William Overington

How it currently works: "Strings" + "Unicode UTF-16":

For what purpose / advantage?  Not only the interface layout requires adjustments to make "hundreds of languages" fit without cropping or other issues, also the Help and all tutorials, static or video, various websites (incl. store and forum) would need an according translation to make sense of "hundreds of languages" for the app interface.
Apart from the required effort to complete your vague and superficial "idea" its sense gets reduced if you consider who could in fact benefit from this work. It is not the users of "hundreds of languages" who might not even be able to purchase soft- or hardware but this would also require understanding of all the localised terms: For example, while you can translate "Leading Override" or "Curve Adjustment" into any language, it might not have the meaning used in DTP.
So, without additional education of users + translation of related documents, an app interface in "hundreds of languages" isn't useful but simply redundant – while with education also one of the existing interface languages got learned quite likely and thus an interface in "hundreds of languages" is redundant, too.
(Not to mention the "idea" that automatic translation will become carried out by AI in more and more areas, without a need for extra manpower or feature requests)

Well, fine, unsurprising, but that is just because of the two cultures thing that C P Snow wrote about.
If the culture in this country were different, maybe chapter 10, say, of the text book learning some French would have had the topic of adding Sodium Carbonate solution to Copper Sulphate solution in a test tube and using a filter paper and a glass funnel and a beaker. So integrating what we did in chemistry class as a practical with our knowledge of how to express things in French.
I appreciate that at the café is important but all the examples were sort of arts based, did we have the same text book? I remember Le prestidigitateur.
When I was young I would have just loved to have tried using Affinity products using the French versions once I had got used to using the English versions.
William
 
 

The Triskalion, a Celtic mystical symbol representing courage, power and wisdom. Made in Affinity Designer using the spiral tool and the symbols panel.
   

Given that you mean
it seems unsurprising to me that you didn’t learn things like ‘basic chemistry’ terminology.

I don't think this is going to be a priority.   People would prefer the programs are stable and have the features needed.   Having worked in several countries, Eglish works just fine for apps like these.  Especially as many will be using keyboard shortcuts most of the time. 

A coloured background effect.

And a photo warm sepia effect in Affinity Photo.

@William Overington The shadows coming forward make the images more menacing.

TOMATO SAUCE IS BEST ON CHIPS!           NO, BROWN SAUCE IS BEST ON CHIPS!
Suggested caption for the above image
--
When shadow was mentioned, I thought of it as going from the feet and then to the right and up at about 30 degrees to the horizontal, not forward like that.
William
 

The best thread to discuss font-related functionality would now be the sub-thread related to the upcoming variable font support in v2.5 beta. IMHO, I would say it is a feature worth adding, because it's something that Adobe offers and is becoming trendier, and could be very popular among big sectors of Affinity's and Canva's userbase. 
I provided Ash with a recommendation of one of the best experts in colour OpenType-SVG fonts in Europe – and one used to work in the UK, no less –, so the ball is on their court and let's see just how loaded with cash and willing to expand Serif is now, post-acquisition. I take it that they still have to have a bit of restraint in their recruiting process (be it for full-time employees, contractors or consultants), project management and goals, etc., but we should indeed expect speedier development from now on. The ball is on their court, in any case.
Interesting as this feature may sound, I highly doubt it will ever be available. It's extremely niche, and might result in quality control issues if lower quality, user-made localisation files ended up on the web. Also, with Affinity potentially becoming bigger, hiring more people for their localisation efforts would render said feature redundant for a lot of communities.
And, if I may say so myself as someone from a minority community of one of top languages globally (Portuguese from Portugal, not Brazilian Portuguese), while it saddens me to see the technical design and typography jargon in pt-PT wither away (I do fight against that by recommending technical dictionaries to my students, mind you), I don't see people defaulting to English on technical software as that dire of an issue when it comes to serving a global market (RTL and Indic script support, on the other hand…). These apps' UIs are usually very sparse on text, and YouTube and the web are chock-full of tutorials using the English terminology anyway. My €0,02.

As I understand the situation, due to lots of funding becoming available, Affinity can now become developed further and more rapidly than before.
Are there roles where people currently do not use Affinity products because Affinity products do not do what those people need and who might start to use Affinity products if Affinity products were to add some particular facility to what they do?
For example, unless things have changed recently, Affinity products do not have built-in colour font capability. What employment roles need colour font capability? Would adding colour font capability to Affinity products increase sales to an extent to make the cost of adding colour font capability worth spending?
Or is adding colour font capability something that will be added anyway because not having it looks unfortunate?
That is just one example.
No. I am retired, I am not connected to Canva, my only connection to Serif and Affinity is as a customer.
William
 

Hi All,
I'm pleased to let you know we have now added the ability to add QR codes as Affinity Shapes and is available now in the 2.5 beta...
 

No they are either .msi or .msix. Affinity should be fine.

Very probably. You won't be allowed to download .exe files and run them. This will include setup applications.
This is to prevent malware from spreading and make Windows more stable. The only malware allowed will be the type produced by Microsoft in Windows Updates.

No, everyone knows that it is HP Fruity Sauce.

Are they in dispute about which type of sauce is best on chips?
William
 

The top six characters in the column in the following document.
https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-15.0/U150-2440.pdf
OCR A extended which I found on this computer recently.
It is not listed on the following page.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/fonts/windows_11_font_list
I have not used this computer much since I got it so I don't know at present how that font arrived on my computer.
William
 
 

No. I am referring to the OCR A symbols.
https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-15.0/U150-2440.pdf
William
 
 

Are you perhaps referring to the E-13B MICR symbols?
 

It may help to know that Affinity uses the term shear rather than skew for the effect.
Searching for skew in Affinity Designer gives a few results but searching for shear gives more.
My comments based on version 1. I do not know about version 2.
William
 

So perhaps the way forward would be for one or two people at Affinity to try to start with a copy of the source code of Affinity Designer and try to produce a version - a sort of software maquette - that will do the localization effect on just three menu items, so that the idea can be seen in action.
The resulting demonstration could be inspiring.
Is that possible please?
William
 

People seeing your links will either ignore them or click through to view the linked posts. The first of those scenarios guarantees that they won’t see the backstory, the second doesn’t guarantee that they will. By using links like mine (the default mode here) you automagically give the reader the first three lines to pique their interest.

Well, as I wrote before, I don't know whether Pledge 4 is significantly different from what happened previously or not.
As far as I am aware, there is no information published to customers pursuant to Pledge 4 as to what is the situation over assessment of ideas and feedback about suggested ideas now that Affinity is owned by Canva.
I am hoping that [edited] will explain what assessment process will be used.
The purchase of Affinity by Canva is a big event, so maybe the situation will change, or maybe the idea is to keep everything as it was lest changing anything spoils what has been bought.
William
 

Well yes, but ideas are being sought and I have suggested one. If my idea could be got working there could be versions of Affinity programs in hundreds of languages. The incremental cost of each additional language being relatively low.
William
 

I do stuff in the music industry and some artwork tweaks I’ve put through Serif desktop applications has been done for some quite big artists. No one cares what you work on, they’re only interested in the result going to print.

Under the new ownership Pledge 4 has been made, so a new era may have different thinking.
William