Steps

The so called "Arrow Tool" is a arrow in two directions. I also would need an arrow that points only in one direction. I try to solve that with an asset for now.

Thanks, this works. It would still be nice to have a way to do this without clicking into a box and using the keyboard. Some sort of accuracy setting would help me. I almost never want to rotate in partial degrees with the mouse.

I wonder that nobody else is complaining about that. Thas this is broken is very obvious if you design a photo collage and want all photos to have the same outline and shadow. Am I missing something? EDIT: If I set the "Scale with Object" option before creating a Style is works on some different sizes, but not all. I think the bug has something to do with that option going rampage.

Currently you can rotate a layer either super precise or by holding shift down to snap to 15° angles. I would like to rotate only in full angles. This could be done either by holding another key down or set is as document property. EDIT: Just Let it be a configuration option how much the angle is rotated by holding down ctrl. Default of 15° is fine, the next guy might want 5° and I would set it to 1 for full angles.

Yes, in it's current state it's quite cumbersome and not exactly ease to use in many aspects. I hope they will use our feedback to make things easier.

This is why I try to give as much feedback as I can to make it an even easier to use tool before release. :-)

I figured that out, yes. But it's still cumbersome. In a WYSIWYG editor like this and compared to many other photo book software, which is essential a light version of a publishing tool it's intuitive to do as much as you can on the canvas. I strongly believe that those software works with layers to behind the scenes, but since everything can be done very intuitive on the canvas itself, there is no need to display a layer panel. For a professional publishing software I would expect both ways to function. There is no need for a professional software to be cumbersome that as Affinity Publisher when it can be intuitive and easy to use instead. Of course, Scribus is way worse. --- EDIT: And you should take into a account that I come from propritary photo book software and Photoshop Elements. So I'm new to publishing tools and have a somewhat fresh view on that. I know from myself how that view gets lost over the time if you see the same behaviour over and over again and getting slowly used to it.

I agree. I stumbled into that, too.

Not sure about that. I'm still surprised that this happens.

Yes, thanks for finding the right words to describe it. I struggle sometimes with that. I expect to be able to do that on the canvas. Either it's just a missing feature (because devs did not think about that) or it's missing intentional. Not sure about that and why.

@Chris B Does this help you to reproduce?

Devs, is support for variable fonts somewhere on your roadmap?

This bug is really annoying and should be sorted out. Or do I have a big misunderstanding of how copy of layer effects should work between differently sized layers? I am used to the Photoshop behaviour that copied effects are always applied regardless of the layer size.

Since no one replied I begin to wonder if my intention is unclear or nobody else sees value in this. I try to describe it more precisly. The use case is that I first drag in a Picture Frame with inexact sizes and place it somewhere. After that I drag in the picture. Now I want the frame to resize to the correct aspect ratio. So if a Picture Frame is for example 17.5cm x 10cm big and I drag into a picture of an 3:2 aspect ratio I want to click a button that makes the frame snap to 15cm x 10cm to conform with the picture being displayed. Or i another case I rotated the Image in an Picture Frame and later I find that I want to reset it. I want to click on a button on that to make the Image rotation go back to "0° relative to the Picture Frame".

Ok, you may be right on that. I watched the History panel and tried to reproduce, but I could not make it fail this time.

Thank you for the video. I now see where our misunderstanding is. You drag from an explorer window. If you first drag the picture into the document elsewhere it becomes a layer of type "Image". I expected that by dragging this layer on top of the Picture Frame layer it would somehow highlight and offer me to put that Image Layer into the Picture frame. So as if I would do it in the assets layer. Actually a lot of standard photo book software works this way: If you drag there a picture onto a frame it goes into the frame. The other way round a picture frame dropped on an image wraps it. The relevant cursor point in this cases is the top left corner. I like this behaviour and are kind of used to that. Enough to expect it. But maybe devs did not make that work intentional. Only they now. Maybe QA can give a statement to that.

This may be the reason why you were so confused by everything I said. :-D Yes, in speaking of the layers I actually meant the labeling that stands after each layers name. The types are presented as "(Image)", "(Picture Frame)", "(Pixel)" and so on. My initial question was all about why the heck a layer of type "Pixel" (this means after "Rasterise...") cannot be converted back to an Image Layer. This was because I needed some time to realise that this kills the original quality and all AfPub could do is create a new image from the pixels that are left. But now I believe it's not possible so you cannot kill the image quality by accident: Switching to Pixel, switching back to Image and not realising the Image was reduced due to this. And @MEB also answered my question by the matter of fact that PSE import just can only see/import the original as pixels and this way I get an rasterized version. What I originally wanted was to convert the Pixel Layer back to an Image Layer to keep size & rotation and adding the original image again. It's cumbersome, but @fde101 suggestion to just create new layers on top using the snapping is the only workaround. I see that this use case of converting PSE documents to Affinity Publisher documents is somewhat a special need and may not worth any change in the tool. Consider my problem as solved.

Yes, this is exactly what I would expect. You did a great job working this out. And you are also right about first selecting a picture and then clicking in assets as this would be consistent with the way styles are added to a layer. I'd love to see that functionality and at least some predefined sample frames in the assets. Please, devs, read this and consider it.

Interesting that this works, but dragging an existing Image Layer does not. This is incosistent.

How did you do that? Picture Frame does not respond to dragging in a Image in my System. Also win10 and current Beta.

There is a tonne of software out there that behaves as described and it works really good and intuitive. The exchange would only happen if you drag it onto the Image. Drag it anywhere else to add it normally. Try a photo book software of any company and you will see yourself. Also also there could be a Key to hold down for enabling or disabling that behaviour.

The context menu of a layer for alignment misses the option to space out between multiple selected layers. The menu in the toolbar offers this function. I nearly believed it's missing.

Sometimes as I just figured out... and sometimes not. There is something broken. Especially after applying different styles.

I have to Picture Frames of different sizes and I want to apply the same Layer Effects to them. On one layer I defined an Radius of 10px, an Offset of 30px and Intensity of 30%. On the target layer this translates to Radius of 1,1px, Offset of 3,4px and Intensity of 30%. Only if source and target layer have the exact same size this works. Otherwise the result is garbage.

I accidently applied one layer with one the ugly pre-defined Styles. Is there a option to take that back without using the undo option? If not, this seems to be missing. EDIT: Please move to Bug forum. I just figured out that the Undo operation does not take back applied Styles.