Dazmondo77

If you're not happy you could always start an Adobe subscription?
Paying for upgrades was made clear from the start, even though I have a moan here and there about a few things, we've  still had nine FREE updates (so far) featuring speed, stability improvements, missing / new features and bug fixes - that's amazing value for money

Not familiar with Just colour picker - but I suspect it works by interpreting RGB values from your screen and not from within the apps - I would guess you'd be safe to go with the values from Affinity - but I can't imagine not checking seps and standards conformance before sending to your print service provider.
You could always open your pdf in photo and view the colour values

We have corporate customers who have bought multiple licenses through the same account. Unlike our home use license (where any machine on that OS that you control can have the software installed) the business licenses are more strict and limited a single machine or a single person on many machines. This panel in the Affinity Store account with information about which machine has registered will help those business and educational customers manage their licensing.

Do you mean 0,0,0,100??? - If I was having these problems, i'd open the liked eps and convert to curves and copy paste into the actual artwork and make solid black, although assign should work as expected - have you checked the values in Acrobat? 

I call it an everyday basic vector functionality

If you're not happy you could always start an Adobe subscription?
Paying for upgrades was made clear from the start, even though I have a moan here and there about a few things, we've  still had nine FREE updates (so far) featuring speed, stability improvements, missing / new features and bug fixes - that's amazing value for money

If you're not happy you could always start an Adobe subscription?
Paying for upgrades was made clear from the start, even though I have a moan here and there about a few things, we've  still had nine FREE updates (so far) featuring speed, stability improvements, missing / new features and bug fixes - that's amazing value for money

me too

👍 We are brothers in arms  

I always use in InDesign 3-pages spread for book covers and 3+3-pages spread for a 3-fold borchure or even 5-pages book cover with flaps. It is very fast and easy.

I need this feature as well. I use it often for book covers. The spine is a single page sandwiched between two of the regular pages. That way I can control the spine size easily as pages come or go during the design process. Another use: Folded covers. This just gives you precise controls, not fiddling with guides which are unreliable and error-prone.

I purchased Designer and Photo years ago but I just couldn't replace Illustrator & Photoshop because of a few missing features that are just workflow basics. I've moved to the Windows platform and just downloaded new trial versions of them to give them another chance, and these problems persist. Most of them relate to features that prevent the user from making critical, unprofessional mistakes like inconsistent color use across multiple documents. If you are deigning a flyer, a business card and a name badge, you can't have variations between them. These are a few [very] minor omissions that I am missing that risks me making amateurish mistakes:
- Global swatches don't carry to another document when copy-n-pasting a logo from one document to another (same as in Publisher)
- Swatches not carrying over to the new document also means that overprint setting are lost because overprint is defined in the swatch, not in the object.
- I can't tell what color mode I'm working in. If my mode is RGB for a flyer, I need something to shout out at me, or at least give me a clue that my print job is going to be disaster. A simple RGB/CMYK icon would suffice. Even Photo displays its color mode in the document's header, but Designer [where it's more important] doesn't.
- The colour picker only picks up RGB/CMYK values, not a global swatch. Even if I've pasted a logo into a new document and it's displaying a global color, the eyedropper doesn't read it as a global color so I can't even reliably copy colors from my source logo. 
- To duplicate an object by dragging it, I have to press the Alt key before I select the object, not during the drag. Most of the time, I need to be certain I have selected the correct object before I duplicate it, however, now I have to duplicate something and then find out if I selected correctly. I don't know how many times I have moved items I want to duplicate and duplicated items I didn't want to duplicate because of this. An application is not fast to work in if I'm constantly undoing my actions.
- Changing the colors of margins & guides. If I design a blue brochure, my margins and guides disappear. I need to make them red or yellow or anything. I don't expect to be able to mix my own colors, but a dozen pre-mixed swatches to choose from would solve this problem. (apart from working in wireframe mode)
- Connecting the selected transform corner in the transform palette to the free transform with the move tool. It's very strange that I can select a corner in the transform palette, but then I always rotate around the center. I have to manually type rotation values in degrees to get the rotation around a corner. Why the disconnect? This disconnect is similar to the disconnect I experience between the swatches, color mixer and eye dropper.
- Previewing at export. Even in Photo, I can't see the effect of the level of JPEG compression being applied to my exported files (neither in Designer nor Photo). I have to export a file half a dozen times until I hit upon that sweet spot of small file size to barely noticable quality loss. Even the open source GIMP does this with a live preview at export. I can do awesome professional work, and then break it all with a poor export... and not even realise it.
- Proofing colors. I really need to be able to see how my colors will separate before I save my PDF. If I've accidentally worked in RGB, this will reveal my mistake as I go to repro. Overprinting and knockout will also be a disaster if not picked up in time. (Who here hasn't experienced the dreaded white text set to overprint and wondered where all your text went?). This feature alone forces me to keep a professional, licensed copy of Adobe Acrobat around to preview color separations. In my final repro file, I have to know if my spot colors are still spots and if I'm printing fine black text as 100% black, or a full color breakdown that will turn my single color print job into a full color one. Previewing the separations (or channels in your photo editor) points out my potential errors.
- Overprinting settings. The previous point leads straight into this one. Why is over printing set in the swatch and not the object? If I want some small paragraph text to over print, but large display text to knockout, I have to make 2 identical black swatches to do this. Why can't I specify this on an object-by-object basis? I guess "Multiply" does the same thing and works as a work-around, but you're targeting print designers, and use the term overprint yourselves so why the strange and risky implementation.
- Snapping to "round" values. When manually selecting a color in CMYK, we are inevitably creating a color using round number values from a color chart. It's slow and frustrating trying to select exactly 50% in a slider as it hops from 49 to 51 and back again while we search for that perfect pixel placement. How about snapping to increments of 5% by holding down the shift key? Your snapping features are awesomely powerful, but only in the document. Why not extend this into the sliders and the rest of the application? (Admittedly, I don't know any other application that does this, but it makes sense and would be welcome.)
 
Basic features that are even in open source software seem to be missing. We waited for years to get arrow heads. You claimed it was because you wanted to get it awesome, but they are no more powerful/different to anything else out there on the market. I suspect we only got them when Publisher was released. Did we have to wait for a whole new app to be leased to get arrow heads? Now we sit with other missing basic, common features like:
- Blend/Interpolate
- Stroke drawing tools like a grid tool and a straight line tool. These are enormous time savers.
- Tabs. (I understand you want to protect Publisher by keeping high end text features like hyphenation, drop-caps and text wrap out of Designer, but this feels like a very basic feature compared to your range of kerning, alignment and Opentype features already here from day one)
 
I understand that everyone's needs are different and you can't satisfy everyone, but you are targeting print designers as well and illustrators and web designers, and  these are all features every professional expects and is surprising that they're not here. You give us features that most professionals just leave on the defaults because few of us even understand them (like color profiles and LUTs), but then drop the ball by not pasting a global swatch from one document to another.
It's confusing and just doesn't make me feel confident in the files I send to print.
Please can you look at these issues before adding new features. I understand that new features are needed to sell products, but a lot of us early adopters are just wondering where the small tweaks and refinements are.
It seems that your development team needs to consult with an old school designer or printer to get these fundamentals right. It feels like you've only got young designers who have grown up with an RGB workflow and have never had to bang out 6 flyers in an afternoon and send them to print with the job being rejected.
 
 

(...)

I am getting more done with the "Fiat 500" than the crappy Adobe Ferrari !!! So Well done to Affinity for producing something that average users can pickup and use!!! Something Adobe will NEVER master...

I believe that very first version of Designer should have had at least a very very basic, destructive, vector distortion capability then there'd be less people like me having a top moan about waiting 5 years and all that, I'm sure they want to knock our socks off with a non-destructive capability, but 5 years blah blah blah....

Not sure why you would want to work with a larger gamut when that larger gamut is not achievable in 4 colour printing. There are many times I have had files clients send in in RGB and shocked when they see the colour when converted (in the proof stage). If I had just taken their RGB file and printed it letting the RIP convert and took what I got I would have issues and most likely an argument trying to explain that because of the wider colour range of RGB it is not achievable in CMYK. I go towards being realistic with colour and how you are printing it. Now when I print on my 44" wide Epson with 12 colours I work exclusively with RGB because I am going to get the best print that way. Also not all RIP's are equal and not all print shops are running a single RIP to power everything. Many shops will have a RIP for their plates, RIP for their digital, RIP for wide format. Your results can vary in each RIP in how it handles RGB.
 

I believe that very first version of Designer should have had at least a very very basic, destructive, vector distortion capability then there'd be less people like me having a top moan about waiting 5 years and all that, I'm sure they want to knock our socks off with a non-destructive capability, but 5 years blah blah blah....

I'm pretty much convinced distortions, image trace and patter tools are features they are holding back to make people buy v2 (and possible v3). Not against them making money at all, they have to play their cards well cause these are single purchase software.

Uuuuuuuh, that hurts. Please. Don't!
In my opinion and experience, it's always advisable to work in the colourspace that you want to use for your output.

Isn't this the case already for the OP? According to this initial info:   "All pdf's files are in Euroscale Coated v2 - same as Publisher document."
 
Hm? – Note this topic is about maintaining 100 K black, e.g. to reduce the total number of inks (see above: "two  color project"), or generally to prevent black text from getting printed with more than 1 ink.
Any conversion to RGB, at what step ever, would definitely prevent from achieving the desired approach.

+1 for true vector brushes, this has been mentioned countless times already!
This could be nice, too, especially if it were possible to randomise size, rotation, opacity, etc. Both blobs along the path and a single click blob tool would be useful.
Cheers, Matt

Yes! And also flip horizontal and flip vertical view! It helps to see if you are doing good with your proportions etc. Really need it in AD 🙏

I use Birdfont which works great with Affinity, copy pastes back and fourth - just does the job https://birdfont.org 
Totally agree with Kemie

If it was me, I would start by removing all linked files to a new folder, then adding them back in groups to see if I could identify a particular file that was causing the problem.
I have in the past found corrupt files this way, that were crashing my app
Alternatively, you may have to wait until Serif opens later today then send them the document plus all linked files for them to investigate and see if they can recreate the problem
 

You need global colours for this - I've requested on multiple occasions, an option to have global as standard but have gradually reached a compromise by creating my own set of global colours, exporting, then importing and making it the default palette for CMYK so every new CMYK document now has a default global palette which also includes REAL greyscale in 10% tint increments 
Feel free to use my attached palette, although it is made up of CMYK colours    

Process globals.afpalette