William Overington

Does anyone here have access to the Pantone metallic chips book please? https://www.pantone.com/uk/en/metallic-chips-book If so, could you possibly say something about the general look of Pantone metallic inks when printed please? For example, is the effect almost like a mirror, or is it more like a gold effect car, not some gold plated car out of a movie or the like, one of the metallic cars that are production models in everyday use. Is the effect like gold leaf on a manuscript, or is it more like the gold blocking on the spine of a book? Does the range include gold, silver, bronze and copper please? If so, could you possibly quote a few numbers please so that I can look at them in Affinity Designer please and try to include them in some experimental artwork? William

Thank you both. I have now found the Pantone Formula Guide Solid Coated V4 palette and found Pantone 363 and filled a rectangle with that colour. How does one get the list with names please? I remember doing this once long ago but I have not remembered how I did it. At present I have filled square of colour each with the name as a tooltip message. William

I found the following video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbOWrk300CI 3 minutes 14 seconds It starts about Pantone colours and then uses an example using an Adobe product. I have tried to find that colour using Affinity Designer, but without success. Yet I am new to this. So can it be done please, and if so, how? William

I have found the following article that includes some information on printing using Pantone spot colours and metallics. https://www.kmslitho.co.uk/print-pantone-spots-metallics/ William

Ah, I wondered why the square brackets, but then I spotted my miskeying and lack of proofreading! I have now corrected my earlier post. William

Some old software runs well on Windows 10. I have used Serif ImpactPlus 5 on Windows 10. ImpactPlus 5 dates from around 2004 or thereabouts. For some purposes, there is nothing as far as I am aware in the Affinity range that is as good as ImpactPlus 5. William

Interestingly, the comet in the sky. Although it has a tail, which might give an impression of being motion lines, as in cartoon graphics, comets do not appear to move over a short period of time. They move over a longer time, but not like a thin fast line from a meteorite entering the earth's atmosphere and burning up. I saw the Hale-Bopp comet one night back in 1997 and it was bright in the night sky but appeared, during the several minutes that I observed it, to be static in the night sky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Hale%E2%80%93Bopp William

Well, I suppose I should have included svg in my list of examples of what I regard as direct file types. William

I like the transparent hemisphere. I did not notice at first. May I suggest please that you edit your post and put five or even seven blank lines of text both before and after the image, so that it is displayed isolated from other items and notes? William

Well, it was just me trying to convey what I meant without knowing the parlance. I regard png, bmp, jpg as direct file types. To me, maybe I am wrong, PDF is a file type which is very useful for conserving a complete document that might include one or more images (if any) but from which extracting an image can either be awkward or impossible. o me a PDF is good for putting on the web, good to send to a print establishment to get a print or prints, but, and maybe I am wrong on this, essentially write-only memory. I know that one can read a PDF into some applications. I have only ever tried it a few times when there seemed no alternative available, but it often needed some sort of bodging to get what I wanted. https://www.lexico.com/definition/bodge I have known the word to be used in the sense of put together as best one can in the circumstances. For example, in Apollo thirteen, one could say that the improvised system that was put together was "bodged together". A peculiar looking result, but it saved them. As in, for example, "I bodged it together with some Araldite." The meaning that Lexico gives seems to me to be more like the meaning of "botched". https://www.lexico.com/definition/botc William

Thank you. Is there a direct file type as well please? William

A side discussion. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/143167-can-one-save-a-file-and-retain-pantone-spot-colour-information-please/ William

Can one save a file and retain Pantone spot colour information please? Say from Affinity Designer. If so, which file type or types please? I would like to try to produce some artwork with a Pantone spot colour. In fact a metallic, but the question is generic. I know that I might not be able to get a print using the spot colour at present, but I would like to produce such a file for the experience and as chance favours the prepared person, if a chance arises I would have something ready. William

Could you clarify please to which files you are referring in the phrase "those files"? I am not understanding how the technique suggested would work, the goal being to make the full size 2171 pixel by 1571 pixel artwork available. William

The printed card has now arrived, Saturday morning. Considering that I placed the order after 9 pm on Thursday, that is good prompt delivery. I have now placed it in the quarantine box for a week, having first removed the card, the package unopened, that arrived a week ago Thursday. That card is the third in the series of Software Unicorn prints, using artwork from 1998. This one is from the following image. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/euto3001.gif I produced the image in 1998 by adapting a copy of a clip art image of a horse that was provided with Microsoft Office. I think, but I am not quite sure, that I produced the image using the PowerPoint program. I got a copy of the image from the web, placed it into a blank Affinity Designer document 2171 pixels wide by 1571 pixels high, then, as before with the Software Unicorns reflected in a Lake image, I moved the upper left corner to (100, 100), then I scaled the image by a factor of three both horizontally and vertically by entering numbers in the Transform panel, then I centred the image both horizontally and vertically, then saved the file, then I exported a jpg image at 300 dots per inch William .

Are you looking for straight line edges to blocks of colour? If so, you could try using the Pen Tool in either Affinity Designer or Affinity Publisher. If the shapes are done in opaque, which is the default situation, they can be placed one over another so you do not need to make the shapes precisely matched in order to get a clean-looking join. The reason I ask is because the image seems a bit blocky on the lines but it is not clear if that is deliberate or just the effect of enlarging a smaller bitmap image. William

Oh, it looks like that did not work! So is it possible to make the artwork file available within this forum? William

Here is the artwork just as an attachment. William

I have just tried getting back a copy of the artwork from the forum. Alas, the file is not full size. So, if I want to make the artwork available so that if anyone wants to get a print for himself or herself, do I need to not place it within the post but just leave it as an attachment? William

Yesterday evening I placed an order for the card. I have now received an email that the card is printed and on its way to me by post. Some points about the process of producing the card. ---- When trying to introduce the ZWNJ character from the visible glyph for ZWNJ that is in the Quest text font I tried using the Glyph Browser of Affinity Designer. Yet it was not available, though the glyph for ZWJ was available. ---- I have asked about how people get a ZWNJ character into a document in the following mailing list post. https://corp.unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/2021-May/009456.html Responses can be followed here, though if discussion continues into June 2021 then another link will be needed. https://corp.unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/2021-May/date.html ---- I checked that the ligature for 'is' in the word 'English' was not preventing the appearance of a ligature for 'sh'. There is not a ligature for 'sh' in the font. There is a ligature for 'sp' and a ligature for 'sk'. ---- William

The Quest text font is available from the following link. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/QUESTTXT.TTF William

Here is the completed artwork, ready to get a hardcopy print. It may not show full size in this forum post. William

As it happens, although I have been posting png files as illustrations, each 400 pixels wide, by 553 pixels high, the Affinity Designer files that I have been using are all 1571 pixels wide by 2171 pixels high, so as to be ready to produce 1571 pixels by 2171 pixels artwork in a 300 dots per inch jpg file to send to Papier so as to get a hardcopy print. Where the greeting in the card goes if a card is used as a greetings card, I put notes about the artwork. So, I decided to check whether a hyphen is needed between the words 'sixteenth' and 'century'. I found the following. https://proofreadmyessay.co.uk/writing-tips/the-word-century/ So the font is based on a design from the sixteenth century, and the artwork is in sixteenth-century style. William

I have reworded the italic part. I am still using the ZWNJ character. I also reduced the size of the side margins, in fact back to their original position. William

I decided to reword the italic part so as to include a ligature for 'st' and a ligature for 'ct' in the page. In doing so, the middle line was wider than the other two lines, so I increased the size of the side margins so that the word 'into' went onto the third line. I then centred the text frame. I also increased the leading to 105% as the words 'Together' and 'glyphs' were touching. However, please notice that the ligature for 'st' does not show, as the ligature for 'is' overrides it. So I remembered the ZWNJ character to force a ligature not to form. So I copied the file and inserted a ZWNJ character between the 'i' and the 's' so that the ligature for 'st' would become displayed. This was quite tricky. In the event I managed to do it by using the FontCreator preview panel to preview the three character sequence > ZWNJ < in my Quest text font, because ZWJ and ZWNJ each have a visible glyph in that font (and thus non-standard) as the ZW means 'zero width'. I copied from the preview panel and pasted into the Affinity Designer document, then carefully deleted the character '>' and the character '<'. It worked, the ligature for 'st' became displayed. Later, I realized that I could have resolved the issue by simply highlighting the letter 'i' and removing the 'Use All' ligature setting, and upon doing that in another copy, the ligature for 'st' became displayed. So I got the result by using a ZWNJ character. As I had never used a ZWNJ character before, it was a good learning experience. William