Michael Hurley

+1 from me as well. Non-printing objects are something I use on a nearly daily basis for things like die-lines and drill marks.

I would say the answer is that Serif aren't terribly interested in supporting us crusty, old-tech types stuck in the slowly dying ink-on-paper past. It's pretty clear they're focused on digital-only workflows. I'm sure it's a far larger, far more lucrative market that we relatively few remaining print folk so I don't know that I can blame them per se. Still, it would have been nice to have an actual, viable third option instead of just the globe-swallowing Rent-Seeking Empire of A and the fading glory of the once-dominant Land of Q.

Let me add my voice to the infernal chorus (we sure ain't divine!) respectfully requiring this feature. I use this literally almost every single time I'm working in Illustrator. I really, really, want to use the Affinity apps as my daily drivers but there are just too many missing functions like select same (and 1-bit graphic support, and vector warp, and, and) that leave this suite in the Amateur field when it comes to production graphics.

Ah. Well darn. Thanks for pointing me to that thread. I'd searched for similar things on the forum but missed that one.

Is it possible to do things like "Select Same FIll" or "Select Same Stroke" like in Illustrator? Those are functions I use quite a lot and I can't seem to find anything like them in Designer. Am I just missing them? Thanks!

Well lookit-dat. I wonder when Adobe added that feature? I guess I've been doing this for too long. It never occurred to me to even check if you could apply color to grayscale images. Still, for offset work I think I'll generally stick to ultra-high-res 1-bit. I actually scan them in color, clean them up, and then convert them to bitmap in Photoshop. That way I can control screen settings with a bit more detail than our platemaker gives me. Good to know I have another option, though. Thanks for that!

Let me just add another voice to the chorus of "please give us data merge!" Not only is the merge function itself necessary, but the ability to generate cut-stacks would also be lovely. That is, once the print run is complete and ready to trim, the first position of the stack is, say 1-500, second position is 501-1000, etc. I.e., the first sheet would have record 1, record 501, record 1001, and record 1501; sheet two would have records 2, 502, 1002, and 1502; and so on down the stack. This kind of thing is absolutely essential for maintaining the order of pre-sorted mail lists on things like postcards. Right now we use a third-party Acrobat plugin called FusionPro for that, but it would be very nice to have everything in one place.

@thomaso: I haven't commented before, but here's another use-case for 1-bit support like in other layout applications (QuarkXpress, InDesign, PageMaker, etc.). At my printshop we just ran a mailing job with letters offset printed 2-color spot. The customer wanted the letter text in black with their signature in blue to look more like it was hand-written with a biro. I scanned their signature at 2400 DPI (that's our platemaker's native resolution) as a 1-bit TIFF, inserted it in InDesign, and applied the PMS blue swatch to it. Instantly spot separatable art without having to mess around with Photoshop Monotones or Illustrator vectorization tools. This cannot be done with grayscale, RGB, or CMYK raster graphics. It's a quick, simple, accurate method, and it works every time. It baffles me that the Affinity Suite do not support this in any way. It's literally an industry-standard print workflow (as evidenced by all the above commentary).

I would like to add my voice to the requests for 1-bit support. I run the design / pre-press department of a printing company. We do spot-color offset and letterpress. I absolutely need 1-bit support for our workflow. Please, folks! This is a very important part of print production! Thanks!