muelli75

Apps: Designer and Publisher (+ some changes to the existing feature in Photo)
Platforms: Windows and macOS
We have now added the States panel to Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher which previously only existed in Affinity Photo. Layer states allows you to either:
Capture the current visibility states of your layers across your document Create queries based on various criteria to use to make a selection or toggle visibility of layers This feature is particularly useful to manage different variations of your work. As an example, one of the social ad campaigns for our recent Black Friday promotion was created in Affinity Designer across multiple artboards. Each artboard had 4 variants for English, Japanese, German and French language.

 
Previously if you wanted to toggle between the English and French version for example you would need to toggle the visibility of the appropriate layers on each artboard separately - not particularly workable when you have many artboards / spreads. The new states panel gives you a new way to work with designs like this. 

In this case I could set up a query with criteria which captures all my Japanese layers. From the states panel click "New Query" at the bottom, I called the query "JA" and set up my criteria to be "All Art Text and Frame Text layers that have a layer name which ends in JA" as below:


Because on each artboard we had used the consistent naming convention that all Japanese text has a layer name ending in JA, all English text has a layer name ending in EN, etc. it made it easy to then set up 4 queries for each of the languages. We could alternatively have used a convention like all French variants are tagged yellow, English tagged Red, etc. 
So now to switch from English to Japanese across all artboards I can just turn off everything that fulfils my EN query, and turn on everything which fulfils my JP query using the visibility on/off buttons next to the queries in the states panel - so in two clicks end up with the below:

 
While this example is only including text, of course I may have had different imagery for each locale and could have included those in the same queries to still have one button to toggle text and images of each language on and off. Also, as it's set up a query like this, should I add additional Japanese specific layers to any of the artboards and name them ending in "...JA" my JA query will automatically pick them up.
In Publisher the same principles apply giving the ability to globally toggle different layers on and off across all spreads in your document which match the criteria you have specified. While building complex expressions is easy, you may also find you wish to have a query for something simple like "Layer Type is Images" giving you an instant way to turn all images on and off across your whole document.
Additional Notes
As well as toggling visibility of queries there is an additional button to make a selection of all layers which fulfil the criteria specified in the query. This is also a new function not previously available in Affinity Photo. For those who used the States panel in Affinity Photo you will notice we have changed the name of what were previously called "Smart States" to "Queries". This reason for this is in the future we anticipate adding a new feature to this which would be better described as a Smart State (this will be something you can build from multiple queries). This will be something which we add in a future update. There is other new functionality we plan to bring to this in the future - namely ability to create presets and some level of integration with export options - but again that will be something for a future update.
 

Apps: All
Platforms: macOS, Windows and iPad
When in move tool double clicking a vector object takes you into node tool. It has been suggested that a double click on an object while in node tool should do the reverse and take you back into move tool (you could previously double click on the canvas / not over an object to return to move tool but this both loses your selection as well as not being possible if you are zoomed in). This has now been implemented in 2.4.

I don't see how to create a feature (object/layer) that is visible, but won't print.

+1      [ Is there any news on the progress or likelihood of this feature being included? Is this HARD feature to achieve?? ]

Apps: All
Platforms: Windows, macOS and iPad
Holding onto any tool shortcut will now just put you in that tool temporarily until you release the shortcut key - at which point you will return to your previous tool. So for example when you are using the pen tool you could hold V to change to move tool to move your curve, and then on release be immediately back in pen tool. Another useful example would be when in Brush Tool, you could hold E to put you in Eraser and release to toggle back to Brush.

Apps: Publisher and Designer
Platforms: All
In the layers panel if you alt-click add new layer when you have a selection, all items in that selection are moved to the new layer created. In other words this behaves similar to grouping, but rather than creating a group it puts your selection into a new layer.
Additionally for desktop versions you will find a new option in the right click menu for "Move Selection to New Layer" which achieves the same thing.
 


This makes it far easier to organise your work into layers, without having to create an empty layer first and drag the items you want into it.

Apps: Publisher and Designer
Platforms: macOS and Windows
From the select menu you will find a new option of "Select All on Current Layer" with a default shortcut of shift-cmd-A on macOS and shift-ctrl-A on Windows.
This was requested as a quick way to achieve the same result of unchecking "edit all layers" in layers panel and doing Select All. A good example would be if you want to select everything on an artboard, you can now just click on the artboard label and hit shift-cmd-A.

I really hoped that a more usable level concept would come with version 2. But unfortunately the "page chaos" still reigns. 😞
 
We all need a global level concept to be able to process large projects easily and quickly.
The simple layer concept from ID is what we all want.
 
Serif people, please look around the forums - this feature is often requested. It really is essential to make the big switch away from ID. Please, work on it ... please ...
 

Thank you for this hint - the export with PDF-Version 1.7 did it. Nothing is rasterized.

Same for export settings with higher PDF versions? Could be useful to upload your Publisher document here, because the dialogue said, that nothing is rasterised.

Hello @mmburke33,
look in the menu for 'Layer > Alignment'. There's also an icon on the icon bar:

 
d.

This is a suggestion, I feel more confortable buying a software that I know I can "own" and no servers are needed to activate.
I own a legal copy of Adobe CS3 Web Premium, have the box and everything and after I couldnt install it recently contacted Adobe. They shut down the servers, so people with a legal copy cant activate the software... (needed a software which they no longer sell even in subscription)
Or maybe a promise that we get offline activation at the end of the V2 lifecycle?

Personally i really like these dots. However perhaps that's right they could have some contour in unchecked state to locate them easier. 

Instead of bitching about it, let's see how the Export window could've been done. This is just something I came up in few minutes. I'm quite sure you guys will come up with something much much better. I'll give it some time later on, too!
Ideas for different UI elements are also welcomed!
This is by no means to make fun of Serif's UI experts, just to give them some ideas for parts of UI that could've been done better.
Thanks in advance for your input!
 
 
 

Hi. I have encountered the cause. Publisher is having problems with files linked/saved on/from external storage. It works perfect on internal disk, but fails to update/reload/save with files in an external ssd
The external is APFS formatted, connected through USB C.
Unlucky for us, this not solve our issue, because we work all from external disk (And v1 had no issues at all with it) and we are not able to store the work internally. But at least we know why it happens. I have read in the forums that Publisher has a logged issue in Ventura with FAT formatted units. I think that the issue could be updated to include APFS too..
Hope this is info of good use to solve it, and that there is a solution soon. Working with v1 until then (Cry in silence)
 

Monochrome, or 1-bit images, are extremely common in publication work. Basically any type of B/W line art illustration. But that encompasses things from b/w illustrations in simple books to encyclopedias, newspaper work, illustrations (from charts that lend themselves to it, scientific formulas and more), etc., etc., etc. All that I deal with are 1200 dpi and higher scans.
Depending upon the work, they are also colorized to fit publication colors (often a spot color in this circumstance). They are an extremely small byte size in comparison to gray or color images.
In the illustration below, that bird head column to column in width, 8600 px wide @ 1200 dpi and is 850k. A 300 dpi of the same px size is 11.8 megabytes. Now imagine a book of these. More realistically, there would be many smaller illustrations. Single column broadsheet (about 2"), an image will be less than 20k and a corresponding RGB or gray image will be at about 150k. 
It doesn't take a mathematician to decide that the file-size savings have an impact on a publication larger than a brochure (and hey, I've used these in brochures, too).

it should be able to place guidlines like all the other elements on the site by selecting the guide an type the exact numeric place in the transform-palette.

Let's all root for this simple request to reach its FOURTH birthday!

Gosh - im shocked that this layerconcept is still fact.
I do many projects where global layers are mandatory. So now publisher is not usable for me, sorry but this is an factor of exclusion 😞

Well, yes, they can exist. But then we are unable to use Pages or Master Pages without converting.
Well…I guess my point could be moot. If Artboards can exist in Publisher and maintain their Layer structure, as they seem to do already, then why not have Global Layers move across Publisher and Designer? It would be essentially the same construct.
Fair enough. I rescind my previous arguments. Global Layers for all!

There are a lot of unsupported or buggy keyboard-features in all Affinty-desktop-applications.
For example here in the actual Publisher RC3.
 
A very annoying bug, is the support of TAB and SHIFT+TAB (for jumping back) in the transformation-palette.

You are able to jump forward in this section, but you are not able to jump backwards by using SHIFT-TAB.
 
 
Another one:
In the Glyph-Palette (Positioning and transformation) you only can jump through the fields within a column, if you want to change values in the other column, you have to use the mouse to change the column 😞

 
Please do a qualitycheck on these "simple" keyboard-features which are almost used by powerusers (which are multiplicators for distributing your software).
Thanks for all the other great ideas and works on affinity-"suite".
 
Martin
 

This is a problem in all three applications.
In addition please let us get out of the fields with the escape key or the enter key or the return key. It is a pain when I change some aspect of the text I have selected and then I cannot exit the field(s).

When I type a value into a field on a studio (such as X, Y, W, H, R, or S in Transform), and then I press the tab key on my keyboard, I expect my keyboard focus to advance to the next field in that studio. When I press shift-tab, I expect it to move focus back to the previous field.
This works fully in some studios (such as Color), partially (tab works, but not shift-tab) in other studios (such as Transform), or not at all in others (such as Character). Sometimes it randomly disappears all studios.
Please make this behavior of tab and shift-tab keypresses work correctly to macOS convention (cycling keyboard focus through inputs) and consistently (working the same on all studios). Thank you.
Affinity Designer version 1.10.1
macOS version 11.6

screenshot added as edit to the original post - sorry for that!

thank you @walt.farrell - exactly what I want. Indeed one step more than necessary but good too.