Download:
Publisher Manual Feb 26 2024.pdf
Q&A
Is this really free? Yes, I'm making it available free of charge. It's copyrighted to prevent others from publishing it as their own. Is there a longer manual I can purchase? No, this is it. Is there an iPad version? No, the steps and screenshots are for the macOS and Windows versions. Is there a version for Designer or Photo? No, but many of the features are the same so you should still find it useful. Why does it use a print layout if it's a PDF? It's a demonstration of how to use the features it describes to create a print book. Previous version for 2.3:
Publisher Manual Nov 29 2023.pdf

Apologies for the delayed response here - unfortunately I'm not personally aware of any workarounds for this issue, as no specific settings for Synology seem to change this behaviour in Affinity.
I have however 'bumped' this issue with our development team to bring it to their attention once again for you. I hope this helps!

If it's useful, I've also experienced disappearing graphics (PDFs, SVG, etc), noted here: 
The files are all hosted locally on my machine (though some have sat in a synced OneDrive folder), and affects both linked and embedded graphics. I've not been able to determine any pattern as to what causes some graphics to disappear and others to work fine.
 
 

Hi @SamMN,
Thanks for your report!
I can confirm this issue is logged with our development team to be resolved ASAP.
I'll be sure to bump this with your thread now, to bring it to our teams attention once again.
I hope this helps

Couldn't think of a decent name. Been trying out a Photoshop tutorial and converting the techniques to Affinity Photo, had to do a bit of jerryrigging as there was one particular bit I wasn't sure how to replicate, but the result mostly worked! Anyway, this is the first attempt. Idea was to make it look like an old CRT monitor that you get in awesome 80's sci fi films.
Original stock photo can be found here for comparison.

Couldn't think of a decent name. Been trying out a Photoshop tutorial and converting the techniques to Affinity Photo, had to do a bit of jerryrigging as there was one particular bit I wasn't sure how to replicate, but the result mostly worked! Anyway, this is the first attempt. Idea was to make it look like an old CRT monitor that you get in awesome 80's sci fi films.
Original stock photo can be found here for comparison.

Couldn't think of a decent name. Been trying out a Photoshop tutorial and converting the techniques to Affinity Photo, had to do a bit of jerryrigging as there was one particular bit I wasn't sure how to replicate, but the result mostly worked! Anyway, this is the first attempt. Idea was to make it look like an old CRT monitor that you get in awesome 80's sci fi films.
Original stock photo can be found here for comparison.

Couldn't think of a decent name. Been trying out a Photoshop tutorial and converting the techniques to Affinity Photo, had to do a bit of jerryrigging as there was one particular bit I wasn't sure how to replicate, but the result mostly worked! Anyway, this is the first attempt. Idea was to make it look like an old CRT monitor that you get in awesome 80's sci fi films.
Original stock photo can be found here for comparison.

Couldn't think of a decent name. Been trying out a Photoshop tutorial and converting the techniques to Affinity Photo, had to do a bit of jerryrigging as there was one particular bit I wasn't sure how to replicate, but the result mostly worked! Anyway, this is the first attempt. Idea was to make it look like an old CRT monitor that you get in awesome 80's sci fi films.
Original stock photo can be found here for comparison.

Couldn't think of a decent name. Been trying out a Photoshop tutorial and converting the techniques to Affinity Photo, had to do a bit of jerryrigging as there was one particular bit I wasn't sure how to replicate, but the result mostly worked! Anyway, this is the first attempt. Idea was to make it look like an old CRT monitor that you get in awesome 80's sci fi films.
Original stock photo can be found here for comparison.

Basically, if the layer is not pixel-aligned (e.g. X/Y = 0.7 pixels) then the software will have ‘partial pixels’ (e.g. 0.3 of a pixel) ‘left over’ which need to go somewhere so that the information isn’t lost so the software (on-the-fly) creates new pixels for the contents of the ‘partial pixels’ to go in.
This isn’t the full technical description of exactly what happens but it’s usually enough to know why it happens without knowing what is happening.
If pixels are important then it’s usually a good idea to set “Force Pixel Alignment” to ON and “Move by Whole Pixels” to OFF on the Toolbar and you shouldn’t (normally) have the problem again.

Ah yes, option 1 fixed it! Is there an article or something on why a non-aligned pixel causes that visual behaviour I could read? Just out of interest / curiosity.

Pros:
MSI had an installation success rate of ~85% (and we have many requests to our tech support team for v1 install failures). MSIX promises a 99.9% success rate.  MSI requires admin privileges to install. MSIX installs per-user, but files are deduplicated so that disk space isn't wasted. MSI apps are not sandboxed from other applications, meaning other applications can break those apps (we have seen this with several third-party apps in the past). MSIX apps are sandboxed to prevent this. MSI updates require a manual download of the full ~550mb installer which must be manually installed. MSIX can perform in-app delta updates which are smaller and faster. MSI updates can only be performed one at a time. MSIX can update all three apps simultaneously. MSI cannot guarantee that an uninstall will leave your machine in the exact state prior to install. MSIX installs are segregated and don't rely on the registry or special filesystem locations meaning an uninstall always leaves you in a clean state. Installation and app data paths are cleaned on uninstall. MSI apps cannot integrate with Microsoft Photos app to provide "Edit In..." style features. MSIX can. MSI does not require a digital signature. MSIX does (this means any MSIX that appears to be from Serif, will be guaranteed to be from us and only us). Cons:
MSI can allow the user to change the installation directory. MSIX can move installed apps to different drives, but it cannot choose a specific directory (due to the sandbox). See below: MSI can allow an option to install a desktop shortcut. MSIX doesn't provide this as an option, but you can pin the apps to either the Start Menu or the Taskbar. There is also the secret Shell:AppsFolder location in Explorer that allows you to right-click or drag the icon to your Desktop for a shortcut as a workaround if you need it.  MSI has easy discovery of undocumented app locations for launching from a third-party. MSIX hides the install location due to the sandbox, but we use App Execution Alias to enable this scenario. You can find the aliases in the following location: C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\AffinityDesigner2.exe
C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\AffinityPhoto2.exe
C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps\AffinityPublisher2.exe
Remembering to replace username with your Windows username. Also, those paths are already in your %PATH% variable so you can often launch them without even specifying the full path, e.g. just AffinityPhoto2.exe. There are bugs in some third-party applications with the App Execution Alias , and the next post includes aflaunch.exe as a work around if you need that instead. 
 

(...)

OP here under my work username (as I'm at work). Yes, it's a Surface Laptop 3, the Pro bit was a typo (it's one of these things). No external monitor connected.
Yes, it's the colour profiles that are the default on the machine provided by Windows. I haven't altered the colour profiles at all or downloaded new ones (changing from Enhanced to sRGB is the first change I'd made to it - to be clear, the default setting on the Surface Laptop 3 is Enhanced, I had to change the default to sRGB). Let me know if I need to provide more screenshots or I've missed a question! 🙂
Thanks again for all your investigative work!
 

For now possibly you can live with the 1-click workaround: just rasterize the filtered layer (or a copy) to make its effect appear in a PDF exported from APub.  
motion blur _ot rast pdf1.4.pdf
It is a known issue and has been recently confirmed to be still unsolved.
 
 

That is kind of wrong use of text wrap: In your .afpub the text wrap is assigned to the text frames, not the the picture frame, you want to get wrapped.

If you assign wrapping to your image frame all text disappears because it wraps around the complete image, which is larger than the text frames:

If you want the text wrap around a part of the image you need to use an extra object for wrapping (e.g. a circle shape with no fill/stroke) – or adjust the wrap outline with the "Edit Wrap Outline" button:

That enables you to make the text wrapping around any shape which is set for the image/picture frame. – As mentioned, in this case it might be easier to use an extra object for wrapping.

 
If there is no transparent area it will wrap the entire object, even if it's  just a jpg, too. Every object has an editable wrap outline.

Perhaps you have something odd setup in View > Grid and Axis Manager? The Advanced and Cube settings there have additional snapping options.

The issue I was referring to only affects printing/export, so this issue is unrelated.
@SamMN I've downloaded and opened your file and it appears your issue is due to your image being incorrectly clipped to the Picture Frame object - it's very subtle, but with Picture Frame objects you need to drop the image over the Name of the object layer, rather than clipping it to the frame as you would with any other object. Currently your image is clipped to the bounding box of the Picture Frame, but your Frame itself is technically 'empty' - which is why you can see the X across the frame still. Please see my short screen recording below, showing how to correct fill your picture frame with an image. (I've used a different example image as your resource is linked and therefore missing for me.)
Picture Frames.mp4

Ah OK, thanks for clarifying :-)

Hi SamMN
When adding a mask in Affinity, they are always applied as blank white masks, meaning they don't mask/hide any content until you draw on this mask or invert it.
As Carl has mentioned above, your mask is white currently (as shown in the layers panel) meaning it isn't hiding any content. Select the mask layer itself, then go to Layer>Invert and this will change your mask layer to black, hiding all content.
Now select your brush tool, apply the textured brush you wish to use and set the colour to white. Select your mask layer and paint away!

That fixed it, nice one! Didn't realise that could cause issues like that :-/ (or is it a bug and it shouldn't cause those issues?)

Do you still experience the issue if you turn off the ‘Contextual Alternates’ OpenType feature? (It’s on by default, and it provides a more ‘handwritten’ look by ensuring that, for example, the two instances of ‘t’ in ‘without’ are slightly different.)

I'm finding this with two text tables. If I try and highlight text in one text box, it starts to select another text box somewhere else on the page. Only started happening on the latest version.

Attached. I'm not sure what options I changed (in that I can't remember), but I probably turned off JPEG compression and turned Resampler to Bicubic.
Schwanzer AI.afpub
 
Edit: I might have also converted colour profile to CMYK, Coated FOGRA39