Affinity Publisher Customer Beta - 1.8.0.531

[AdamW]

Status: Beta
Purpose: Stability and General Testing
Requirements: Purchased Affinity Publisher
Mac App Store: Not submitted
Download: Download
Auto-update: Not Available

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Hi,

We are pleased to announce that a new Customer Beta of Affinity Publisher (1.8.0.531) is now available as a download from the link above.

As this is a 'Stability and General Testing' beta it is considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity where you may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents. 

We hope you enjoy the beta, and as always, if you've got any problems installing or running up, please don't hesitate to post in this thread. 

Any problems actually using this version please make a new topic in this forum and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Please feel free to leave general suggestions and comments in the Discussion Forum. 

Once again, many thanks for your continued feedback.

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StudioLink

This build of Affinity Publisher, 1.8.0 Beta, requires 1.8.0 Beta builds of Photo and Designer for StudioLink to function. These are available from the Photo and Designer Beta forums.

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Fixes and Updates

Main Menus / Toolbars / Studio / General Tools
Unified View Menu 'Manager' ordering for all Applications and Personas
Find and Replace text colour does not work when colour is selected from waterfall
Tweaked Vector Crop tool so that we offer a hit handle for narrow shapes
(Mac) Grid fixes, bad redrawing on zoom, issues with gutters, improvement with Metal shader
(Mac) Preview Mode button on new toolbar now correctly reflects if preview mode is on / off
(Win) Drag objects into Assets

Document Management
(Mac) Miscellaneous fixes for New Document Panel
(Mac) Double clicking a page type in New Document didn't close the dialog correctly
Changing document DPI can change bleed / margins and text wrapping values under certain circumstances
Added previews in 'Add Pages from File...' dialog

Text / Tables
Text composition performance improvements
Fixed crash when column end hyphenation zone would force an entire line to the next column
Column end zone should not be used if auto-hyphenation is off
No-break text was breaking at twice the frame's width
Line break after "/" should not get a hyphen
Text Frame gutter drag handles become misaligned when frame is scaled
Text with Baseline Grid isn't vertically aligned correctly
Copying table data from Excel can bring in an extra column
Excel import style fixes
Excel import merged cells not being handled correctly
Excel import some sheets missing on import
(Mac) Removed spurious drop control that had appeared on Paragraph panel

Hyperlinks
Unintended Hyperlink attributes can be applied when inserting immediately adjacent text
Implemented 'Go to Target' for URL Hyperlinks
(Mac) Fix for specific crash with Hyperlink edits
(Mac) Fix for editing of Hyperlink names
(Mac) Hyperlink dialog offering pixels instead of pages

Images /Picture Frames
Placed embedded stock photos can now be converted to linked correctly
Updated OpenJPEG importer to fix import of specific images
Fix for crash embedding afphoto file multiple times
Fix for resizing a Picture Frame before placing an image altering the image scale

Preflight
Updated Bleed Hazard Preflight check
Added Preflight default profile
Added Preflight user comments
Added Preflight for spelling errors
Added Preflight for a range of undesirable text patterns
Added Preflight check for missing fonts
Only warn about the last overflowing text frame in the flow
Inhibit creation of profiles when no document is open
Fix for delete from Profile Manager
Made the out-of-date resource Preflight warning fixable
(Mac) Preflight panel missing in separated mode
(Mac) Fixed unreadable page numbers on Panel in Sierra

IDML Import
Fixed up IDML file associations
Estimate document DPI when importing IDML files
Inserted PDFs import at incorrect size
Text enclosed in XMLElement tags is now imported
Avoid possible 'Linked resource changed' warning on IDML import containing linked PDFs
Importing custom glyphs with g+nnnn notation
Some image frames coming in as empty despite having image content
Fixed table sizes and offsets to take account of border line width
Hyperlinks now imported (as text only)

Plus Help and Localisation updates
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To be notified about all future Mac beta updates, please follow this beta notification thread 

To be notified when this update comes out of beta and is fully released to all Affinity Publisher customers, please follow this release notification thread

[Seneca]

Happy New Year Publisher Beta!

[000]

Thanks!!

Are there any more new features coming for 1.8 or are we in the polishing phase?

[garrettm30]

1 hour ago, AdamW said:

Added Preflight user comments

After figuring out what this is… Awesome addition! That's a pro-level feature in my book.

[KipV]

5 hours ago, Jens Krebs said:

Are there any more new features coming for 1.8 or are we in the polishing phase?

It seems like they added a lot of pre-flight features.

[garrettm30]

6 hours ago, Jens Krebs said:

Are there any more new features coming for 1.8 or are we in the polishing phase?

I am interested in how this question is answered–if they are able to answer it.

Of course I do hope there are new goodies. But just considering what is already in the 1.8 beta, I feel like there is already a quite respectable amount of progress made. For example, consider these three major standout features: IDML import, preflight, and the interface for new documents with elegant template support, not to mention a lot of fixes and smaller quality-of-life improvements (and whatever else I'm forgetting). I know we have other important features on our wishlist as well as these, but realizing that it can't be all done at once, I can be content with the pace of development that we are seeing here, even if there is nothing further to add to the upcoming release besides polishing what is now already there.

By the way, Jens' question is what got me thinking about it, but what I say is not directed at him or anyone else in particular, or at least not any more than it is directed first to myself. I don't want to be the spoiled kid at Christmas who says, "That's nice; what else?"

[fde101]

My guess is that the "big ticket" items are in play by now though we may see a few smaller things sneak in before it is final...  but that is just a guess.

 

If nothing else I suspect they may still add a few more tests to the preflight panel and support for conversion of a few additional things from IDML.

[R C-R]

21 hours ago, AdamW said:

Implemented 'Go to Target' for URL Hyperlinks

Yay! 

Among other things, when it works this means when I am testing a new feature or trying to understand how one works, I can add a URL hyperlink to a forum post or topic about it & from the Hyperlink panel just select it & click the 'Go to Target' button.

However, it seems to be buggy, at least for me -- sometimes adding a URL hyperlink hangs the app, but I need to do more testing before reporting this as a bug. (FWIW, if I create the URL hyperlink in the retail version & then open the file in the beta, 'Go to Target' for URL Hyperlinks in the beta works fine, even URL's created directly in the beta that hang it.).

Edited January 16, 2020 by R C-R
added "FWIW" comment

[000]

16 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

"That's nice; what else?"

Don't get me wrong, there's lots of nice stuff in the 1.8 update and it's much more than most other companies provide with a paid upgrade ... I'm SUPER happy with the progress. The question was just for information to see how far the betas are ... and, off course, to maybe, possibly get a subtle hint on when and if the ONE feature I'm desperately waiting for  is coming.

[garrettm30]

@Jens Krebs No worries; I understood. I was just musing with myself out loud more than anything. 

[AdamW]

On 1/15/2020 at 4:09 PM, Jens Krebs said:

Are there any more new features coming for 1.8 or are we in the polishing phase?

17 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

I am interested in how this question is answered–if they are able to answer it.

Yep, most of our cards are on the table for 1.8 now. We're already planning future updates, but there are a lot of loose ends that need tying up for 1.8 too. 

[000]

@AdamW Thanks for the answer and the hard work ... it's a MASSIVE update.

[A_B_C]

On 1/15/2020 at 4:23 PM, AdamW said:

Importing custom glyphs with g+nnnn notation

Terrific job on that, Adam! Works like a charm. I am going to perform some more checks with my documents and report back. 

[A_B_C]

Here’s an IDML context that fails to import properly. Here’s another one. 

[TonyO]

I was playing with imdl import and it's pretty nice, as accurate as I would expect it to be given the proprietary nature. Are you working on idml export also? that would be a game changer at work, I could design in publisher and output to cruddy old indesign so my co-workers could open them, haha!