Pariah73

also discussed here, but with text

Hey, I'm Pariah, been using Affinity products for the last year or so, when Adobe raised their rates again. Very happy with the product and naturally impatient for a fully functional Adobe killer to happen In the meantime, I thought I'd put here my workflow that's completely different now that I've ditched Adobe. 1. I design mostly in Designer. If I have text to warp (I often do) 2. I warp text in Serif DrawPlus X8 which works perfectly well on my Windows 10 machine. Can still purchase from Serif Legacy for $20. 3. I use Inkscape (free) for text warped into a particular shape (the limit on the shape is 4 nodes)** 4. I use Serif DrawPlus X8 for spot color separations. 5. For pdf, I use Bullzip Studio and Printer (all free) and I have a teeny tiny program called Sumatra PDF to render thumbnail previews of pdfs in Explorer. For me, Bullzip Studio takes a few more seconds to open for some reason. It's annoying but I'm really impatient. Two other pdf programs that are similarly excellent are PDF24 (you can use their full pdf suite online or installable) and PDFill, which can do anything, but it's hideous to look at With PDF24 you also need a thumbnail previewer but i can't remember whether or not i did with PDFill. Best of the other solutions I have used at various points: Scribus for spot color separations - free Photopea - free (online) for text warping, many features from Photoshop. Export to svg **Let's face it, nothing is better at text warping than Illustrator. I decided to give Illustrator CS2 a try, being free and all. Works just fine on Windows 10 (1809). It even did spot color separations with no problems. Here's the link to Adobe CS2, in case anyone needs a temporary solution to the lack of text warping in Designer. https://www.adobe.com/downloads/other-downloads.html The entire suite is there (I tried out Acrobat that came with it but it didn't work properly) but I just got Illustrator because I'm determined to have as little to do with Adobe as I can lol (Can't wait until i no longer need it!) Hopefully this helps someone!

if you prefer white, type white text with a black stroke. Then add an fx "Outline in the colour of the text (or other) thick enough so that it is visible around the edges of the letters.Then switch the "Blend" of the layer from "Normal" to "Lighten". This is for white text.

Just an additional note on an issue i ran into today on a design. I needed an elliptical selection so i used the ellipse tool with a white fill black stroke. In order to get the full selection of the entire area of the circle, there has to be a fill on the ellipse in order to use Control +clicking on the thumbnail to get the selection. If your ellipse only has a stroke on it, Control clicking the thumbnail will result in a selection of only the area covered by the stroke.

nice job as usual thank you!

The Plus range was a more mature product. If you have PagePlus, keep it. Publisher isn't quite ready for primetime. I am still using DrawPlus while i wait for features I need from Affinity. It's hard to keep reminding myself Serif has a small team doing this. I keep wanting NEW! RIGHT NOW! lol it's getting there, but slowly.

this was a great help, thank you!!

+1

i thought so too

I'm sure they will be

thanks!

thanks!

nice

I go with AP, AD and APub also

+1

i had that thought also

If you create the file in one of the beta releases, you can't use it with 1.6 stable. It would only work within the beta programs. Don't use them for any projects that are important to you.

good idea

awesome solution, thanks!

thank you all for the tutorial links and resource links for this

that's really cool, thanks!

Sounds like you might be happier with Photoshop Elements, a slimmed down version of Photoshop that does not require a hefty monthly subscription

Thank you for the detailed review!

thank you for this post!