Steps

Then it's about time to submit your crash log.

Really good!

I'm surprised that there are not more people that find the auto buttons useful but consider it a problem that they are destructive. As this app is mainly meant for professionals and the principle every tutorial teaches you is to always work non-destructive I don't quite get the acceptance for this being destructive. Does everyone develop their RAWs so perfectly they don't ever use that buttons?

You really waste a lot of other peoples time trying to read this mess of a badly formatted text. Try to state in clear words what you want to do and what is the issue you facing. If that is not too much to ask.

Yes, definitely! Out of curiosity I trialed recently InDesign CC 2019, QXPress 2018, Xara Designer Pro X and so on to get a better idea how Publisher actually compares in the market. Just now I trialed Canvas X 2019... and... wow... just wow... this is certainly a really really bad usability. And they want 300$ for this (normal price being 600$)? Crazy. I can forgive Scribus for it's bad usability since it's open source, but this Canvas offer is upright offensive. I was even not able to do my usual test case workflow as I did not find how to rotate or crop a image. Sorry for the rant, but I'm puzzled right now.

@fde101 I found out that Xara Designer Pro X has a pretty simple solution to the problem you mentioned regarding non-rectangular shapes. They just always use the objects bounding box for constraining. So the logic always deals with an rectangle image that can't leave a rectangle shape. This should be easy to implement. In the most common case of an rectangle shape it's identical with it's bounding box. Pretty simple solution. Isn't it?

@KipV I was wrong at the beginning of the topic and @MEB was right all along. You don't have to wait for Publisher! Designer in the stable version already does what you need for prototyping. I just trialed it and learned it has a Artboard feature I was not aware of. This is a way you can similar to Sketch design your single windows or pages for a workflow. The Export Persona lets you export every ArtBoard to a single file. I just did a quick test and I think it's perfectly suited for designing UI mockups. Designer also has already an Assets panel with icons for iOS. I believe the ArtBoard feature is meant for what you asked.

That mode is called "Edit content directly", but what it does is actual moving with snapping. MEB called it the real move tool. The other mode you mentioned is more like a widget. And yes, it shows the border, but it lacks snapping. And without any snapping here I always have the effect that there is dead space between the picture frame border and the image itself. Please double-check that you have snapping in your suggested way. I only know about the two ways. One is without border and the other without snapping. And I need both features. A little hint: I just added some new videos to the OP to explain better which feature I mainly want in this topic.

If I move the image in the "move with snapping mode" I see no borders: Gmsxo3jx4D.mp4

Objection! Publisher is already a winner and strong contender even without those features. It has already been proven to me on a production project (with ordered prints) to be suitable for photo book creation and alone for that purpose I see a big market. In my view they just need to sort out the bugs and improve the stability to get the first version ready to ship.

This has been discussed before. One main reason is how the file format works in regards of caching and another that even "linked images" are embedded. Use the search and you will find . Quick Tip to reduce the size is to "save as" with another name. This empties all caches.

I have to disagree here. Out of curiosity I just trialed InDesign CC 2019 to compare different things and I found that the Picture Frame handling there is even worse. I accidently changed the size of image without keeping aspect ratio and cropped where I meant to resize. Publishers implementation feels to me like a polished copy of that what InDesign does. But I still don't like it. I seriously would not go with InDesign for my next photo book.

I have to disagree here. As far as I can see Xara Designer Pro X does not work just like that because you have to explicitly create a new Bitmap layer on top of the other layers. It can be compared to "merge visible" from Photo. But it pops up a new dialog asking you a few things how you want your bitmap to be. Yes, I see that Affinity does a better job here since it's a few clicks less. The new bitmap layer ("pixel layer" in affinity speak) here replaces the old one. But there also comes a usability problem with it as this procedure is not really transparent to the user. It just looks like as if the layer actually is converted rather than replaced with a whole new layer of a different kind. That's why I did not think this is intentional to throw away information. I think this seems to be a bit typical for Affinity apps not to call actions after that what really happens. It reminds me how a "Convert to Picture Frame" on an Image Layer does not actually convert it, but it wraps a new Picture Frame Layer around the Image Layer. --- And in InDesign it seems not be possible. I just looked into the trial version of InDesign CC 2019 and googled a bit, but I cannot find a similar function to rasterize an object. All people asking for it are recommended to flatten images on PDF export.

Because we can't be trusted. In the end we will expect it to actually happen on that date and if not we will start dozens of new threads complaining. Serif is better of to surprise us. It will be ready when it is ready.

Ok, I think all has been said and for my part I call it the end of discussion. Thanks to everybody for sharing your thoughts.

I think that will depend on their third party lib to support that... But maybe they have implemented it on their own. Actually I'm not to sure about that right now because the third party license statement mentions the usage of OpenJPEG which describes on it's website that it's for JPEG 2000. But you can't export this format from Affinity, so this may be used for regular JPEG exports. I'm a bit confused here. However: You can try to find out if the recent OpenJPEG version is capable of what you ask for and suggest updating it (which they may have done anyway). --- If I have to make a wild guess: They use "libjpeg" for this and forgot to mention that in the third party licenses.

You pay a price with your personal data you are just not being aware of. Wait for it, one day you will.

Easy: You proved that with your postings. But your lack of understanding the issue is not my problem. One day it will become yours. I don't care. And for the Minority vs majority Argument ... ok, I let it go. It's ridicoulos to argue that the minority must be wrong.

Your point is that most people do not care. We knew that before. The only purpose of your posting is to expose how little you understand from all of this. It's okay, I took a note.

That's kind of an resignation fighting it, but eventually we get there. I remember refusing to use the Battle.net because of it's awful Terms and conditions, but in the end I wanted to play Starcraft 2 and finally I accepted that EULA after a month of resistance. I am thankful for laws like the GPDR because as user you are indeed in a weak position.

Unnecessary posting and totally uncalled for.... But thank you for proving my previous point about people that do not care. One day you will be affected by an fraud like identity theft and this will help you to learn. I at least hope so.

Yes, but I did not know that as I created that issue. It looked like a obvious bug. Now I want to understand how other Apps handle that and which @Chris_K was refering to. By the time I got all info I need I will open up a suggestion topic to improve that behaviour here. How does the Tool you work with handle this?

I understand the Bitmap creation process, but rasterazing a layer (which can be a group) should take that rotation information rather than discard it. I'm fine if I have a layer that is a group with one rotated child that this is lost. Since different children could have different rotations I would expect that. But how it's now is in my view a somewhat cheap / lazy implementation. What does InDesign and QXPress do in the same situation as described above? I don't have these tools to compare. Can someone verify that? Is it actually equal behaviour?

Out of curiousity and a bit disbelief. I still think it's a bug. What do you think? Is the current behaviour correct? What is the benefit of that? Why should it not work as I expected? I found the answer a bit too short.