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I have a multi layer graphic on which I want to make a certain area shaped by a layer object appear in bw (i. e. saturation = 0). I was fiddling around with adaptations and masks (which behave different to AD1) but I didn't get it working. Is it possible at all? Thank You very much. 😊

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Affinity Designer for iPad is an awesome program, but because of some of the defaults, it doesn't put its best foot forward for new users with the Apple Pencil. This thread is meant to share fixes and workarounds I have discovered as I've learned to use AD with the Pencil. I will add posts below with screenshots to suggest certain configuration settings that prevent problems. I fixed my worst AD nightmares with the configuration settings. But there were a couple of other problems I encountered early and often which I will try to describe here. PROBLEM: When I open the "..." menu by mistake, when I close it, I lose my current selection! SOLUTION: Yes, anything you do "off menu" gets treated as something besides just trying to get rid of the menu, so the solution to this one is: When you realize you've opened the "..." menu by mistake, click on the currently selected Fill Mode (Alternating or Winding, whichever one is currently highlighted). That's treated as an attempt to change it to what is already is, and will close the menu without clearing your selection. Selections can be super-easy to make by dragging around until the right objects are enclosed; but they can be super-painful to make if you're just selecting certain objects nested within others. AD is pretty cavalier about clearing the selections you might have struggled to make, but at least you can find workarounds like this one or use the UNDO system to restore your selections. PROBLEM: When editing in close quarters, the Node tool keeps switching to other objects, maybe messing up things I was finished with, rather than selecting the nodes I'm trying to tap! SOLUTION: There's no way to change the Node tool's behavior, but you can use layers to organize your document, and on the Layers Studio's menu, uncheck "Edit All Layers." This way you can make sure the objects you're working on are on layers separate from "finished" objects. As long as you have the right layer selected, the Node tool won't be able to mess with finished objects.

I'm brand new to Affinity Designer but trialing it I found it has a great ui and pretty much every feature I need except one major omission: bsplines. By bsplines I mean b-splines or basis splines (or possibly NURBS curves? I'm not entirely sure on the math definition), basically a different way of drawing curves than beziers that can be far more intuitive. Specifically, I'm looking for the kind of bsplines Inkscape has where you can adjust the "pointiness" of each node in a bspline curve by shift-dragging node handles, kind of similar to how the Corner Tool works in Affinity. Open the attached svg in Inkscape for an example. I use bsplines literally all the time in Inkscape because I find continuous curves without ugly flat spots far easier to make, yet they are surprisingly lacking from software. Adobe Illustrator doesn't have bsplines. CorelDraw has them but not with adjustable nodes as far as I can tell. Inkscape has them but Inkscape has lots of other drawbacks and issues. Now-legacy DrawPlus apparently had them though they weren't in the starter edition I was able to find. Affinity Designer, on the other hand, has been primed to get bsplines for a number of years according to various forum posts here like this, this or this from January 2015: So here I am, expressing interest but the last mention I can find was in December 2016 and now it's 2019, so my big question is: is there any chance of bsplines finally coming to Affinity Designer in 2019? The addition of bsplines with adjustable nodes to Affinity would make my rating of the product go from 8/10 to 10/10, or 12/10 if they could be drawn with the Vector Brush Tool (I would have easily paid double!). Thanks for reading all this and making an otherwise exceptional product. I really want to make Affinity one of my core graphics programs, just the lack of bsplines is holding me back. (Note that I am aware bezier nodes in Affinity have a "smart" mode where their handles are adjusted automatically, somewhat similar to bsplines, but I really don't find that the same, and the moment you adjust them they become un-smart. Also I did check the beta, no mention of bsplines there ) bspline_example.svg

When sending content for professional printing sometime we need to convert text to curves. It would be very helpful to have a feature to distinguish editable text and curves from converted text easily. In Illustrator it can be easily done in the view-outline mode - the text would in solid and converted curve would be outline mode. I'm not sure if the exact behavior is possible in Designer, but some easy way to distinguishing Curve-from-text from Editable-text could be immensely helpful to avoid error while sending out content to other vendors. PS: This is the original thread where I asked for help regarding this issue - and the moderator MEB suggested that this feature doesn't exist and I should request for it:

After more than 18 months CTS is cured and tons of sketches have piled up. Happy to use Affinity again :)