Cannot Get Spot colors to PDF

[BennyD]

8 minutes ago, thomaso said:

It's hard to understand that Serif doesn't focus on bug fixing for professional use but rather prefers developing new features like the (temporary) option to save a document history as video, to download brushes/assets alternatively from within Affinity or to refine astrophotography support.

I totally agree. They could have saved the new features for 2.0 and better had been concentrating on bug fixing for 1.9 imho.

[loukash]

3 hours ago, Gigiga said:

PLEASE FIX THIS ASAP!

+1,000,000!

3 hours ago, Dazmondo77 said:

ghostscript (don't have the patience)

@Lagarto's Ghostscript based preview app from the "Acrobat thread" seems to work for some (not for me).
I made me a quick'n'dirty MacOS Automator Service plugin that utilizes Ghostscript, but it still needs a bit of polishing before I'd release it to the wild. (Working in El Capitan and having Acrobat X, I'm still good for the time being anyway.)

2 hours ago, BennyD said:

But what's the point of having spot colors and overprint then? I just don't get it.

Neither do I.

2 hours ago, thomaso said:

whereas here "challenge" + "impressive" doesn't feel positive to me but rather absurd

Frankly, my usage of the "challenge" word was definitely meant as a sarcasm…

2 hours ago, thomaso said:

It's hard to understand that Serif doesn't focus on bug fixing for professional use

+1,000,000,000!

I almost pulled my hair out last night while attempting to make a gradient fill overprint.
It! Does! Not! Work!
(To be precise: it does work under some metaphysical conditions that I'm not able to fathom. It might have something to do with a document that was created by an earlier Affinity version. For me, it definitely doesn't work in any document created by v1.9.3.)

[loukash]

10 minutes ago, loukash said:

I almost pulled my hair out last night while attempting to make a gradient fill overprint.
It! Does! Not! Work!
(To be precise: it does work under some metaphysical conditions that I'm not able to fathom. It might have something to do with a document that was created by an earlier Affinity version. For me, it definitely doesn't work in any document created by v1.9.3.)

Speaking of which:

19 hours ago, Dazmondo77 said:

see attached for example

How is it possible that in your moontest Tritone.afpub I can create overprinting spot gradients, without resorting to Multiply blend modes so that they work in PDF/X-1 /X-3 export?
Is it because the afpub is based on a v1.8.x (or older?) afphoto?
But then again, so was my moontest-tritone-loukash.afpub, and in there, it doesn't work, no matter what I try.

This is maddening!

[Dazmondo77]

1 hour ago, loukash said:

How is it possible that in your moontest Tritone.afpub I can create overprinting spot gradients, without resorting to Multiply blend modes so that they work in PDF/X-1 /X-3 export?
Is it because the afpub is based on a v1.8.x (or older?) afphoto?
But then again, so was my moontest-tritone-loukash.afpub, and in there, it doesn't work, no matter what I try.

This is maddening!

I can only export PDF/X 4 and get what you'd expect and only by using multiply as substitute for overprint and screen also seems to work for some stuff - the bottom line is we shouldn't have to resort to testing ideas and theories just to try and get simple stuff to work - I've never sent a spot colour job off to print from Affinity yet, I just came up with (hopefully a temporary) workaround to get by while it's being fixed, luckily, my main print service provider takes PDF/X-4  - I guess we'll just have to try and be patient

[BennyD]

6 minutes ago, Dazmondo77 said:

I guess we'll just have to try and be patient

Yes, but time is running out. I'm sticking with macOS High Sierra and Adobe CS5 on my Mac Mini from 2012 but I'm experiencing end of support for a lot of programs I want to continue to use already. I'd love to be able to switch to a more recent macOS but I'm quite forced to keep CS5 alive not only because Affinity doesn't get the spot colors right. But it is a key reason.

[lacerto]

(...)

[loukash]

@BennyD @Lagarto @Dazmondo77
See my reply in

… as it's likely a more appropriate thread for this specific issue.
In short, believe it or not (I barely do) but by some loop garoo voodoo majick I made it work. In Publisher. For now. Ugh.

18 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

E.g. for trapping.

Sure. That was a rhetoric dialog…

[lacerto]

(...)

[loukash]

13 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

assignments had to be done multiple times before they "took" and they might be lost for more or less mystical reasons.

Yep, my experience as well.

That said, same applies e.g. to AI CS5 and its text/character styles. It is a literal pain in the butt to make them work.
This in contrast to ID CS5.5 in general which lacks many of those bells and whistles we love in Affinity as part of the Studio Link and also has some clunky UI parts which are annoying, but its basic "pro" functionality is just rock solid, and from my experience after nearly two decades with ID, it's 99% reliable, the 1 % usually being a user error or oversight.

But this is a APh bug thread and I'm getting off topic…

Now, @Serif:
Give us Duotone mode in APh already!

[BennyD]

Affintity Photo/Designer 1.10 is out, but this quite severe bug still exists! @Gabe, are you Affinity guys kidding us? It's unusable for people who work professionally in the print industry.

🤦‍♂️

 

[BennyD]

@Gabe@MattP@Andy SomerfieldV2 is out and one of the first things I tried out is to look, if you took your professional customers serious… and I was disappointed.
Why is it so hard to admit that this problem here is a severe bug which prevents people who work in the printing industry from making the switch. At the moment I still cannot rely on your software, because the whole color management and spot color handling is still a big mess. 
😢
Cheers
Benny