Jump to content
You must now use your email address to sign in [click for more info] ×

Recommended Posts

What you want is a table, why don't you use them? It'll be easier than drawing lines.

Another tip is to use a paragraph style with numbered list. You don't need to enter numbers (1 to 28 or 31), only to apply the paragraph style to a cell. When you want to begin another month, you use the Paragraph panel (not the Paragraph Style panel, or not modifying the original Text Style), and in the paragraph panel, you set the list to begin again the numerotation.

2019-11-02_224138.png.4c8eb56d8fa7950118ac3b6ed0559f68.png

Here the file (sorry, by default it's opened by APub Bêta, you won't be able to open it in the regular APub).

calendar example2.afpub

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, PButler said:

I had that moving/"marching ants" green line too. Dunno why

Probably you used the APhoto persona, since it's the only one with Selection tool that result in "marching ants", or used a shortcut able to select some pixels.

Marching ants: it's a term I read in this forum, used for the dotted/dashed selection of pixels. I find it funny. In French, we keep the boring and simple term of "selection".

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Wosven -

Big errors, yup.

I could, maybe, follow your examples better if I worked through them on my system. However, the close-ups of your illustrations show you using the "Calquer" panel; my French-English dictionary renders that as "to trace or copy", but I don't see anything quite analogous to that in my "View: Studio" submenu.

Kindly walk me through this a little more explicitly, s'il vous plait!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote

Until now, I've never needed to make a screen recording, and have neither acquired software to do so nor found same in the MacOS toolbox. Can you tell me where to go for this function, or post a link to a how-to? I could give you a screen cap, but doubt that would help much...

@PButler To follow up on this, LICEcap https://www.cockos.com/licecap/ is a very-easy-to-use application which works on OS X and Windows and allows you to quickly get animated screen captures. The output quality is not always great but it’s good enough for most purposes. Another option might be ScreeenToGif https://www.screentogif.com/ but I’ve not used that enough to form any reasonable opinions about it. On OS X you probably already have Quicktime installed and that should do the job too (but with larger output files). You have plenty of options, it’s just a matter of experimentation until you find something you like.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 hours ago, Wosven said:

Marching ants: it's a term I read in this forum, used for the dotted/dashed selection of pixels. I find it funny. In French, we keep the boring and simple term of "selection".

Just curious, but then how do you distinguish between making a tool or layer selection & a pixel selection?

It is a bit like the term "burger menu," which I am sure to some users suggests something you would see at McDonald's. xD

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

tool or layer selection

A layer or object selection is shown by blue stroke and handles. It seems the ants are for pixels selection, if we look at the rectangular/round, etc. selection tools, or the brush or lasso selection tools. If those selections take the shapes from other objects, it's only for using on a pixel layer or mask (or the result go awry :S).

Burger menu or "hamburger menu" is fun too, and easier to use since we don't have name for it and people try to call it "the strokes/lines" (+ its location) or another term. It's easier when something have a name.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

18 minutes ago, Wosven said:

A layer or object selection is shown by blue stroke and handles.

Keep in mind that for objects in capital L "Layer" container layers we now have the option to set different colors for the selection handles (& for selected text), so confusingly an object selection is not always shown by blue handles:highlites.jpg.4355768b07460b9393bd9b04efb8538c.jpg

But what I am curious about is how you would make it clear that you were referring to a pixel selection & not a tool or object selection, for example when explaining to someone how some aspect of the Affinity UI works. Using "pixel selection" for that often seems to confuse some users, I think because they interpret it as a reference to a pixel layer, or sometimes as something that is a part of some specific layer rather than as an independent kind of selection.

Using "marching ants" instead seems (at least to me) to be a less confusing way to make that kind of reference.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

Link to comment
Share on other sites

About the colour of the layer: I'll assume the simplest use, when people don't use colour for their layers, but in either cases, there are handles, and if they are in another colour, we can ask or understand that it's a coloured layer.

About selection: we would just complete the sentence to make the distinction: select "part" (= the apple, the face…)  of this image means, if you're working on a picture, to select pixels, = marching ants. If the apple or the face is a vector object, it'll be evident it's the vector objects we ask to select. We don't work blind when we describe something, especially when working with photos or illustrations, and if there are a vector  and a picture of an apple, we just need to complete the description (for example by type, or by position).

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

Using "marching ants" instead seems (at least to me) to be a less confusing way to make that kind of reference

Yes, but it's the same as with specific vocabulary, if people aren't familiar with the terms, they won't understand. They can search Wikipedia about this one! :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

18 hours ago, PButler said:

Kindly walk me through this a little more explicitly, s'il vous plait!

Calques = layers (look at the panel, it shows objects and the opacity option, and at the bottom of the panel the "Master A" with the fine orange line at the left).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 minutes ago, Wosven said:

About selection: we would just complete the sentence to make the distinction: select "part" (= the apple, the face…)  of this image means, if you're working on a picture, to select pixels, = marching ants.

Except that we really are not selecting pixels, just an area of the document defined by the marching ants selection. In fact, as this super simple nothing but ants.afpub file demonstrates, even when there are no layers at all in the document it is still possible to create a marching ants selection. This trips up a lot of users, even ones who have been using the Affinity apps for years.

Besides, in these forums we do frequently have to work blind because for one reason or another an OP has not provided enough info for us to know what they are working on or having problems understanding.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

Link to comment
Share on other sites

49 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Except that we really are not selecting pixels, just an area of the document defined by the marching ants selection.

Yes, but it'll be usefull only if you click on a layer with pixel or a mask. And to select this you had to switch to the Photo personna, that is especially dedicated to pixel work.

This selection can be initially a complexe vector shape that you retrieve the selection to use on a mask, painting only in this area.

Now, people can do unusefull actions, but they shouldn't be prevented since something we don't find usefull can be an usual use for someone else.

 

55 minutes ago, R C-R said:

we do frequently have to work blind because for one reason or another an OP has not provided enough info for us to know what they are working on

Hum, that's not due to faulty apps, but what we call  PEBCAK :D

Link to comment
Share on other sites

To all - apologies for lag in replying. After my “Big errors, yup.” comment, the forum software informed me:

“ You have reached the maximum number of posts you can make per day. “

(Looks like the limit is 10; I will combine replies hereafter when practical to stay kosher.)

So, I wrote the following Saturday to post today:

Wosven -

I don’t use a table because I need to cram more info into the page than will fit in uniform boxes. A day with lots of events may take two or three times as many lines as a quieter day, and I have to make, e.g., my Friday and Saturday columns wider than those of midweek days. See https://www.gainesvilleiguana.org/calendar for an example of the final product (and yes, I know some of the things I do there ought to be against the law).
The pack-as-much-in-as-possible situation necessitates putting events and day-numbers in different superimposed text frames, so I can get two lines of 10-pt event text next to a 24-pt day number.
I won’t try to open yr file: since I’m floundering so much with the release version I plainly have no business jumping into a beta.

And so far I have acquired only the Pubisher persona, though I hope to buy and install at least the Photo persona eventually. Maybe some Photo code got re-used in Publisher and created a “feature” not intended for this app.

Sfaik, the phrase “marching ants” goes back to Bill Atkinson’s _MacPaint_ program on the original 128K Macintosh of 1984. Atkinson wrote that he gave his B&W selection-highlighting technique that name specifically with 12-yr-old boys in mind (he likewise called the zoom-in mode “Fat Bits”).

Updates:
Thanks for translating “Calques” - my Larousse, c’est ne pas à la mode!

Much of the other new commentary just underlines for me that learning AffApps demands a new terminology. I remain stuck at figuring out where this involves genuinely innovative approaches and where it’s just idiosyncrasy.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Oops, I'd forgotten that our site got hacked and the webmaster redirected everything to F'book. I've attached a .pdf of the currently posted calendar.

Meanwhile, I dunno whether I've learned some subtle mouse-movement trick, or AffPub has changed its behavior, but I was able to drag all the items out of that "Calendar constants metalayer" folder - a process which created some odd appearances and disappearances on the canvas, but ended with everything visible - and am naming and grouping, and trying to figure what to lock. (That approach may not work too well, I now suspect, once I fill the space with text frames: it would be better to have some way to get them all out of the way when I need to tinker with the framework, and vice-versa.)

One horizontal "curve" - the line below the 3rd Friday box, fwiw - still shows marching ants, whether selected or not. Nothing about its listing in the Layers panel indicates anything different from the other "curve"s.

Oct 19 Igcal.pdf

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, PButler said:

One horizontal "curve" - the line below the 3rd Friday box, fwiw - still shows marching ants, whether selected or not. Nothing about its listing in the Layers panel indicates anything different from the other "curve"s.

As I mentioned earlier, a marching ants selection is not itself a part of any layer. If you do not have Affinity Photo installed & therefore cannot use Publisher's Photo Persona, I have no idea how you created a marching ants selection to begin with, but to dismiss it just go to the Select menu & choose Deselect or use the keyboard shortcut for that (on Macs by default it is ⌘D).

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@PButler 

Ouch! I'm sorry for you if you have to do this every few monthes ;)

APub 's Tables seems out of the way since they don't seems to accept wraping text around images, and you have some here and there.

Perhaps working with columns or long text frames can do the trick. Number for days can be drop caps, if you use the Bêta that allow to have more than 1 character as drop caps.
I used a table to keep the days and columns aligned. Perhaps this file can give you ideas.

Oct 19 Igcal.afpub

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I do this eight times a year - getting the info is the hard part.

The text wraps I do (so far) manually. The Apple Pages app sets a text wrap distance on all sides; since AffPub allows setting that distance differently in four directions, maybe I can apply that some day.

The drop caps trick might work, but I'd rather keep the day numbers so that they flow back and forth, and I don't have to change each one with every issue. Does AffPub have any way to embed one text frame inside another so that the smaller one moves when the text above increases or decreases by a line, and they have different text flows?

I like how you used different Decorations to create different dividers between items in a day and different days - gotta experiment with that! And it seems your table has columns of different widths - something I hadn't expected, which makes that possibly a tool I can use after all. Does the text have to flow from one column to the next?

On the prototype I posted here, I have a row of day-numbers for the 2nd week in January I prob'ly won't need this issue. When I selected them all (and the divider lines above them) and dragged them down to the next page, they went where I put them and stayed there. Then I undid that, selected the batch again and moved them with the down-arrow on the keyboard (so they'd stay in exact vertical alignment) - and they became invisible once they fully entered the gray area between pages, and stayed invisible even after they were an inch down into page 3 (and didn't show up after I drew a new selection rectangle including all of the area they'd gone to). ???

Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 hours ago, PButler said:

The drop caps trick might work, but I'd rather keep the day numbers so that they flow back and forth, and I don't have to change each one with every issue. Does AffPub have any way to embed one text frame inside another so that the smaller one moves when the text above increases or decreases by a line, and they have different text flows?

I like how you used different Decorations to create different dividers between items in a day and different days - gotta experiment with that! And it seems your table has columns of different widths - something I hadn't expected, which makes that possibly a tool I can use after all. Does the text have to flow from one column to the next?

Since the numbers are linked to the style with a black line above, that's always the date, perhaps easier to use than text frames to move around.

I didn't thought about adding the vertical lines as decoration for the paragraph, but it can be done too, avoiding the need to modify the table below or move the lines.

And yes, you can use simple text frames as columns. But if you've got all the text at once, and shortcuts for each styles (or use the option of those text styles "Next style", and right click on some paragraphs and use the option "Apply Style_xxx and next", it can be easy to format all your text in few clicks).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I spent my AffPub time yesterday trying to understand/duplicate your example, and only got partway there - gotta dig more into text styles and other panel esoterica. Each time I thought I'd figured out how to do two different types of after-paragraph Decoration, results came out inconsistently at best.

Quote

Since the numbers are linked to the style with a black line above, that's always the date...

In my Nov-Dec example, the 3rd Sunday, for example, is "Dec 1". Our next issue will be Jan-Feb, and the 3rd Sunday will probably be "[Jan] 26" (because we will come out, again, on the 2nd week of the month). If I can't slide the numbers around by text flow, I'll have to re-enter each one - time-consuming and especially aggravating after having used an easier system. But possibly I can have the best of both by embedding date-number text frames within text columns (maybe the Edit menu's "Paste inside" command will help there - a pity the Help section doesn't even mention this not-seen-anywhere-else-in-Mac-apps feature).

Damn, I miss the days when software developers produced systematic manuals, instead of leaving users to bounce around between videos, help-file topics, chat fora, and trial-&-error. At least I'm pretty good at that error part...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 hours ago, PButler said:

In my Nov-Dec example, the 3rd Sunday, for example, is "Dec 1". Our next issue will be Jan-Feb, and the 3rd Sunday will probably be "[Jan] 26" (because we will come out, again, on the 2nd week of the month). If I can't slide the numbers around by text flow, I'll have to re-enter each one - time-consuming and especially aggravating after having used an easier system

It's what I would call a 50/50 situation: either way, you need to have an action. Moving around text frames in one, updating the number in the second. Since you need to put few words in bold each time, you can enter them at the same moment, or before pasting the text.

With time, I'm less and less prone to use items I need — and forget — to move around (like lines, or text frame for drop caps, etc.). But that's a personnal preference :) Behing able to move all the day with linked frames is interesting too (in usual calendars, with 1 column for the dates and one for the days,  I do this to move the days).

calendrier37279.thumb.jpg.f38eeac24a33328cf93cbba2ffc88ac7.jpg

Look at the Pin options to keep a text frame in the text:

2019-11-06_075326.png.f8fd7423618ec7c8219aff74fb660be5.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That Pin panel looks like exactly what I need (at least once I get a better grip on the Decorations possibilities).

After I finish each issue's calendar, I usually make a copy with a filename for the next issue and, during slack times of phone calls, etc, eliminate nearly all the text, saving only an initial letter or two in boldface for the lead words and a little in plainface for the rest of the entry (except for reliably repeating items, where I might delete only the title of a talk). That sets me up as well as I can predict it for the next month's production - typically done a few hours before going to print, with someone looking over my shoulder.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, PButler said:

initial letter or two in boldface for the lead words and a little in plainface for the rest of the entry

Why not have a Paragraph style with bold, and a Character style for regular/normal + a shortcut? (Or do the reverse). This way, you paste your plain text and in the end you apply bold or italic or bold-italic without needing to do multiple selections to paste 2 words here and 4 there.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My typical recycled entry looks like this:

Q pm.

So all I have to do is select the "Q", type in the bolded part of the new entry, click the right-arrow key once, and type the rest. Quick and easy (though I needed matching styles as well, particularly since Pages sometimes likes to change 10-pt times to 18-pt Helvetica when part of a text box gets deleted; at least the matching quirk in AffPub apparently needs a text-frame link to go that nuts).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Guidelines | We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.