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A few questions about the behavior of AD for ipad


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I have now spent many hundreds of hours using AD for iPad using an Apple Pencil and iPad Pro 12.9. It has been mostly a great pleasure. There is no other iOS app that comes close to it for doing vector graphics and it’s pixel persona is fine for all but a few things which can be finished up in Photoshop. (Affinity Photo is good also but I’m so used to good old Photoshop I haven’t really pursued it.) I understand that Adobe is promising an iOS version of  illustrator, but they have a lot of catching up to do to match AD, and if Photoshop for iPad is any indication I’m not holding my breath.

So kudos to the design team!

But... (I’m sure you could see this coming) there are a few strange behaviors and omissions that prevent it from being a 5 star app (call it 4.5 at present) So....

1) A minor issue, but a significant waste of time, no way to turn off spell check in settings. Yes, it can be turned off in the Text Studio burger menu. But it has to be turned off on EVERY entry. To add insult to injury when you deselect spellcheck, Guides are turned on. So that’s several unnecessary clicks, including turning off guides again on every entry. I realize that this issue has been raised repeatedly, but it doesn’t seem like it should be much effort to put it in settings.

2) No rulers. Bad deficiency. I need to know precise  measurements for documents.

3) The units seem stuck on points. In settings there is “Text in points” and “Lines in points”. What if I want it in pixels or inches? Some adjustments can be done in pixels but the main display remains in points.

4) Dragging layers to arrange order is error prone. Very easy to miss your target. Which can make the object disappear into the ozone. Thank God for undo.

5) Here’s the one that makes me scream. When editing text I select the text string. But if there are several paragraphs in the selection the virtual keyboard pops up and covers the target. And (this is the problem) when I try to use 2 fingers to bring it into view, it snaps back behind the keyboard. What is this about? Maddening.

 As always I know I may be missing something, so I’d be happy to know if I can get results another way.

Regards - Jan
 

 

 

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Affinity Publisher for iPad is currently being developed (no ETA) and more options may be added to the apps Preferences as it will require more specific text options. Some of these may be ported over to Designer and Photo on iPad overtime but nothing is confirmed at this time.

No rulers at this time but is a requested feature and something that may be added in a future update.

If you just wish to adjust the units, tap on the Document menu and select Resize you have an option on the Context toolbar to change the Units and tap Apply. If the options in Preferences > Interface haven't been disabled these will still apply.

Layer selection can be easier when using an Apple Pencil, the workflow may be improved as development continues.

For the moment you may need to adjust your workflow to zoom out so more of the lower text is visible to edit.  Or at your current zoom level select one of the text tools, then two finder swipe on the document to move up/down and then tap directly into the lower text to edit.

 

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Fair enough. I’ll try the things you suggested.

I’m now pretty much convinced that I’m playing the fool trying to use iPad for any kind of serious work. I really like AD a lot but the Desktop version seems to be Serif’s sole focus and I’ll be heading there from now on. Don’t like Illustrator’s UI and both Lightroom and Photoshop for the IPad are useless, for too many reasons to detail. It’s all a dirty shame because the basic vector editing capability of AD combined with the Apple Pencil is really nice. Sadly  there are too many important things missing/broken and apparently no intention to add/fix them. I wish Serif had just put an label on it saying: “Just a toy“ and saved me the trouble of having to find out through long trial and error.

Ah well, you can’t always get what you want.

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