William Overington

I notice that there is a facility to export a palette. It seems to use a proprietary Serif palette format specific to Affinity products.
Would it be possible to also be able to export using the .ase Adobe Swatch Exchange format please?
Would there be intellectual property rights issues to doing that?
William
 
 

It all sounds a bit complicated, but well done on finding a solution, (albeit a temporary one). 👍

You've to see if it's something you can easily fix yourself or not. You can look & search on the Lenovo websites if there is a Hardware Maintenance Manuals (HMM) for that notebook (Ideapad or Thinkpad etc.?), in order to identify parts. - Dependent on where the power button lies and if it's integrated, aka if part of the exchangable keyboard or a separate switch, there are chances that you can get some a less expensive replacement component then, which you might can exchange yourself, without paying much third party repair service.

As said avoid buying something crappy here, which means some weak underpowered consumer Laptop/Notebook. What do you want to do with a Celeron based CPU, 4 GB RAM and a 64-256 GB SSD Win Notebook nowadays or tomorrow (...that's a hardware joke at best, just for surfing and writing one/two emails, but nothing you can use in a realy productive manner for todays or tommorows demanding software needs)?  - Further you also have to distinguish between consumer and business oriented notebooks. The later are much more sturdy build, have better matched hardware components, usually offer more connection interfaces, are meant more for overall continuous use and also usually come along with much better/longer warranties (some with direct next-day on-site-service warranties).
When buying a new notebook which has to last and should pay for itself over some longer period of time (amortize), you have to invest more in advance here!
For example, if it should be from Lenovo, maybe look better instead after some business oriented Thinkpad model like this upwards ...
https://www.lenovo.com/de/de/laptops/thinkpad/p-series/ThinkPad-P15s-Gen-2-15”-Intel/p/20W600GTGE?cid=de%3Apaidsocial%3Amloutc
... for a Dell there are things like their Latitude series, HP has also Z- and Elite lines etc.

If it can be repaired, that may well be your best option. However, (from what you've said in the past) I assume you are not able to take it to be repaired, so would have to pay postage costs on top of the actual repair bill. If the problem is more than just a switch, the total cost may be more that it is really worth, considering that it doesn't sound as if your current laptop is in the best working order anyway.
Personally, I think that your best course of action, and probably best value for money in the long run, would be to get the best laptop you can afford, and install the Affinity apps that you have already paid for. (Your option 1 above.) 

Yes, a battery costs around 10 or 20 €, as far as I remember. It's a simple button battery. One of the larger ones. I would at least ask an expert if this could be the cause of your problem. There are several websites on the web that can tell you how to change the battery yourself. That shouldn't be too difficult, but of course laptops from different manufacturers are different from each other. But if you see a button battery somewhere on the mainboard, it should be the one.

There’s no hard-and-fast rule that I know of.
What the manufacturer calls it is often dependent upon how the manufacturer wants to ‘market’ the machine, and the same machine can be marketed differently over its lifetime.
For instance, a particular model could be a laptop when it is first sold but can sometimes change to being a notebook later in life, showing how its performance has dropped behind newer laptops.
There are most probably some notebooks which are more powerful than some other laptops.
“Laptop” usually means “for normal-use, or power(-ish) user” and “notebook” usually means “for light-use user” but, as I said, it’s a ‘fuzzy’ area.

In general, a “notebook” is just a ‘light-weight’ (in both actual weight and computing power) laptop.
The ‘line’ between the two terms is both wide and grey.

That doesn't matter, there are a bunch of good solid notebooks, the point is more to don't buy any crap here!

In general, for image editing you need a strong CPU, as much RAM as you can get (minimum 8 GB, better 16 or more) and a good graphic card. Also thinking about the future, you should be aware that the requirements for graphic apps and even operating systems will expectable increase. I personally decided to buy a Gaming PC some years ago, that did cost about 1,200 €. Unfortunately the power you need to handle pixels has its price.

If the £159 laptop you mention is this one:
https://www.currys.co.uk/products/hp-stream-14sdq0506sa-14-laptop-intel-celeron-64-gb-emmc-white-10225081.html
… then the storage of 64GB will be no good for anything more than web browsing and office stuff (that’s an exaggeration but, in practice, you will find problems having so little storage in the medium/long-term).
Plus, the 4GB of memory is only the recommended minimum to be using the Affinity applications so you may find that the machine slows down more often that you would like.
It could be usable for what you want to do with it but I wouldn’t personally recommend it for anything more than ‘basic computing’.

That's a Windows restriction, and a major reason for having 10S: Only applications from the Microsoft Store can be installed.

I'm really not a hardware expert, so anything I can tell is without warranty. But as far as I remember, I had somehow similar problems long time ago with my Desktop Computer, that were caused by the battery that was running empty. It was solved by simply changing the button battery, that is placed somewhere on the main board.

I'd agree that your laptop is probably at the end of it's life. If the problem was just the power switch I'd say try getting it replaced, but it sounds like it would probably cost more than it's worth to get the laptop working properly. 
As you don't carry the laptop around, have you considered getting a desktop model instead? You can often get good deals, so, depending on the specs you want, it may work out cheaper in the long run. (Although, of course, you would have the additional, initial, cost of a monitor.)
Personally I wouldn't bother about using the Windows S mode, assuming you are the only one using your PC!

I’d take it to your local computer store or hardware/repair/recycle centre to see if it can be saved but it sounds to me that it has reached the end of its lifetime. 

Hello,

Need help with Pen Tool.
Is there any tool that identifies the drawing and turns it into a vector by itself? I can't get my vector to be exactly the same as the drawing What is the best way to do it ???? :)

Well there are bitmap-to-vector tracers/vectorization tools, but what they can generate always also highly depends on an image's quality/color tonals etc. you throw them on. In your case that bitmap background image looks pretty dark and thus would probably need some customizations so it can be traced in some useful manner! - Other than that, you can finetune and better adjust what you've already traced there manually via the help of the Node tool.
You should give either way a try, in order to see what works best for you here!

It may be impossible to get it exactly like the image but you should be able to get close if using the Node Tool you add more nodes & carefully adjust their positions & handles to more closely follow the contours in the image.

I am trying to design a logo for a site based around renewable energy, so I thought maybe a sun and (UK) electric plug combined could work, ie to symbolise electricity generated by the sun.
 
I am quite please with its simplicity but I have a feeling that although the sun seems obvious, the plug could be mistaken for something else, e.g. a grand piano! Doesn't seem to help even when rotated.
Bear in mind this is for a UK site, so the three pin plug is appropriate. I'm currently working on an alternative with a lightbulb, but I'd still like to make the plug work if possible
Any help appreciated, thanks
 

Does it need to be a plug? Could it be a socket with the plug holes?
It is a very recognizable pattern.
Then the shape of the edge of the plug would not be needed.
Then that could fit inside a circle with the sun rays around it.
Also, renewables is about more that solar power, so could there be wind turbines in the upper corners, and perhaps waves along the lower edge?
William
 
 

William
 

Not even that, you can simply move the existing nodes up, down and left so that your bleed area is covered. Once you've scaled your artwork to A5 and have positioned it correctly, if you add guides to indicate where the respective shape/s overlap the page edge you can use that as a guide to ensure your extended shape/s overlap at the same location.
If you also use the Artistic Text Tool (rather than the Frame Text tool) for your text prior to scaling from A3 to A5, you can simply scale everything mathematically by 50% and align accordingly on the page which overcomes the issue of the Frame text not scaling in line with your artwork unless you manually use the outer scale handle to scale the artwork.
Your artwork actually already has plenty of bleed overlap which once scaled to A5 exceeds the 3mm bleed anyway so you shouldn't actually need to make any changes...

Scale A3 to A5.mp4

Since the original coloured shapes were drawn using the pen tool in Designer, once you've scaled your artwork down to A5 simply use the Node tool to extend the coloured shape coverage to your 3mm bleed or beyond...

Yeah, it was me. I had to delete it as there was a mistake on my part.
I tried your method, and it works on the browser. If the text is not so long, I usually use the glyph browser to type Indian languages as it will help to display ligatures correctly. So, no need to open it in a browser and print screen.

There is a thread
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/65212-tagged-pdf-support-for-accessibility/
that has been going since 2018.
Can Serif make a statement in that thread about what it will do about this important issue please?
William Overington
Monday 25 January 2021