William Overington

Because I was answering the claim that I do not seem to do anything with Affinity apps. William

Well, the banning of anything generated by Ai means that I have not been able to post something that I have done. I started with a picture of the exit of an art gallery with a noticeboard in the picture that had been generated for me by AI and in Affinity Designer I produced a notice with a display that is applying one of my inventions and I added it onto the noticeboard in the picture, so as to produce a picture of the exit of an art gallery with the sign that I had designed displayed. Alright, it is not allowed to be posted in the Share your work forum, but I have done something using an Affinity program. Maybe it is not of interest to everybody who looks at items in Share your work, but some people might be interested and it might inspire people who are learning as to what is possible. Anyway, here are links to before and after images. https://punster.me/serif/viewtopic.php?pid=4124#p4124 https://punster.me/serif/viewtopic.php?pid=4141#p4141an From my viewpoint, the Affinity program has been an important tool in allowing me to make progress with my research as I now have an illustration of what I am suggesting. Also, although I could produce beautiful output of text set out for framing, as I understand the situation, something that is text is not acceptable for the Share your work forum either. So this lovely sonnet cannot be posted even if typeset in a stylish font, even if it had not been generated by AI as a result of my prompt (though later found not to be in the Italian style). https://punster.me/serif/viewtopic.php?pid=3682#p3682 William

It seems to me that the fourth one is about the food and drink available at the BINGO AND QUIZ NIGHT. I suppose that that panel could just be adverts for the kitchen and the bar and neither be open. That brings back memories of a train with a railway carriage labelled BUFFET CAR and having gone there it was shut. 😁 William

I would hope that Ploughman's Supper would include warm chunks of carrot and warm slices of potato in a gluten-free parsley sauce. Ploughman's dinner perhaps like Ploughman's Supper except for Herbes de Provence instead of Parsley. Mmm. 😁 William

No, details of the BINGO AND QUIZ NIGHT take up four panels. There is no date stated for the BINGO AND QUIZ NIGHT event. William

Because there is no date stated for the event for which the document is about - A BINGO AND QUIZ NIGHT. The 12th April date is on a page that has FORTHCOMING SOCIAL EVENT. So it turns out that there can be, or are planned to be, more than one BINGO AND QUIZ NIGHT before 12th April and the same brochure can be used at each of them has information about the running order of each of those events, and also an advertisement for the event due to take place on 12th April. (Though no detail as to what is a Ploughman's Supper!) 😁 William

https://punster.me/serif/viewtopic.php?id=567 William

That explains why there is no date for the event stated in the artwork. So I suppose that the same brochure could be used for more than one such event. William

I have been trying to find out what is a Ploughman's Supper. I have known of a Ploughman's Lunch for over fifty years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ploughman's_lunch William

In the top left panel the artwork has 7 pm - 7.30 pm Does this mean a half-hour show or does it mean "doors open at 7 pm, the show starts at 7.30 pm" ? If the latter, a way to express that is 7 pm for 7.30 pm I remember a local factory where the staff had an annual dinner dance at a local venue one evening each year and the tickets used to have Carriages at 1 am as a fancy way to mean that the event finishes at 1 am. 😁 Is this brochure all for one evening, with music, bingo, quiz, food, drink each in a different room or is it that the events are on different occasions? It is not clear from the artwork. William

The clumps of leaves. Does one use the same green colour but with various levels of opacity? William

I saw the following web page https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment/tv/a-beautiful-paean-to-doing-things-at-your-own-pace/ar-AA1loCzT I like the picture. How in Affinity Designer would a person best approach trying to produce effects like those in that picture please? In particular the leaves of the tree in the left foreground, yet also the clouds. William

I have found that when using the Affinity Designer Pencil Tool on a Windows system on a laptop computer that using Mousekeys on an external keyboard to press down and effectively hold down the trackpad by software rather than hold it down physically makes drawing with the Pencil Tool much better. It means that I can lift my finger from the trackpad without ending the curve that is being drawn by the Pencil Tool. Is this already widely known about or is it a new idea? William

Possibly. Please note, replying "Possibly" is an attempt at humour. Alfred knows to what I refer, namely a character in one of my novels who says "Possibly" when she is avoiding saying "Yes".

But it is not. I have found that Bing Chat Ai is very good for some things, but cannot be relied upon to always be correct. I find that it is necessary for me to look at the result provided and decide whether it is correct. Yet Bing Chat AI can provide useful ideas of where to look. The art is of variable quality. Some paintings seem excellent to me, yet some get in a muddle, for example, sometimes an okapi has been depicted with horns somewhere between a gazelle and an ibex, which is not correct. But, yes, I did rely on what Bing Chat AI told me about copyright and its claim that the paintings are originals. So I need to try to check those claims in some way. William

I asked Bing Chat Ai about copyright issues in artwork that it generates some time ago and the reply was that the system learns the style of an artist from licensed databases and that the pictures generated are originals generated using the style information. I have had a quick look to find the response but I have not found it at this time, I saved it in a WordPad file. I do not know if I posted the response in one of the threads about AI in Alfred's forum. https://punster.me/serif/viewforum.php?id=11 I have prompted Bing Chat AI to produce a number of original paintings. I am amazed at what has been produced. Yet Bing Chat AI usually offers four pictures, sometimes fewer, and some of them are indeed muddled in some way, yet some of them are, in my opinion, truly beautiful. I have framed prints of a few of them. Though, in fairness, I am not an expert in art appreciation. Alas, work produced using Affinity Designer that starts with using an AI generated image is not allowed in this forum, but anyone interested may like this link. https://punster.me/serif/viewtopic.php?pid=4141#p4141 William

I have asked for advice in the Unicode mailing list. Any replies should be readable in the mailing list archive. https://corp.unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/2024-February/date.html William

The empty narrow rectangle, sometimes known informally as a tofu box, is the .notdef character of the font. The way TrueType and OpenType fonts are set up is that a font does not have a glyph available for every possible character code, so if it gets a request for a glyph (loosely "the picture") for a particular character code it sends the glyph for the ,notdef symbol of the font as the response to the request. Many, though not all, fonts use an empty rectangle as the .notdef glyph. So it seems that Affinity Publisher is receiving the code number ("the Unicode code point") but when it tries to find a glyph for the code point then there is not one located, for whatever reason. I cannot quite remember if I have used the Private Use Area in Affinity Publisher, but I know that the Private Use Area works well in a text frame in Affinity Designer. Have you seen Fontstruct? https://fontstruct.com/ Maybe it would work better for you. It has the same chunky grid format. You do get a TrueType font as the output. If you want to make fonts the High-Logic FontCreator is good, though it is a program for which one needs to pay for a licence. FontCreator has a friendly, helpful forum. https://www.high-logic.com/ It depends what you want to achieve, whether a one-off logo or a font for lots of use in text or whatever. William

I had not known of eudcedit until I saw your post and I hope to learn about it. May I suggest that you try pasting into WordPad, then copy and paste from WordPad into Affinity Publisher. I do not know if that will work, just a hunch. William

People may not agree with me but my latest post is because of my genuine concern that the threshold of ability and performance being expected for the Share your work forum is unhelpful for encouraging people who are learning to use Affinity products to participate in the pleasure and progress of posting items that they have produced using Affinity products. I accept that due to me not previously understanding what level of use of Affinity products was expected for participation in the Share your work forum by Serif has resulted in the past of me posting threads that are incompatible with the level of achievement that I now know that Serif regards as expected. I had thought that using the Affinity product to achieve some result was sufficient. Yet management must manage and if Serif management has a requirement then it is Serif's Share your work forum so Serif's choice. William

Thinking about this I am rather concerned that Serif is setting the threshold for participating far too high. No artistic skill is required to purchase a licence for the software. At the risk of being accused of counting clicks, before the discussion restarted yesterday the views was 2.6 k, now it is 3.2k,so lots of views, though some views are by the same people keeping up with the discussion. So I wonder how many people reading this thread would like to post something in the Share your work forum yet do not do so as they are concerned that what they can produce is not good enough. My view, and I appreciate that maybe nobody will publicly agree with me and that I may be criticised for my opinion, is that people should be encouraged to post what they can do, because that achievement can lead to doing more and better. If people are presented a cliff face to learning then learning and achieving can seem impossible - better to show the way to the longer, yet gentler gradient, path to achievement. Maybe we need a thread in Share your work for people to have a go, perhaps as their first post, a gentle thread with encouragement. A sort of learner's café. William

Thank you for replying. It took me longer than two minutes to do the editing, I had not used Shear before. I am rather pleased with the result that I achieved with using Affinity software. It is another step forward with my research project as I now have an illustration. I do not know whether anybody would be interested. As far as I am aware - though I have not done a search, just from my memory of what I have seen previously - what I did is using the application in a novel way, to produce a composite image by placing a sign onto a noticeboard that is in another picture. William

Yet it is a good example of using Affinity Designer to produce a composite image from two original images, using shear and rotate so as to achieve the result. If the image of the art gallery had been a photograph I could have posted about the editing in the Share your work forum. Then a discussion about how to adjust the smaller image using Affinity software to achieve a better lighting effect could have taken place. William

You posted a sonnet that is in the Italian style. So I posted a link to another sonnet that is in the same style. It is a serious thread in a friendly forum. It may be that some people have the opinion that I am asking the same question as was asked before, but it is not the same question. It is a question asked to Patrick, so hopefully a ruling will be made as to whether an image generated by AI may be used in a Share your work forum post if that image is edited other than just scaling using Affinity software, is an AI image allowed as input to Affinity software in a Share your work forum thread on the same basis as is a photograph. If the question is not asked then by default it cannot be done, so I consider it best to ask as that could lead to progress in applying Affinity software: an example being that this morning I used shear and rotate together to achieve a first attempt at a desired effect. William

Well, it is a discussion thread. We are indeed fortunate that Serif allows discussion of forum policy. William