Affinity Designer Macros

[junovhs]

Just wanted to say, it is so stupid that Designer doesn't have macros but Photo does. I have no doubt this was a marketing decision to encourage users to buy the full suite, which is very irritating because I'd rather NOT have to switch to photo everytime I need to run a macro operation. 

Extremely dumb. 

[carl123]

If you have Publisher you can use StudioLink to run your macros without the need to fire up APhoto.

Additionally (and more beneficial) you can record and playback specific Designer (and Publisher) commands that you don't have access to if just running APhoto

 

2 hours ago, junovhs said:

I have no doubt this was a marketing decision to encourage users to buy the full suite,

Resistance is futile, you will comply (eventually)

[GaryLearnTech]

11 hours ago, junovhs said:

I have no doubt this was a marketing decision to encourage users to buy the full suite

I've got all three apps on the Mac and both on the iPad - and have been lurking around these forums for several years.  I could be wrong but, frankly, Serif doesn't strike me as the sort of company that would stoop to such underhand tactics.  If nothing else, it would be a rather contrived approach to their goal of world domination.

[v_kyr]

Not sure what great plus macros should offer there for AD then, since either way, the Macro capabilities like in APh are pretty limited in their overall offered functionality. Scripting support with a rich set of accessible functions would probably be instead more useful to have here for AD and in general. - StudioLink, well it's more or less sort of a way towards an integrated system (same scheme as some former time tools in the past already offered all in one package) due to the apps shared proprietary file format, but actually without licensing also a copy of Publisher the whole is in its current state pretty useless.

[walt.farrell]

2 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

StudioLink, well it's more or less sort of a way towards an integrated system (same scheme as some former time tools in the past already offered all in one package) due to the apps shared proprietary file format, but actually without licensing also a copy of Publisher the whole is in its current state pretty useless.

Yes, you need to license Publisher to get StudioLink, but it's well worth the money, in my opinion, even if you do nothing else with Publisher but use it to improve the integration of Designer and Photo. And it also gets you Find/Replace for text, improvements to Frame Text, and some other functions that are useful in Designer and that may remain Publisher exclusives. As well as some enhanced macro capabilities, as Carl mentioned.

[v_kyr]

1 minute ago, walt.farrell said:

Yes, you need to license Publisher to get StudioLink, but it's well worth the money, in my opinion, even if you do nothing else with Publisher but use it to improve the integration of Designer and Photo. And it also gets you Find/Replace for text, improvements to Frame Text, and some other functions that are useful in Designer and that may remain Publisher exclusives. As well as some enhanced macro capabilities, as Carl mentioned.

That sounds somehow like the OP then is right with his marketing wise assumptions. - Honestly, APub doesn't yet in its early state offer most of the functionality (book/manual projects, seperate chapter file handling, indexing over several files, cross-references, sidenotes/footnotes, equation math handling, SGML/XML, ePub, HTML ...and so on...) I would personally have more a need for. Find/replace (?), well that's usually what I call a mandatory function for every app which claims to deal/work with probably lot of texts. Further I'm not sure if StudioLink would be a possible memory hog for/on older not that performant systems.

[walt.farrell]

14 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

That sounds somehow like the OP then is right with his marketing wise assumptions

There may well be some marketing involved, but I seem to recall anther answer from Serif that part of it is segregating functions to keep the individual applications focused and their UIs simpler than if everything were in one app.

As regards needing Find/Replace, I think that Serif will say that Publisher is now the app anyone dealing with a lot of text should be using. Users may have had no choice but to use Designer for that in the past, but now they do.

[v_kyr]

13 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

There may well be some marketing involved, but I seem to recall anther answer from Serif that part of it is segregating functions to keep the individual applications focused and their UIs simpler than if everything were in one app.

Maybe, though in their beginnings they've gone that route, looking here at "Designer Persona/Pixel Persona" or APhotos vector support (even more limited).

16 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

As regards needing Find/Replace, I think that Serif will say that Publisher is now the app anyone dealing with a lot of text should be using. Users may have had no choice but to use Designer for that in the past, but now they do.

Personally I still can't realy imagine of writing longer text passages in any Affinity app, they don't offer that much of a good visual reading/writing experience. Thus I for my part prefer to write text with other dedicated tools, which BTW also offer here much more and better text/word handling capabilities, be it find/replace, multiple cursor selection changes, word count and corrections etc. Thus I would write elsewhere and paste over the reviewed text just for L&F formating purposes.

[Annabella_K]

I don't know if it's marketing or they just assume that everyone buys the whole suit, but even if you have all the programs, I agree that Designer needs it's own macros. When you need an artboard vector document, which is Designer created for, then nor Photo, nor Publisher is the right choice. So switching back and forth just for macros is not acceptable.

[walt.farrell]

3 hours ago, Annabella_K said:

When you need an artboard vector document, which is Designer created for, then nor Photo, nor Publisher is the right choice.

Publisher can easily work on documents that contain artboards, and can even create documents that contain artboards, if you also own Designer. And then, if you also own Photo, you can use macros for that document, too. Switching between the 3 Personas of Publisher makes this easy.

[Annabella_K]

41 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Publisher can easily work on documents that contain artboards, and can even create documents that contain artboards, if you also own Designer. And then, if you also own Photo, you can use macros for that document, too. Switching between the 3 Personas of Publisher makes this easy.

Okay, I needed to check, because I've always got the error message that you cannot add artboards to documents that are multipage or have master pages. The missing step was that you can turn off using master pages when you create the document, I haven't noticed that before. Or just didn't understand that checkbox. Thanks @walt.farrell 👍 But if you're suppose to do everything in Publisher, then what's the point of all the rest? They could just create one master program with 6 or so personas... I really don't get it. Anyways, I'll probably end up buying Photo too (while it's on sale), now that it has actually TWO features I may need. This is crazy 😂

[walt.farrell]

You're welcome, @Annabella_K.

15 minutes ago, Annabella_K said:

But if you're suppose to do everything in Publisher, then what's the point of all the rest? They could just create one master program with 6 or so personas...

I'm not saying you're "supposed" to do everything in Publisher, and Serif staff would probably disagree with me if I did

But I find it to be a useful method of working, for some purposes. It doesn't completely solve the problem if you need the Export Persona, but with my way of working I seldom use that Persona, and if I need it I can switch to the full Designer (or Photo) application.

And I don't always use Publisher. It depends on what functions I'm going to need. If I don't need easy access to the tools provided by the Photo Persona of Photo, or the tools provided by Publisher, I'll just work in Designer.

[Annabella_K]

Hi @walt.farrell It's just that a lot of topics has the answer that "you can do that in Publisher with X persona", so I kinda have that impression. 😊

To me, it looks like that compared to Adobe they blurred the lines a bit between the programs, which is convenient on one hand, but it also confused a lot of people (me included), who now only need 1-2 tools from another app, and it leaves us feeling "BUT WHY????". Because those tools would completely make sense in the application for our work, they are an integral part of the workflow. I wonder what kind of professions they target with each software, or how they decide what goes into one but not into the other. Or maybe this is just the drawback of using such a young software suit and everything will fall into place eventually.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, Annabella_K said:

... but it also confused a lot of people (me included), who now only need 1-2 tools from another app, and it leaves us feeling "BUT WHY????"

One part of the "why" is that different people want or need different tools from the other apps, so there is no "one size fits all" tool set that everyone could agree on.

[Annabella_K]

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

One part of the "why" is that different people want or need different tools from the other apps, so there is no "one size fits all" tool set that everyone could agree on.

My brain knows that has to be the case but that doesn't help about feeling that way.  😅

[Stepaan]

At least simple pairing of Find/Replace would be great. For example choosing replacing a plain space following numbers with non breaking space with one click could really speed things up.