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request, please add custom artboard features

In my opinion Shape Builder Tool is very necessary. I can't switch to Affinity Designer from Illustrator completely just because of this one missing tool. I've seen post back from 2015 of people asking for this tool, why 4 years later this still isn't a thing? I'm very frustrated...

Hi guys, I'm part of a type design community working with the Glyphs app (https://glyphsapp.com/) or Fontlab (https://www.fontlab.com). This is a huge community and type design is an important part of the design process. There are some real typography rockstars in this space wanting to work with Affinity. We'd love to have a system fonts folder, like Adobe has, to export and test fonts with Affinity apps. Adobe's fonts folder is usually located here: user > library > application support > adobe > fonts This folder allows us to export fonts to this location and prevent Apple font cache issues. Because Adobe directly reads typefaces from this folder there's never an issue and you can export and test fonts unlimited. Whereas if you'd use Apple Fontbook, you'd need to clear font cache all the time, because it's almost impossible to change the same font file a few times in a row without issues. Having a specific folder for the Affinity Suite would help a LOT of type designers out there. I know a lot of people who are switching from Adobe to Affinity, but this is kind of a dealbreaker, because font cache issues are horrible to work with. Would this be possible? @ Type Designers feel free to jump in!

As the title suggests, I would love to see a guest host that creates different things using the adobe product on stream. It would be cool to see.

Having a timeline would be great to make quick animations or picture gifs. Photoshop's was great and I would have figured that affinity would have one. Also the spot healing brush is okay, but not as good as photoshop's. Having to press ALT to locate a source is sometimes irritating but sometimes it comes in handy. I would like to have a source when doing something more precise but most of the time it's an unnecessary extra step.

First, I love Affinity Designer, but I do love a tool from Concepts app called Nudge, attached you can find a video showing how it works. And it’s not just for lines, is so fun to use it with complex art too! It’s an amazing tool, that makes so easy and interesting to edit vectors, and I believe is so revolutionary that Affinity Designer must have it (and improve it) so we don’t need to use Concepts instead. Sorry for my bad English, thanks! 929F89D9-716B-4D2F-AF63-C8F41F3C3671.MOV

I´d really like to have a flip canvas option, this is pretty essential for drawing, painting and concepting in general.

Coming from Illustrator, something I used somewhat infrequently but often enough was the Variable Stroke Width tool. This tool allowed you to change the width of the stroke along a curve (we have this) with adjustable Anchors along the curve (we don’t have this). Very useful if you wanted to precisely align a specific stroke width to a specific area of the shape like a pre-measured curve anchor. This video shows what I’m talking about:

Could inner/outer shadow paragraph decoration be added? The idea is boxed decorations is great, with a wide variety of strokes and endcaps. However, dropshadows would add options to emphasize text (i.e. a boxed paragraph).

Hi all! Hope you're doing great! I'll try to be brief. As I pointed out in this twit, the non-Apple devices found in the preset dropdown in the Affinity suite are way too old. I don't even remember what screen, resolution or size these devices had, for this "preset suggestion" to be relevant to me anymore (I mean, just look at the release dates. Nexus 5 and Surface Pro 2: October 2013, Galaxy S5: April 2014, etc.) I believe the suite could have more useful presets by simply updating the models these presets refer to, so that we can have something more recent in mind when we choose what to work with. Thanks a lot for reading!

So I've run into a conundrum - the Affinity suite of apps that I purchased from the Microsoft Store doesn't appear to have command-line support. This is because those Windows Apps downloaded from the store are sandboxed off away from users. You cannot directly find the `Photo.exe` file from the Explorer (unless you're willing to blow away a lot of permissions). The best I could find on how to start Affinity Photo from the MS Store from the command line is the following: powershell.exe explorer.exe shell:AppsFolder\$(get-appxpackage -name SerifEuropeLtd.AffinityPhoto ^| select -expandproperty PackageFamilyName)!SerifEuropeLtd.AffinityPhoto But that doesn't allow me to pass in any arguments into the Photo executable. There does appear to be a solution though. First - the Affinity Suite of apps could use Command Line Activation. That would basically set up an alias so that users of the command line could send arguments to that exec alias. The apps would just need to update their OnActivated handlers for the new CommandLineLaunch activation kind. Another option could be to create and register a Protocol. This is similar to the Command Line Activation, but now you can have the Affinity apps open based on URL. For example, afphoto:// could open up Photo, and afphoto://file=foo.tif could open load the foo.tif file into Photo. Maybe you could even supply actions to Merge or create HDR from URL parameters - but that would just be icing on the cake. If your curious about my reasoning (like, who really needs to use the command line for this!?!?), it's that the UWP MS Store app boundaries are preventing integration with my DAM. I use Capture One, and C1 cannot find Affinity Photo because I cannot navigate to the app from the Windows Explorer (files and packages are hidden). By having these entry points, it could allow for me to create an extension to Capture One or a batch command wrapper so that I can send the files I want to edit over to Photo. To be clear, if I had purchases Photo directly from Serif, this wouldn't be an issue since the app gets installed in Program Files and I can browse for that. Thanks for your consideration. I hope the links show that to enable the feature wouldn't require too much code to get that done (well, how could I really know, I haven't seen your code) and would love to see that. I thought purchasing the MS Store version would just mean the apps would behave the same and that I wouldn't have to worry about performing updates manually - but now I know a little more about how UWP apps work and sorta regret doing so. Cheers and all the best

Currently, the “shear” function of the Transform Studio within Designer only shears objects along the ‘x’ axis, or horizontally. To shear vertically, the user has to turn the target object 45 degrees (on its side), reorient the control handles, perform “shear” function, turn the object 45 degrees in the opposite direction, and either reorient the handles again, or deselect the object and allow the handles to default to their original rotation. If the resulting vertical shear is not correct, the user has to start over to attempt to correct the shear. A second “shear” control would make the vertical shearing process so much easier. The two controls could be named “Shear X” and “Shear Y”, or “Shear Horz” and “Shear Vert”. It would be something to keep users from going crazy while Affinity continues to steer itself down its chosen roadmap and finally implement the Envelope Vector Warp users have been promised. I honestly would really really really really really prefer the Vector Warp, but Vertical Shear I’d be willing to take now. Soon. Like, during the next update.

Since you can draw to scale in Designer; it would be great to have a dimension command with extension lines, arrows and text. I design furniture and refuse to pay a monthly rental fee to Autodesk. I will never do subscription software. I have been using Designer with some success. The lack of dimensioning is a hinderance.

Suggestion for a very small, but very useful feature/shortcut option for 1.7. I, as well as a vast majority of illustrators, designers and photo editors I know and work with, constantly rotate the canvas while working. This is not a 90 degree rotation, but rather just a standard rotation while working (exactly like the View - Rotate Left/Right/Reset options). Assigning this to custom shortcut keys helps speed things up (I currently have Rotate Left and Right assigned to Q and W in Designer), but it's still slow in comparison to Photoshop's dedicated rotation tool. With Affinity I'm left pressing my custom defined rotation shortcuts multiple times to get the perfect angle for the work I'm doing. With that in mind, I don't think it's necessary to add a dedicated rotation tool like Adobe PS has, but rather just a key combination shortcut. When you hold Ctrl+Alt and click and drag in Affinity this changes your brush size and hardness, which is incredibly quick, efficient, and useful. Could there not be a similar option (say Alt+Cmd+click and drag, or Ctrl+Cmd+click and drag) to rotate the canvas working angle? Either that, or a pop-up menu (similar to Sketchbook Pro) where when you move the canvas using the move tool (Spacebar) you also have the option to rotate the canvas. I've also seen this used in software like Krita, where holding modifier keys + dragging allows you to rotate the canvas. It's a non invasive way of still giving the option to those who use it, but keeping it out of the way for those who don't. You could possible also include the option to enable/disable the pop-up menu in the Preferences for those who don't like to use it or find it distracting. I think this would be an incredibly invaluable feature, particularly for artists/illustrators who rotate the canvas to draw using a tablet, but also useful for designers and photo editing.

Hey, I was wondering if anyone had figured out a way to use a mask, or a z-depth image to blur an image? In Photoshop you can use a black and white image to partially blur an image, to get a narrow depth-of-field effect: I've already tried to use a full-image blur with a mask, but that gives 80s-esque halo effects. The halo is there because the whole image (BG+dress) is blurred, while the dress should not be taken in to consideration for the BG-blur. It is quite noticable around the dress here: Anyone have a usable method for this effect in Affinity?

I use a lot of text captions next to photos. These look much better when centered on the photo's frame (left, right, bottom, top). Also using centre for the alignment in the text. Sometimes, the text frame needs to be narrowed/widened in order for the text flow to look better (so, for example, you do not end up with a single word on the last line of the caption). I struggle to manually keep the text frame centered while narrowing/widening the text frame. It would be very helpful to have a "modifier" key that will freeze the center of the text frame and as you narrow/widen one side, the other side would also narrow - keeping the text frame centered on another object. This seems to me similar to locking the aspect ratio on picture frames by using the Shift key as you drag a frame handle. This would also apply to making the text frame taller or shorter for the same reasoning. This would save a huge amount of time in that 1.) the frame needs only to be narrowed, and 2. extra time is now spent also re-centering the frame since, now, only one side moves and it ends up non-centered. If there is such a method to do this, it escapes me at this time. Thanks.

Hey guys, One thing that keeps bugging me when I open a project that I'm working on is that the first thing I have to do is switch to the respective Document Palette from the Default Palette. Wouldn't it make more sense for a document to remember this and just select the last Document Palette you used (in case you have more than one) when opening a .afdesign file? Or at least give us an option in the Palette menu to set that Document Palette as default for that specific document. This would be nice as well. What do you think? Thanks in advance, Cristian

I would find it helpful if each new thread needed to have the actual version/program as a tag. No point for the likes of myself with Photo only looking too much at Designer threads Cheers

Hello, as a professional creative, I put many hours into Affinity Photo since it came out. For now, using in around Photoshop. However, without I cannot open a PSD file that can read all variances of layers (e.g smart layer) it's really not applicable to a replacement. Most of my clients, art directors, designers and photographers work and send layered PSD files with smart layers. I am a big fan and hope that you can add those little features soon. I know by reading a lot here that you are working on it and replicating all features is hard. Cheers David

1) I would like to be able to Place multiple images with 'Picture Frame' on multiple pages and indicate how many on each page. I guess I can do this with a master page with Picture Frames pre-set but would still have to add each image manually and pre-create pages, unless there is a way to auto add multiple images? i.e. If i have 10 images and want 2 per page (using a master page with 2 frames), I would like to auto add 4 extra pages by drag & drop multiple selected images by dropping in 1st Frame on 1st page. Each new page would adopt the selected master page. With say a text frame under each image on the master page it would be easy to then add the image description or text as required.

Good day and good job guys! Beforehand sorry for my bad english. Request: There is a chance to enable the ability to select guides and edit them like the rest of the objects? In InDesign I tend to use many guides, change their position and delete them just like the rest of the objects or just select them to know their position is pretty useful for me. I'm not sure if this is a common way to work for other people but in my case is crucial. I know this is a different app with a different approach than inDesign and I understand that maybe this request is not compatible with the overall user experience concept you have. But at least I should try Thank you for your attention.

I do so like this publisher so far. I would like to make a feature suggestion, I apologise if it is already available and I have overlooked the option. I want to be able to view the document in a gallery style mode as per similar to I design. Both with and without bleed margins that would be good.

I had created a text box and I would like to fill it with a color and even change the stroke. If this option already exist it will be great to learn how to do it, otherwise, it can be an interesting implementation because this will avoid an extra layer as a background for the text.

Offset path or even more complex contour tool would very useful for many works. I found on this forum some old disscusion about these tool but it was long ago and still not happend and even not present on roadmap. So I just would like to make little reminder about it with a lot of hope to find it in future update.

I want to make it easy for Affinity developers to identify and prioritise the most popular feature requests. After looking around this website for a while, I cannot see an obvious way of doing this. I suggest adding three big buttons at the top, namely: "1. see feature roadmap" "2. search feature requests" "3. add new feature request" Also, within a specific feature request post, the developers of this forum should make it clear how to vote for a feature. Is this currently done through clicking the heart button? Here's an example: I want to find out how to "select and copy just a segment of a path" I do a general search If I can't find how to do it or if it's not possible - I search "feature roadmap" If it's not there, I search "requests" If it's not already listed, I add the request If many vote for it, and it is feasible, it gets added to the roadmap If there is already a system for this, please let me know the correct way of doing it.