MikeO

I can agree with you here on personal experience. Through a long and winding road I had come to own the IP of an RPG that I had illustrated and art directed for a decade at that point. We had a strong and rabid, but small, fan base, and we had a bit of an outsider take on tabletop RPGs. But after an additional 15 years of trying to make it work and not really getting anywhere, my partner and I were burned out. If someone had offered to buy us out then, I would have sold it all in a second. Even on a project I had worked on on and off for half of my life. But no one did, so in this case I'm jealous of Serif. We ended up licensing it to a group of fans who have done amazing things with the RPG; but not things I would have ever done, but it doesn't matter. I couldn't have serviced the fans any longer because the fire was gone. So whatever Serif's reasons are, I get it and don't hold anything against them.

I'd buy it now. It could be years before it might change and it would be years you can't get back struggling with poor software or else paying the Adobe tax. $114 for apps of this quality is a steal. Especially Publisher, which I am beginning to like more than InDesign, as Adobe has let InDesign whither.

My two cents is that Canva just decided to go all in on competing with Adobe Express; and instead of creating their own creative tools, they bought some. Tools like Express and Canvas are a really big deal in my space, higher ed. Nearly every institution either has one of these two (or a competitor) or is planning to implement one (we certainly are at this Tier 1 research university). I'm hopeful that Canva has more money to throw at feature requests we've been asking for for a long time because of their need to compete directly with Adobe. Time will tell of course. I'm still with all of you skeptics on whether their pricing model will be retained; I hope if they do add a subscription it'll be part of the Canva subscription many are already paying. And the apps will still be available for purchase individually for non-canvas users. That's my hope at least.

That works of course, but I can't send the native file to our print vendor so I need to export it as vector art. Designer rasterizes it during the export when an adjustment layer is present. I need them to remain vector objects, both for file size and also if I need to make any object adjustments later to accommodate any wall and fixture irregularities. In any event the proof came out well, so I didn't need to do this. I'll try some of these scripting ideas now that I'm not under deadline. Thanks everyone!

@MEBThis may help, but I just noticed that this bug does not occur in the document size numerical boxes that are part of the Export dialog box. v2.0.4

Yep. I was hoping not to have to go back and forth. BUT, it's an option since I have both apps.

I'm using a Mac, and yeah I used the "Select by fill color" but there are very few objects that are the same color. Thanks for the suggestions though the idea of scripting makes my brain hurt. I think what I'm going to do is wait till the vendor outputs a test piece and we see what it looks like under the lighting conditions in the space. At that point I can let the vendor deal with their converted version of the file. Which may be a PNG.

Here's most of what I'm working with. Changing all of these objects to global colors would take hours and still wouldn't accomplish what I'd want since I have to select each color individually to change them, when all I want to do is select the group and lighten or darken all of it. An Adjustment layer gets the look I want but exporting the file with active adjustment layers will rasterize any objects associated with the adjustment. This is a 3m high mural so rasterizing it at 300dpi would lead to an immense file.

I'm working on a portrait in Designer 2.0.3. The portrait is made up of several dozen objects, all of which have a unique fill color. I grouped everything and then decided that the whole portrait looked too dark since it would be printed so I used an adjustment layer to lighten it. I exported the file as an EPS since that's what the print vendor requires. The problem is that the adjustment layer is merged with the objects its affecting by rasterizing the whole thing. I need it to remain as vector art since it's going to be printed as a large mural. Is there a way to adjust a grouped object of different colors in one go, as opposed to adjusting each object in the group individually which would be tedious and very difficult to retain the same contrast between objects? Thanks.

Thanks! I'll have to see if Venture breaks CC or my font app Typeface3, but if it doesn't then I'll update.

Wow, I just came here to report this as well. This happens in both Designer and Photo. FWIW, I have 2.0.3 of both, MacOS Monterrey 12.4, and I usually use the number pad on my extended keyboard to enter the numbers (if that makes a difference).

Our file servers are Windows boxes off campus (I work at a university). They simply disconnect from any desktop that is using them when they run a backup. I'm running v2 of Affinity on a Mac with OS 12.5.1. I have the same issue with any Creative Cloud files I leave open, but they remain loaded in memory and can reconnect with themselves if I reconnect to the file server before I mess with them. I was mostly surprised that Designer didn't give me an option to save a local copy before it shut down. Like I said, it's not a big deal because I should close everything when I go home, but I often don't. Today though I noticed that even though I wasn't connected to the file server any longer I was still able to work on and modify an open document. Only when I went to save it did the error message pop up notifying me that Designer couldn't find the file and would shut down.

This isn't necessarily a bug per se, but I wanted to make everyone aware of it in case it is. At work, I commonly work on documents off of a remote file server. Everything works correctly, unless I forget to close the file before I leave for the day. Sometime at night the file server is backed up and I lose the connection to it. In the morning, when I go to Affinity Designer, the open file pops up a warning that the open file cannot be found and it will now close down. Sadly there is only an "OK" button in that dialog box, and not a "Save As" to give me a chance to save it locally in case it didn't save. Designer will then quit and when I reopen (after connecting to the file server) I can usually open the recovery file that is offered by Designer and I'm good. All I need to do is remember to not leave anything open when I leave work, but is this how it's supposed to work?

I was just having the same issue and found this thread. So the issue isn't about the number of elements in the document slowing things down, but simply how much of it is visible when you try to open it. I'm working on a table runner design of an embroidery pattern that is 90" x 16". The file is only 6MB but it has loads of small objects. The strategy would be to group things so they are easier to make visible or hide? Hmm. I'll have to try that. It's too late in the drawing for this but the whole thing is made of instances of 8 different colored identical shapes. Maybe next time I'll use symbols.

Well it seems to stay on the main monitor after I close and reopen it. But I'll have to see for how long since it inevitably opens under the palettes eventually. I was curious if it mattered where my mouse pointer was when I hit Command+O but it still opened on the main monitor if my pointer was on the second monitor. I DID get it to appear under the palettes on the second monitor if I have an active cursor in a palette; I was typing in a dimension in the Transform palette and left the cursor there, then hit Command+O. I was able to repeat that behavior. Maybe that's the bug?

I'm having the same problem: open dialog appearing underneath the palettes on the second monitor. I've got a 5k iMac with a second cheapy Dell monitor running at 1080x1920 (monitor oriented in portrait mode). OS 12.5.1. The problem doesn't happen all the time however. Once I move the open box from the second monitor to the primary, further Open commands make the dialog box open on the primary.

Since there aren't any text wrap features in Designer (are there?) I have a rectangle that I sheared into a parallelogram to flow some text into so it'll have a left margin with an acute angle. I copy my text and click in the parallelogram using the Frame Text Tool and paste it in. That works but the posted text has taken on the same shear angle as the rectangle has. So I delete the text and convert the parallelogram to curves and paste the text again; same result: the text has the original shear angle and I notice that the rotate gizmo at the top of the selected shape also has the shear angle. The question is: after using the transform settings to adjust a shape, how can I place text into it where the text will not inherit any of the shape's distortions? This is also the case where I wish Designer had text wrap tools; I started the project in Designer and had to change it to a design that included skewed text boxes instead of straight ones. Publisher doesn't have the illustration tools I need so it's not worth trying to rebuild the design in Publisher just to get a wrap tool for a few text boxes. I thought the Frame Text Tool would be a good stand-in but it only seems to work correctly if the text frames remain simple rectangles. Any ideas?

I'll bump part of your thread instead of creating a new topic: Regarding the Colour Chooser: I can't understand why the full featured Colour Chooser window can't be docked as a persistent palette, the same as the Colour, Swatches, Stroke, etc. palettes are presented? The same can be said for other floating "managers" like Snapping and Guides. There doesn't appear to be a functional difference between a Studio and a Manager that I can see. With many users having multi-monitor setups, leaving everything open all the time becomes reasonable. I'm wondering if a dev can explain why these two types of windows are treated differently in the interface? Thanks.

Now that I started getting warnings from InDesign that our friends at Adobe are dropping support of Type 1 fonts in 2023, I was wondering whether Publisher will continue to support them? Adobe isn't offering any technical reason they aren't being supported beyond that they are old and don't work on the web and in mobile. Thanks.

I've discovered it's definitely a screen redraw issue and not related to 1.8.4. I put 1.8.3 back on the affected iMac and the same issue occurred. After messing around with the Performance preferences in Designer, some combination of using Metal for Display and/or checking "enable Metal compute acceleration" is causing it. Some bug with this video card in this iMac (AMD Radeon Pro 5700 XT 16 GB) is causing it.

Same thing; that was how I actually first noticed it. I thought I had a white box floating around somewhere but as I moved around using the scroll wheel or the Grab tool I noticed how it stuck to the same place on my monitor. While I've been an Illustrator user for more than 20 years, I'm still getting used to Designer so some of its quirks or differences have looked like bugs to me, or just better ways of doing things than Adobe. I just tried creating a new document on my home iMac that is also running OS 10.15.6 but has 1.8.3 of Designer. It worked fine. So perhaps it's a bug with 1.8.4 I think I'm going to reinstall 1.8.4 with a clean installer and see what happens.

This has been happening for a little while: if i create a new document of any specs, I see the outline of the documents border as a grey box, but there appears to be a static portion of the document that is either white, or the transparency checkerboard if I've checked transparent background. The rest of the document background remains black. Zooming in or out or scrolling around will not change where this visible area appears on my screen; it's always located in the upper left corner of the window. It feels like it might be a screen redraw bug, but I'm not sure. I just tried a document I created in June and I can't seem to replicate it. I'm using 1.8.4 on a new iMac running OS 10.15.6. Thanks.

Well, it looks like we don't need to worry about this. I just created a new document in the shipping Publisher, switched to Font Explorer and activated a new font, switched back to Publisher and the newly activated font was available. Well done Affinity!

I've been promoting this app in the RPG design Facebook groups I'm part of too. I'm a full time graphic designer at a university, but used to do all of the layout for the RPGs I published. My main concern with it right now is support for third party font managers and how it deals with tables (my game's rulebook had over a hundred tables with some of them multi page). I still need to dig into the latest beta though (1.7.0.312). It's definitely a pro app and not a warmed over word processor. VERY promising.

Well glad to hear that it's on the list for planned updates. Without that feature, long document production is basically a non-starter, at least anything with more graphics than a novel. I just hope it's high on this list.