Jim_A

Interesting website with some nice examples: http://art-exlibris.net/ and the youtube video I got the link from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXhLWgDcMXA

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

Oh yeah, this is great news for me and I wasn't aware of that. But it is also a bit tricky to find out, so here's the solution for anyone else having this issue:
Open the Export dialog Make your adjustments for size, format and compression Now this is the tricky part: you might have to get the keyboard focus away from the input fields. Sometimes just hitting TAB works but normally this only skips to the following input fields. What works for me is collapsing and re-expanding the "File Settings" section or scrolling down past all the controls and click in the empty area below "Embed metadata". THEN you can indeed use CMD-1, CMD-2 (not on the numpad) and so on to control the size of the preview. In case I missed an easier solution please let me know. Otherwise, the Dev-Team could make this a bit easier to achive on macOS.
But nevertheless, thank you for your help! 8-)

I also want this. Astute Graphics "simplify" paths is outstanding. We've been using this for vector images drawn with an iPad with a pen. It creates a lot of nodes and have to ve cleaned up. Their's tools is fantastic and I really want this in Affinity Designer. Or  Affinity could create better clean up/optimise tools themselves. 

Hi, Interesting question!
Works very well if you set up a structured workflow

From a personal perspective I would rely heavily on templates and integrate a workflow that encompasses the whole Affinity Suite. Using just Publisher (because it's publisher- Pages + documents!) would be a mistake as you are restricting the application of some extremely useful features that are not directly available. 
This is particularly true when you consider the upcoming new features added to Designer 2.04 | 2.1 (Vector Warp | Vector Fill | Brush Panel Enhancements | Knife Tool | Bitmap Fill new options and Style picker etc....) Affinity Apps work very well and closely together.. they were designed this way!
Considerations
1. Consider using templates at a Page; Panel and tier level. Also create a valid asset structure that is available to all the apps
2. Decide what tools are needed to speed up workflow: Pre-define brush categories | Typefaces | Styles | Palettes (Re-usable)
3. More complex bit -setting up different page sizes U.S and UK Comic templates are different standards!)
4. Create assets for Panels Tiers and Pages
5. Define you pages that can be 'pulled as templates from Affinity Designer into Publisher. (When A comic gets larger ..much easier to work on the master document)
6. It is not just a matter of building a page template with spreads and pages.. need to decide how your panels + Tiers are going to fit the pages (templates inside templates)
7. Flexibility: the more variation you can add to assets and templates the better
8. Make use of the most valuable tools. Clip Paint has a lot of integrated features to speed up workflow. Some are available in Affinity but a. Not called same feature and b. work slightly different and simpler in some ways (a considerable advantage)
9. May need to make a series of structural templates to help you (Sketching | inking | Pencil work) rather than try and create everything by drawing inside spreads of publisher

There are a few videos but limited to particular techniques
1. Comic & cartoon illustration using vector tools with Robert Hansford
2. Affinity Photo Comic Book Effect Micheal Wilson
3.Create simple comic page | affinity designer Jago vector
4. Making Comics with Affinity Designer: Pt.1 Reusable Panels Labsquad Media 
5. Vintage Style Comic Page in Affinity Photo Frankentoon
6. Propaganda Kit Frankentoon
7. Iannocent Channel
8. Creating a detailed illustration in Affinity Designer with RSKT
9. Squishy Christi du Toit
10. Clamnuts Bob Byrne
 

This is the only area of Affinity that gives me real anxiety. Most of my work is done for websites/screens but what I tend to get printed rarely involves spots, though I'm familiar with working with them in AI. If I ever move heavily towards printed work, I'd feel I have to go back to Adobe. I don't have the knowledge some here possess to deal with the complexities in a timely manner. Not to mention, it would frustrate a printer to no end to give them "non-workable" files over and over learning that this and that doesn't output as expected, which is unprofessional. So the issues some have cited with output on the regular are concerning. I've had bugs with just printing things at home straight from Affinity that have wasted ink. So I know outside of a quick check, to never use in-app print, which is concerning.

I know some have recipes to make it all work, but like others it gives me serious concern this has not been addressed. I'm fine that they have a screen focus, but I would like to know if they are moving ahead with serious plans this direction or not. If @Ash would enlighten us, that would be fantastic. If not possible atm, it is what it is. I'm not going to beat a dead horse and just appreciate the apps for what they're currently able to do, which is sufficient for what I'm doing. Of which I am grateful.

Hi, I am an advertising graphic designer with 25 years of experience. I have been using the Affinity Suite for 3 years (starting with Photo and Designer and then adding Publisher as soon as it was in beta). In Italy, I have created a course dedicated to Affinity Publisher and numerous Live sessions to help other users understand the differences between Adobe and Affinity workflows. I have helped some graphic studios to make the transition. Unfortunately, I have repeatedly highlighted the significant technical limitations present in both the V1 and V2 Suites, which, from my point of view as a Senior professional, are extremely frustrating and cause significant workflow time losses for graphic agencies. This text will be a bit longer, unfortunately, but I hope effective and understandable.
These are essentially the points you will find below, primarily related to Affinity Publisher:

    •    PDF export is not currently reliable. Depending on the values entered, there is a risk of obtaining terrible unintended effects without realizing it. This includes text rasterizations (which automatically transform a Black K-100 into a Rich Black in part of a text), knockout black instead of overprints, and unwanted effects when certain types of FX are applied at the layer. Not to mention what happens if I work with a text with an FX shadow on a Pantone color (the Pantone becomes a CMYK where the shadow is present, instead of remaining a Pantone and accepting the shadow in overprint).

    •    Color management is terrible. If I assign Fogra39 to a file and then I have to print it at a printing company that uses a different color profile when I load the new color profile, all the colors in the file will have to be reassigned because they will completely lose their real composition (the K100 black will become a rich black again and so on, as if the entire color flow passes through RGB and then returns to CMYK).    

    •    There is no internal control system in the Suite that allows the user to understand in advance when these problems occur. Nor is there a tool to understand it after creating the PDF. An Export Persona is necessary for Affinity Publisher that gives the possibility to see exactly what happens in Color Separation when a certain combination of values is chosen from the PDF export menu.

    •    Swatches management is too slow. On the palette, I have to build my Global Colors, otherwise, I won't be able to modify them intelligently later on. But what happens when I copy an object from one document and bring it to another document? Its color palette is not added to the existing palette (each color has to be manually added one by one), and this creates a considerable loss of time.

    •    Why is there no way to transform a Global Color to which I have given the Spot value into a normal four-color process? It doesn't make sense. Often, in the workflow, the same color is changed several times, from Spot to Non-Spot, and only in the end is it decided what to do based on the printing. Here you cannot. The color must be remade and reassigned to each object.

    •    Why is there no way to replace one color with another? A "replace color" function would be excellent. As well as a function that asks me if I want to replace it with another color when I delete a Global Color from the palette. 

These are the most important and limiting things for me. Although one could list a whole series of minor bugs that have existed for years and have not been resolved.

After accepting that none of this was done in V2, my idea is that I am not part of Affinity's true target audience. I am a professional with extensive experience. I worked with Quark before, and then with Adobe for decades. Why should someone like me switch to an "economic" system like the Affinity Suite? My answer is that I appreciated the great effort made by Affinity to invent a new workflow that is non-destructive by default, more modern, and suitable for the hardware available today. I was bored of using Adobe.
However, after this first step, made years ago, it seems to me that there has been a change of direction. Not surprisingly, most of the Affinity users I talk to are students, enthusiasts, or even mid-level freelancers, but not high-level professionals. This makes sense. It would be a bit absurd to go to war against one of the largest software houses on the planet, we would come out of it with broken bones. Yet I still hope. I hope I am wrong and believe that Affinity can make it.
I have 3 copies purchased of V2 in the drawer. I don't use them because I don't need them, and my workflow now works well on V1, while on V2 I immediately ran into bugs that weren't present in V1. It also happened in Adobe, I'm not scandalized.

But the question to Affinity is: do you plan to address the points mentioned above? Are you aware of them? Do you have any ideas on how to remedy them? Or is it not in your plans?

The answer to these questions would certainly help thousands of professionals like me understand how to orient themselves.
Thank you and sorry for the length.
Sincerely, Beniamino (PS: translated from Italian with ChatGPT)

Hi all, im up this zip containing two pallets rgb and cmyk basic.

colors set.zip

It's broken in AD 2.04 but working in the beta 2.1.0.1736 (macOS), so hopefully will be fixed in the next release.

Can reproduce here, though only seems to apply to pixel images. Vector images added from stock and placed PDFs seem to save ok.
AD 2.1.0.1736

Graphic Converter has some powerful digital asset management features such as the Browser which works with your existing file structure and has extensive metadata tools (for instance, ExifTool is built in), convert and modify, powerful batch processing, renaming tools, face recognition, ratings, labels and tags, non-destructive editing in Cocooner, basic RAW editing, cataloging to print or html, etc etc. It took me a few days just to go through the multiple preference options (which fortunately can be exported to a reloadable file).
The trial is not time-limited and is fully functioning. MacOS only. It's still under active development by Thorsten Lemke who originally released it in 1992!

Graphic Converter has some powerful digital asset management features such as the Browser which works with your existing file structure and has extensive metadata tools (for instance, ExifTool is built in), convert and modify, powerful batch processing, renaming tools, face recognition, ratings, labels and tags, non-destructive editing in Cocooner, basic RAW editing, cataloging to print or html, etc etc. It took me a few days just to go through the multiple preference options (which fortunately can be exported to a reloadable file).
The trial is not time-limited and is fully functioning. MacOS only. It's still under active development by Thorsten Lemke who originally released it in 1992!

As I understand it, your custom Spyder monitor profile should be selected in your operating system's display preferences. For macOS, this is set in System Preferences > Displays > Color.
When working in graphics programmes such as Affinity Photo, select a device independent colour profile such as sRGB.
That way, the document you are working on in the device independent colour space (e.g. sRGB) is converted by the OS using your custom monitor profile for display onscreen.
If you send the sRGB file to someone else, they will view it through *their* monitor's unique calibration profile, and in theory you will both see the same colours.
You also have to make an offering to the colour management gods.
If in doubt, work in sRGB!

* Attachments updated Apr 22, 2024 with minor edits and the addition of a Dutch version
I've made a chart of the Special Character symbols shown when you choose Show Special Characters in Affinity Publisher, Designer, and Photo, including some characters that can't be inserted from the Text menu and which must be entered as Unicode and some that aren't mentioned on the Affinity Help page for special characters. Please let me know of any errors so I can update the chart. I apologize for any translation errors.
I've attached the original afpub file so that others can use the embedded images of the special characters for other training materials or purposes.
Special Characters.pdf - English
Caracteres speciaux.pdf - Français
Sonderzeichen.pdf - Deutsch
Speciale tekens.pdf - Nederlands
Special Characters.afpub - editable version
 

Please do make the layer lock absolute in Affinity Photo, as an artist it causes me endless issues. When concentrating on a complex artwork it is so easy not to notice that you are colouring the wrong layer and you have to revert to where the error occurred, which can be a long way back resulting in lost work - so frustrating!

This was also possible with V1.
Video of behavior:

22.11.24_06-05-07-PM_NV12_1920x1080.mp4  

Hi, 
First of all, thanks for your hard work, I really like the new versions.
The only request I would have is related to the functionality of the lock layer.
I would like to see a real lock layer, which, like any other software, locks all the content of a layer and prevents any action on it.  
Right now the lock layer is not a lock layer, it's more of a positional lock layer, which is very different.
I can't count the number of times I've inadvertently drawn on a layer that was locked, it's really frustrating.
I am looking forward to this problem being solved one day, because to me it is.

Thank you again for your work 

I really wish there was some way of locking a layer so I couldn't change anything about it. 

Try Live Projection.
A.Photo v1 workflow:
1) Layer > Live Projection > Perspective Projection
2) Adjust the perspective grid


3) Select the Move Tool (V) and Export.
Ctrl + Mouse Wheel = Zoom
Space bar = Move canvas

Hi @Jim_A,
I can confirm these issues are currently logged with the developers for resolution, i've bumped the issues with your report(s).

Hi,
i guess the actual common export dialog still needs significant improvements (all three Applications). I use the Affinity suite mainly for web design and web programming. Overall they do a good job in this area of application. But when it comes to export for web and reproduction of layout with HTML/CSS i often have to switch back to Photoshop, to render the final Bitmaps for use in web.
First of all: we finally get a measurement tool !!! I always need to measure the exact pixel values from my design, to finally reproduce/program the exact appearence in CSS. But why only in Designer and not in all three apllications - this is an absolutely basic feature ?!
Designers export persona with it's slices is fine for SVG and uncompressed PNG. It also suites for most small (average) images (JPG).
And even WebP is now availlable in the export persona as well as in the common file export dialog. Thanks for that😍
 
But when you have to optimize e.g. huge hero images to a file size as small as possible neither the export persona nor the common file export offer a really handy preview of the resulting image. For lossy codecs like JPG and WebP this is highly recommend, because no preview means time consuming guesswork.
Yes, the actual axport dialog offers a simple preview for the bitmap file types with some estimated target file size. But you have no direct visual comparison between original and exported image. Especially when you have to tweak the compression rate to as high as possible for huge images you have to carefully check critical areas. But at the moment WebP does not even allow a 1:1 pixel zoom ???

 
A good example of how the export dialog might work is the good old Photoshop CS dialog "save for web". Why Adobe marked it as "legacy" is a mystery to me. I still use this since 20 years...

What are the key features:
1) You have a side by side preview of the original and the compressed bitmap. The preview areas have a synchronized zoom and pan so you can always see the same image area in original and result. There is a 1:1 pixel:display preview. If you check the typical problematic areas with JPG and WebP (red areas in general, soft gradients like in the sky, artefacts around Text and thin lines) you allways have to tweak the compression strength until it's just visually bearable. No algorithm can do this automatically and every image is different. By the way - the Designer pixel preview (view > split) is rather useless because an A|B split/slider does NOT show the same image area in parallel! You only see the vector OR the pixel preview 🤔
2) The estimated filesize is more prominent. At the moment in Affinity this is somewhat hidden in the upper right panel under the export settings.
3) It should be possible to strip all metadata from the exported file.
 
EDIT
OK - This is already integrated for some scenarios: uncheck to strip meta data

 

Hi All,
Well, it’s been a pretty crazy week since the launch of V2!
This has been a real labour of love for us over the last year or so, and I can’t even begin to describe how hard the development team have worked on it. Not only getting the V2 apps launched, but also of course finally bringing Publisher to iPad. 
With this being our first paid-for upgrade there has understandably been a lot of feedback / questions around future updates and our pricing policies. I thought it was worth addressing / clarifying our position on some of these personally...
Updates to V2 moving forward
Buying V2 not only gets you all the new features you have seen, but we have various updates planned – including many more new features and improvements – which you will get for free. This will continue until such a time that V3 is released. We’re not sure exactly when V3 will be, but I can confirm we are not going to move to anything as regular as an annual upgrade cycle as has been speculated.
It’s worth saying too that V2 does include many under-the-hood changes to our underlying technology, and we have also been investing in several new areas of research recently. Some of these haven’t manifested themselves into new features yet, but overall V2 does give us a better platform to develop on moving forward and I’m sure you will be pleased with the updates V2 will receive.
Updates to V1 moving forward
While we did say on the FAQ that V1 would no longer receive any updates, I want to clarify that was about new feature updates. We will be updating V1 to fix any critical problems caused by operating system updates in the future. So if the next version of macOS breaks V1 we will endeavour to fix it. There will be a point in time when continuing to maintain V1 in this way will not be tenable, but certainly for the foreseeable future we will continue to patch. In fact, we have an update to V1 queued up for release very shortly with some fixes for Ventura and issues caused by a recent Windows security / quality update. 
We will update our FAQ shortly to make that clearer for everyone.
Offer period
In case you didn’t see, I’m pleased to confirm we have decided to run this initial launch offer until 14th December to give everyone the best chance possible to get it if they wish / have a decent amount of time to trial it. 
Upgrade pricing
It’s been really hard to see some of the comments about us not looking after our existing customers – we’re pretty devasted that anyone feels like that to be honest. But the fact is we felt our hands were tied somewhat with being able to offer upgrade pricing in a fair way. The main reason for this was App Store customers (which make up around 35% of our userbase). The problems with that are two-fold: firstly, we didn’t have a way from within V1 to validate an App Store purchase receipt to reliably ensure customers who were entitled to an upgrade could get one; and secondly, we could not find a good way for people to get that discount via the App Store. Us pushing upgrade customers to go exclusively via our own site (including customers who were previously acquired via the app stores) may also have put us in violation of App Store Ts & Cs which we were obviously concerned about.
I’m not saying that these issues were completely insurmountable, but any solutions we came up with would be messy, and most importantly could have resulted in some bona fide V1 customers struggling to get validated and claim their discount. We certainly don’t have the support resource here if we ended up needing to manually validate tens of thousands of receipts for example.
The only option we felt was safe to move forward with was a general launch offer, which would guarantee that every V1 customer could get the discount, whether they purchased directly through us or the App Stores. We knew a side effect of that would mean some new customers would end up receiving that same discount – but we felt that was a better option than V1 customers missing out. It’s also worth saying that while there has been some good press about V2, all our main marketing has been via email and through social media to our followers. In other words, we felt ok about it because we knew the vast majority of people who would find out about it or take advantage of the offer would be existing customers. I would be surprised if over the offer period customers upgrading from V1 didn’t make up more than 90% of our sales.
Overall I do believe us giving a 40% discount, along with the addition of the new Universal Licence of course, is offering fantastic value for money for those who want to upgrade. 
However, taking on board some of the feedback there is something extra we can do – we will offer a new free bundle of content exclusively for V1 customers upgrading to V2 as an extra thank you for your support. I’ve seen this suggested by a number of customers and it’s a great idea as it does remove the App Store conflict entirely. 
We’ll need a little time to put something together, but all customers who previously registered or purchased V1 and have since upgraded to V2 will receive a voucher code for this via email as soon as we can.
A comment on no subscription
I do want to say that some of the points above are exactly the reason why software companies move to subscription. Whatever you do with upgrade pricing, you still have the issue of customers who bought the previous version 3 months ago vs. those who have had it 2+ years. Offering perpetual licences also gives the additional overhead of needing to maintain the previous version longer than you would if everyone was on subscription / generally always on the latest version.
We are a small team so some of these complications are not ideal — all we really want to do is focus on developing our latest codebase, push out regular updates and continue with our mission to make great creative software accessible to everyone. 
But it does need to be funded somehow. We know you love our no-subscription model, but there also needs to be a level of appreciation that the alternative is having paid-for upgrades from time to time. That unfortunately comes with its own problems.
All of that said, I have to say we have been blown away with the response to V2 - around 3 times as many people have upgraded in the last week than we expected - and we really can't thank you enough for the support you have shown. More than anything the success of this upgrade puts us in a great place to continue investing heavily in development which is ultimately what it's all about, and we’re super excited to crack on with some great updates coming next year!
All the best,
Ash

It does that if you paste into BBEdit but paste back into a Publisher text frame and I get multiple End of Story characters.
(Thanks to @MikeTO for the invisible character list.)
 

Two bugs in Publisher 2, perhaps related.
First bug:
Selecting a word in a paragraph of text by double clicking on it copies an extra space after the word. If the word is selected by dragging over it, no extra space is copied.
Second bug:
Even if only the word with no extra space is copied to the clipboard, when I paste it into the Find And Replace panel an extra invisible character appears after the word. It looks like the end of story character.
I've had a look in preferences and on my system (macos Monterey, see sig.) but can't see anything obvious that would cause this. Other apps such as Pages or BBEdit behave as expected, copying the word only. The test paragraph in the screenshot was created with a new blank document but the same behaviour happens with the example templates provided in Publisher.
Can anyone reproduce this?