Steps

I spent a few minutes searching now if someone may have converted Bahnschrift to good old non-variable TTF files, but no luck so far. :-(

Oh, yes, you are absolutely right. I did not notice a problem because somehow the buttons for making the font bold or italic work. But now I figure out it's not really the bold version of the font, but PSE does some magic with it. Comparing "Arial Bold" with "Arial Regular" and the bold button deliver different results. The difference between PSE 12 and Publisher is that Publisher disabled the "Character Traits" for "Bold" and "Italic" for some reason. Ok. Affinity is not that bad. I take back my rant.

I think it's a great idea to be able to change the image of a Picture Frame simply by drag & drop. I used a lot of different photo book creation software and actually it's quite common there that you can change the image of a picture frame simply by drag & drop rather than an "Replace Image" button. This is one of the points where the Publisher definetely feels cumbersome and non-intuitive. I does many things right compared to the competitors but sometimes fails on low hanging fruits like this.

Thanks for pointing that out. I found that the layer in the PSD somehow got rasterized or scaled down. Maybe because I can't use Smart Objects with PSE 12, I don't know. However the quality is far better if I put a Image Frame beside that with the original picture in that, too. Maybe thats due to an DPI cap in PSE. I do not understand enough whats exactly happening there to the quality.

Ok, this is the cumbersome way to use snapping to create new layers on top of that. Thanks for your guide. So the "Pixel" layer type is kind of the final destination for a layer with no return ticket? This means one has to be very careful not to accidently rasterize image layers.

+1 for this idea. This was the first thing I tried before finding the menu item. Drag & Drop feels just natural so this will always be the first thing a new user tries.

Thank you for elaborating this idea, @fde101 I really hope that devs may read this and see if they can come up with one of your solutions. --- EDIT: I played a little around with that. Now I have three layers in a group I named "My decorative border": The border as Pixel or Vector The mask The empty picture frame I moved that group to my assets and deleted it. I dragged it back after that. Now I place an image in my document. To get in into the frame the only way is to use the layers panel and move that directly onto the Picture Frame layer. The group must be expanded first of course. If the image is not already in the document I can choose the Picture Frame directly from the layers panel and use the "Replace Image" option. What I like to see is dragging the asset (which has ONE empty picture frame) ONTO an image and the image gets automaticly wrapped into that group. I think this is what happens in photo book software behind the scenes and maybe dev finds that this convenience feature is easy to implement. --- EDIT 2: And beside making it easier to use I think the Publisher should already come with a small set of decorative frames. There are icons and glyphs. Why no frames?

Ok, this means even Affinity Photo does not support that? Nice to know. This surprises me as my copy of Photoshop Elements 12 seems to have no problem with that. I hope devs are aware of this problem and work on that.

How long is the lifetime?

My point is to make it really really easy with "one click". In all photobook software I have Seen so far you can drag a frame onto the picture and the frame is applied. Think of this as an convience method.

Can the current Beta build be used forever or is there a kill switch? Assume the current version works good enough and I design a photobook with it. As time goes by another Beta build comes out or even the final release and there are breaking changes to the file format that renders it unusable for the new version. Will I be able to work in the old file with the old version in ten years from now? Assume that Windows Updates play no role as VMware may help out here.

Oh, thanks for pointing this out. I was driving crazy to do that because it's so different from Photoshop.

Since Publisher comes with some assets like iOS icons and has some predefined Styles like "80s Poster Shines" I wondered if there should be some decorative frames included. I'm talking about an easy way to apply frames like https://www.vecteezy.com/free-vector/decorative-frames to Picture Frames. I also attached a screenshot from a photobook creation software of their masks. The point is that you can do it with Photoshop and I'm pretty sure that by using mask layers this can be achieved somehow in Publisher too, but it's really cumbersome. If you want to create a nice photobook really quick it's cool to have predfined masks you can apply to an image with one click. Also it would be nice if there is a way to save a created mask to easily reuse it or share with others. My background with using Publisher is that I want to create a photo book and order that as PDF. I know it's easier to just use propritary software of photobook printing services, but as they don't give you a PDF for your digital archive I watch out for solutions like Publisher. This feature may be useful to reach more normal end users like me that like to order photo books and hate that vendor lock-in that prevents getting a proper PDF of your work. I find the Publisher really easy to use compared to Scribus and VivaDesigner. And of course InDesign is way too expensive for a hobby. So there may be only very small adjustments to be made for a broader audience beside professionals. What do you think?

Bahnschrift is a standard font for Windows 10 since Fall Creators Update and I really like it. Unfortunately it can't be used correctly with Publisher as all font styles are detected as "Regular". Other fonts seem to work properly.

I imported a collage I made from an PSD file. This contains many pictures as layers with different sizes and orientations. Now I want to switchover with that project to Publisher. The imported document looks exactly the same as in Photoshop which is very nice. The pictures are now layers of Type "Pixel". I want to convert them to layers of type "Picture Frames" or "Image" so that I can replace it's pixel content with the original images for better quality. The "Layer" -> "Convert to Picture Frame" option is disabled. How can I achieve that?

And a related question: Is there an option to set a target DPI for scaling the image by that?

Thanks for clarification. I hope this will be implemented soon.

EDIT: Nevermind. I read the other topic again more carefully and figured out that this is already a known bug to the devs. --- I have an image which is saved by Photoshop with 301 DPI. This is properly written to the EXIF which I can see with both exifutil and windows file info. If I drag that image into Publisher 1.7.0 192 (Win 10) or use the "File" -> "Place..." option that image is imported as 72 DPI. The document itself is also 301 DPI. The image is the pages background and I would not expect to have it resized. Is there a setting that fixes all images at 72 DPI or is Publisher just not reading metadata? EDIT: This may be the same as this topic, but that got a bittle long and confusing. So please make it short: Is this working as intented or is it considered to be a bug?

I would like that, too. I create a photobook and I just want to plan my structure ahead to see where I want to place what. I would expect that after naming a page it will be displayed as "Page 3: My Custom Name" for example. If the page does not have a name it should still be "Page 3" as before.

Nope, as far as I can see there is currently no option to actually import pages from another document. You can just copy the contents, but not the page itself. I want to create a photobook and I have two different PSD templates I want to merge together: the cover and normal sites. Both documents have different sizes and their own guide lines. It's currently just not possible. Is it?

Hi Chris, sure. I added an photo by dragging it into the application window from my windows desktop. This created an "Image" layer. In the context menu of that image I opened up the "Layer Effects" and added an "Outer Shadow" and an "Outline". I selected the image and choosed in the menu "Layer" the menu item "Convert to Picture Frame". This resets the Layer Effects. The "fx" icon is also gone then. If I copied the layer before I can use "paste FX" to reapply the Layer Effects. I use "Affinity Publisher 1.7.0 192 (Beta)". I hope that helps.

Thank you very much for this. Actually I clicked on "Create Style" before to solve that problem, but since nothing happened I considered that menu point to be broken. :-D I indeed would also expect a naming dialog to pop up and also I would expect that the "Styles" view opens up if closed when I use that option.

This is Feedback for Affinity Publisher Beta. I seem to be in the wrong forum (even it is displayed to me as "Discussions and Suggestions for Affinity Publisher Beta on Desktop").

Sorry, I'm confused. I posted all my threads to "Discussions and Suggestions for Affinity Publisher Beta on Desktop". If you did not move this topic it's still displayed as the Publisher Beta forum to me. I mean Publisher.

Will there be a import feature from InDesign? Is it planned for version 1.0?