Affinity Publisher - Picture frame borders

[GForce_n1]

Hi,

I'm looking for some guidance on what I think is a simple issue. I have just started out with Publisher and have made good progress picking up the interface; it's all pretty intuitive, maybe with the exception of the text styles dialogue and how it interfaces with contents/indexing.

In the document I am putting together I have a lot of photographs and have used the picture frame stroke feature to create a white border between adjacent images. It's set to a 2.5pt outer border on each adjacent image. On printing to pdf there seems to be a fine line visible in the border. On closer inspection this seems to be part of the image from behind. Is there a way to get rid of this or a better way to achieve the 5pt borders I require? I have up to 9 adjacent images on some pages.

I have attached sample screen grabs, one from Affinity and the other from Preview (pdf). Any help appreciated!

I am running v1.8.4 on OS 10.13.6.

[GarryP]

Welcome to the forums @GForce_n1
My first question is: Why are you using a thick Stroke to create a ‘border’ between image frames?
Would it not be easier just to space the frames apart from each other by a little bit?
Or are you using a non-white background?

[GForce_n1]

Thanks for the reply.

I am using a white background. The issue is that I have over a hundred pictures adjacent to each other in this document that I want to space equally (5pts). Snapping the picture boxes to each other and using a stoke seemed an easy way to achieve this, without getting bogged down in positioning all these objects.

I don't understand why this line is present as I would not expect a border around the stoke. On experimenting drawing lines over the picture box nodes seems like the best option?

[Pšenda]

17 minutes ago, GForce_n1 said:

Snapping the picture boxes to each other

This must be "pixel" perfect, not "points" perfect. Try set "Force pixel alignment", and unset "Move by Whole pixel".

P.S. Pixel perfect (position and size) also applies to the images themselves, otherwise they will be unnecessarily recalculated, blurred and anti-aliased at their edges.

Edited February 16, 2021 by Pšenda

[GForce_n1]

Hi, interesting. This does help, in that it minimises the line, but it is still there. I think I will go with the overdrawing a line solution.

With regard to the pixel perfect option; is this really recommended to prevent image distortion? Should I always work with this option turned on?

On an almost related subject I have noted some odd behaviour, in that when I modify a master page Affinity can distort/stretch images, even when the properties of the image specifically say this should not happen. I am assuming this is a bug, and have reinserted images to ensure there is no distortion after a master page update.