William Overington

Yesterday I sought advice in the following thread in the Share your work section of the forum. Alas, no replies as yet but I am wondering whether the issue that I asked about has not been noticed because it is in that thread. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/85230-portrait-of-a-lady/ The full description of the issue is in that thread, but briefly it is that a vector image produced using the Pen Tool In Affinity Publisher ends up as a bitmap image if copied and then pasted into a PagePlus document. William

I was just thinking of publishing an svg file of the picture of the lady in the Share your work section of the forum. If I select all of the picture and get to the export dialogue panel, the estimated file size is smaller than if I select all of the picture and then group and then get to the export dialogue panel. I am wondering why. Also, is the choice of with and without background not relevant as the picture is rectangular and filled? For example, is it like having a transparent or filled background when exporting a png? (while noting that svg is vector and png is bitmap) William

The problem is considered and a work-around found in the following thread. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/86113-copying-a-vector-pen-tool-generated-image-to-pageplus-ends-up-as-a-bitmap/ William

I produced this image by first producing an outline using several of the tool shapes. I used the trapezoid for the lady's dress; two rectangles, an ellipse and a triangle for her skin; a crescent for her hair and a circle for her eye. Alas there is no "Quick grid" so I used a table for the window frame, though I could not seem to get the corners quite right. I then used the Pen tool to produce the shapes that I wanted by going round, or nearby, the regular shape so as to make the curves look more natural than strict mathematical lines, then deleting the original shape, though I did have a record as I had saved the original outline design as a separate document. I then altered some of the points in the shapes that I had produced so as to get the finished image. Finally I added a rectangle for the wall behind her, though that then led to needing to sort out the view through the window as that is done using a rectangle behind a transparent table object. That leaves the possibility that a future such image could have a view through the window that has something like a tree or a mountain in the distance.

@Alfred Thank you for your reply. I have just tried it and Paste Special in PagePlus X7 of the picture of the lady copied from the .afpub source file that has the lettering offers me one choice, namely Device Independent Bitmap. However, I experimented and found that I can export the picture from Affinity Publisher as a .svg file and import it into PagePlus X7 and produce a PDF and the size is small and enlarging the lady's eye to 6400% in Adobe Reader shows the image to be vector. So, I can get the desired result by another route. William

@RaphLuna @firstdefence @Alfred Would "out for adventure" be better as "out-for-adventure"? Should "see's" be "sees"? Should "to get into" be better as "into which to get"? Should "Blossoms kind be "Blossom's kind"? Should "it will be, read on" be better using a colon instead of a comma, as "it will be: read on"? Should "corner, turn" be better using a colon instead of a comma, as "corner: turn"? That final question mark is after a statement rather than a question. I am unsure what to suggest about that, maybe @Alfred will have a view on this. Yes, the best way is only to use full stops in the author's name if using an initial instead of a name. For example, if Laurie A. Garland or L. A. Garland were the style used.

Gold star to Affinity Publisher. I have just used Affinity Publisher beta 283 in an experiment, and it works a treat! The really great thing is that the experiment is not about Affinity Publisher, it is about something else and Affinity Publisher provided the facility to get it done. Only one minor glitch and maybe that can be sorted, but it is a side-issue. Recently the following appeared in the Unicode Technical Committee Document Register. https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19082-qid-emoji.pdf Please note that the PDF is over six megabytes. I found it best to download it to local storage and read it locally rather than try to read it off the web - your results may be different depending on how your internet connection performs. Wow! I have sent in this feedback. ---- A suggestion regarding font support in relation to QID emoji William Overington Wednesday 3 April 2019 In the document L2/19-082 QID Emoji proposal, on page 3, in the section headed Interchange, there is mention of the need, if a display of the character is to be produced at the receiving end, for a font with a glyph for the character being available at the receiving end. I remember that in February 2003 I started a thread in the Unicode public mailing list (please note that the email address listed by me in that thread is no longer in use) with the title ‘Hot Beverage font.’. The post is about a font that I had produced and published. The font is still available. The font includes just one glyph, for the then newly encoded U+2615 HOT BEVERAGE character, though accessible both with that code point and also with a lowercase h in case that might be helpful in some circumstances. I am wondering if at the same time as the encoding of the new character that is suggested in the QID Emoji proposal document that the Unicode Technical Committee could please consider specifying a font name format and a file name format for a single glyph font for a QID emoji. For example, for a font with just a single glyph for the White-crested tiger heron emoji that is mentioned in the QID Emoji document, maybe the glyph could be in a font that has a font name of fontQ218543 in a file named fontQ218543.otf so that the internet, or some part thereof, could be searched for a single glyph font for the particular emoji. If these single glyph fonts were all made available using the SIL Open Font License font licensing facility, then maybe that could be beneficial for assisting interoperability of QID emoji. Reference: Overington, W. J. G., Hot Beverage font. https://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2003-m02/0338.html ---- So this afternoon I decided to try to make a maquette font to test it out. I used the High-Logic FontCreator program to make the font. In fact, version 8 of FontCreator. That worked a treat. I then decided to test the font using Affinity Publisher and it works. The liga table of the OpenType font is on by default in Affinity Publisher. It needs to be on for this experiment as the experiment depends upon a liga table glyph substitution. The really class bit of Affinity Publisher in relation to this test is that the substitution rule in the font is as follows. sub uniEFF8 uE0051 uE0032 uE0031 uE0038 uE0035 uE0034 uE0033 -> glyph218543; Look at that, a plane 0 Private Use Area character and seven plane 14 tag characters in a glyph substitution and Affinity Publisher did it with ease. As soon as I entered the TAG DIGIT THREE character from the Glyph Browser the White-crested tiger heron emoji glyph (maquette version! Modern Art?) was displayed! [Supplementary note of 2019-04-06 Saturday Please read the third and fourth posts in this thread before trying to reproduce this experiment. This is because the font has been updated and there is now an extra character, CANCEL TAG, that needs to be input to get the result. ] I used 36 point type for the test. Wow! For the test I used a Private Use Area character, hexadecimal EFF8 as the base character, with an arrow as the glyph. The minor side issue was that I could not get the hexadecimal EFF8 character into Affinity Publisher from the Glyph Browser. So I used the Microsoft calculator program to find the decimal equivalent of hexadecimal EFF8 as 61432 and then used Alt 61432 in WordPad to get the character and I then used copy and paste to get it into Affinity Publisher. I could get all of the other characters in from the glyph browser, quite straightforwardly. The font is attached in case anyone wants to have a go at finding the white-crested tiger heron. William Overington Thursday 4 April 2019 fontQ218543maquette2.otf

There has been a development in that the following document has been published yesterday. https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19203-wd-uts51-17-draft.pdf I refer to Annex C.2 of that document. In that section the use of U+1F194 SQUARED ID is suggested as the base character for QID emoji. I have thought of a mnemonic to help remember the code number - namely 1 F then the number of letters in the phrase "a memorable code". I have now produced a maquette font that uses that base character rather than the Private Use Area character that I used before. Here is the substitution sequence that is within the new font. sub u1F194 uE0051 uE0032 uE0031 uE0038 uE0035 uE0034 uE0033 uE007F -> glyph218543; In order to try the experiment one needs to install the font. So here is the sequence that one needs to enter in order to cause the display of the (stylized) glyph that represents the white crested tiger heron in these experiments. u1F194 uE0051 uE0032 uE0031 uE0038 uE0035 uE0034 uE0033 uE007F That is, the SQUARED ID character then tag characters 2 1 8 5 4 3 then the CANCEL TAG character. Please note that for the glyph substitution to work the OpenType liga feature needs to be on in Affinity Publisher, which it is by default. The font fontQ218543maquette3 in the file fontQ218543maquette3.otf is attached. You are welcome to download, install and use the font. William Overington Thursday 23 May 2019 fontQ218543maquette3.otf

I have just tried an experiment. I opened the .afpub file for the picture of the lady with the text and copied the image of the lady onto the clipboard. I then pasted that image into a PagePlus X7 document. A new one with nothing in it. The image was almost A4 in size. I made it smaller. So far so good. An image produced using the Pen Tool in Affinity Publisher can be added in to a PagePlus X7 document. I then tried producing a PDF document and it worked but is 30.14 kilobytes, while the original PDF directly from Affinity Publisher is 7.74 kilobytes and the version with the text directly from Affinity Publisher is 17.83 kilobytes. So I wondered why. However, emlarging the display in Adobe Reader greatly shows that the images produced from Affinity Publisher are vector and stay nice at very large sizes yet the image produced from PagePlus X7 goes blocky, so appears to be a bit map image. Why is this please? Why did the image end up as a bitmap image rather than stay as a vector image? William

Would the answer be to ask the Affinity team to add a patch to Affinity Designer such that holding down the CTRL key when using the brush will produce the result that you want? William

Well, Serif has some QR code generation in PagePlus X9, so maybe the code for doing it might be suitable for porting across to Affinity Publisher.

Could the Pen Tool have a "sum curves" facility please? Suppose that one has produced a representation of y=f(x) using the Pen Tool. Suppose that one has also produced a representation of y=g(x) using the Pen Tool. Could we have a facility such that one can select both curves and press a button somewhere and a single curve y=f(x) + g(x) is produced please? Not done by summing the mathematical functions but by actually summing the curves as presented. That way it would work for any curves. If the first curve has p points defined, whether sharp, smooth or smart; and the second curve has q points define, whether sharp, smooth or smart, then the result will have a maximum of (p+q) points defined: if a point is at the same value of x in both curves then only one point will be in the result, so there could be fewer than (p+q) points in the result. How difficult would this be to program please? William

Maybe for detecting most errors but not necessarily for correcting them. William

Could the Pen Tool have a status panel please? In the Serif Program ImpactPlus there was (is, as I still use it and it works well in Windows 10 notwithstanding that it is over a decade since it was last updated) a status panel. When I first used ImpactPlus I found it hard to use, but once I made using the Status Panel the key part of using ImpactPlus I found ImpactPlus delightfully straightforward to use and I got good results. So could the Pen Tool have a similar comprehensive status panel please? I know that the x and y coordinates are in the Transform panel but there does not seem to be any numerical indication of the angle of the "what's it called" or its two lengths when the point is in Smooth mode. If the Status Panel for the Pen Tool could be able to be placed near the point and be such that one can adjust the numbers in the panel and the angle and the two lengths of the "what's it called" could be automatically updated on screen, that would be good. I found that with ImpactPlus that using the mouse unit to try to manipulate shapes and get a good result was very difficult and near impossible or even impossible, but using the status panel enabled good results to be produced straightforwardly. Though those tools were useful when trying to sort out some rotations and it was not obvious what numbers were needed and those tools did allow me to get a rough approximation that could then be refined using the Status panel. So based on that, I feel that a Status Panel giving full numerical control over points and their attributes would be very useful. Naturally, its use would be optional. Also, if there could be a mathematical explanation of how it all works please that would help some users be able to calculate the settings to use for cases where precision rather than artistic impression is needed. William

Ever since I first saw the Affinity Publisher logo from time to time I have been thinking that I have seen a coat of arms of someone famous in history that had several bends dexter upon it. I remembered that UMIST had a shield like that, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Manchester_Institute_of_Science_and_Technology but I seemed to remember that someone famous had a coat of arms with three thin red bends dexter. Today I found it, though they are called bendlets,. It is the coat of arms of Lord Byron. https://drawshield.net/reference/parker/b/bendlet.html William Overington Monday 13 May 2019

Some readers might like to know that items published by a person living in the United Kingdom and/or published in the United Kingdom are collected by The British Library. https://www.bl.uk/legal-deposit https://www.bl.uk/help/how-to-deposit-your-digital-publications Five matters arising when sending in items as email attachments. 1. State that the items are for legal deposit. 2. Do not include a web address as such in the email itself because their spam filter will wipe the email and as far as I am aware will inform no one of this wiping. If you want to include an email address, such as the thread in this forum where the item is published use a combination of text and the symbols spelled out, such as forum dot affinity dot serif dot com solidus index dot php question_mark solidus topic solidus 85230-portrait-of-a-lady solidus and not https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/85230-portrait-of-a-lady/ Maybe safest not to put the https in just in case the spam detector acts on that. 3. They will send you an email receipt IF (and possibly ONLY IF) you request one when sending the email. I always include A receipt is requested please. as a separate paragraph near the start of the email. 4. I always list the file names and the titles of the files. This may not be essential but may be helpful for the archiving process. 5. There is no assessment of merit involved. The idea is to gather an as far as possible complete record of what is produced, not to pick and choose. William Overington Monday 13 May 2019

Matters arising. The description of the coat of arms for Lord Byron includes the word 'enhanced'. I had not known of that word used in heraldry and I found that there is a page for it. https://drawshield.net/reference/parker/e/enhanced.html Why not tell @firstdefence ? I have been looking at the logos for Affinity Photo and for Affinity Designer as well. The logo for Affinity Photo is elegantly subtle, like a letter A and the iris of a camera. That leads me to think that there may be similar subtlety in the design of the logo for Affinity Designer. William

For readers who are not aware, Alfred is making a friendly nod to a font that I made which I named as Sonnet to a Renaissance Lady. In fact, the font is free to use and can be obtained without any need to register from the following link. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/SONNETRL.TTF As Alfred had mentioned the font I got the idea of making a copy of the original lady_1.afpub file as lady_2.afpub and then in the copy grouping the items in the picture, scaling the picture down to about 40% of its linear size, and moving it to about half-way down and with its right edge at the right margin line. I then had the idea of adding a text box, use the font Sonnet to a Renaissance Lady at 24 point and add some text - filler text at first - and then try to have the text so that it goes around the picture so as to produce a nice page with the text and the picture. If I could learn the technique I could then change the text to something suitable and make an image and post it in this thread. Here is the result. There is now a PDF version of the document on the web and the display is clearer as the PDF document is completely vector-based. PDF version on the web There is also a PDF version of the complete picture on the web. It is completely vector-based. PDF version on the web of the original picture

Pantone are offering three .ase (Adobe Swatch Exchange) files, free, one is new. https://www.pantone.com/eblasts/20190507/index.html These three palette files are good for trying out the Import Palette feature of Affinity Publisher. Readers are invited to post images using one or more of these palettes in this thread. William

Where the green of her dress meets the wall, there is a thin dark line. This appears to be because the system is trying to make a number of pixels part way between the green and the red. Is there any way to get rid of this?

So what goes on? Am I not using Affinity Publisher correctly or is Affinity Publisher producing PDFs that are too large or is there some other explanation? Hello Mike, I am including @MikeW so that you get a notification.

Also, I like the way that you have done that shimmering reflection. William

@Manozac2000 Would it be a good idea to remove the drawing lines around the mountains, the drawing lines around the yacht and the drawing lines around the reflection in the lake from the final image? Having said that, at my present level of skill, I cannot produce anything like as good as what you have produced. William

I have now produced a PDF using the PDF/X-1a:2003 format from Affinity Publisher. I have requested honouring spot colours. It was, in fact, already set (by default?) The PDF file is over 400 kilobytes. Could someone say why it is so much bigger than the web version please? It is all vector graphics in the original. I am wondering if the Affinity team could possibly consider having a selectable option for use when using the "for web" version such that the names of the spot colours are automatically listed, as comments, in the Keywords section of the PDF document properties please: this is just an informal enquiry at present. That way the spot colour information would be recorded in the PDF document. The thing is, my website is not big enough for lots of large files. By the way, are spot colours always Pantone colours? William art_from_five_colour_palette_X1a_2003.pdf

Ah yes, scroll down, that is what I have been missing. I keep forgetting to scroll down in the More... section. I have had that issue before and I keep forgetting to do it!