You also have to praise once in a while (Linked Layers, Contour tool, Layer Masking)

[chessboard]

After grumbling so often, I'd also like to offer some praise for Affinty Apps.

For a die cut sheet with stickers for kids, I had to create several illustrations, taking into account the die cut outline and an additional bleed of 5mm all around.
Working together, the three Affinity apps provided the most flexible workflow here. Using the new links in AP, I connected one path with the die-cutting contour to another path, which in turn was extended outward by 5mm using the contour tool and served as a layer mask for the actual illustration. The illustrations were drawn in separate files for each sticker and importet as linked images. So they could be rotated at will without losing the ability to edit them in the correct orientation in the paint program.
I packed everything together into a group and was thus able to distribute the individual stickers wonderfully on the sheet and rotate them as needed. If the shape of the cutting outline had to be adjusted, that was no problem because the mask was linked to the path for the cutting outline. I did all the work in Publisher, because of the ability to switch easily between all three apps inside of Publisher.

This all worked really well and provided enough flexibility to quickly adjust the die-cutting contour, inclusive the bleed, and to rearange the stickers on the sheet after some correction requests by the publisher (the client). In comparison to other apps the Affinity apps brought the most advanced workflow in this case. And while I was working in Publisher, I could duplicate the sticker sheed and adjust the visiblity of the die-cutting contour on the second page by selecting same fill and stroke, to export just the pure illustration for printing as TIFF (PSD had some issues).
This was an really advanced workflow compared to my older one using a combination of Photoshop and Illustrator.

So, a big "Thank you, Serif" at this occassion.

In the end I would only wish, that the link panel would be accessible in all three Affintiy apps. This would make things a lot easier. And it would be nice to have the abillity to disable layers from export and printing without making them invisible on screen.

[loukash]

1 hour ago, chessboard said:

the link panel would be accessible in all three Affintiy apps

It's not exactly kosher and it's possible that it might not work on Windows, but on Mac it "just works" via a few "happy accidents".

[chessboard]

Yes, you spoke about the easter-egg, but I didn't manage to let the link-panel appear. Will try the current Beta tomorrow. Does it stay when you got it or do you have to use the "happy accidents" each time the apps are startet new?

There seem to be some points different between the platforms. I see you have a tool palette with two rows. I can't get it to work like that on Windows

[loukash]

2 hours ago, chessboard said:

I see you have a tool palette with two rows. I can't get it to work like that on Windows

You don't have View > Customize Tools?

[chessboard]

Oh, yes. It's a little bit strange. At first I looked in Publisher, which I am working most time with, and I'm sure there was only "View->customize toolbar" (thus the toolbar at the top of the window). I could only adjust the icons at the top bar. I then switched to the Designer Persona and there was actually "View->customize tools", where I could switch the toolbar at the left to a two row design. Same in the Photo-Persona. Back in Publisher Persona suddenly the tools at the left were also two rows, and the menu was now called "View->customize tools".😶

I would really appreciate if there were not so many easter-eggs hidden in the apps. 😏

Still searching for the link panels in Publisher and Designer Persona. When I link two layers in Photo Persona the link icon (small chains) only appears in the layer palette in the Photo Persona, not in the other two personas. Just checked it in the last Beta of AD for Windows. The chains are also not displayed in the Layers palette.

[Pšenda]

On 5/8/2021 at 7:03 PM, chessboard said:

And it would be nice to have the abillity to disable layers from export without making them invisible on screen.

Try disable Make item visible in export (Export Persona, Layers panel). 

https://affinity.help/designer/English.lproj/pages/ExportPersona/exportPersona_layersPanel.html

[Pšenda]

11 hours ago, chessboard said:

At first I looked in Publisher, which I am working most time with, and I'm sure there was only "View->customize toolbar" (thus the toolbar at the top of the window). I could only adjust the icons at the top bar.

The View - Customize Tools menu is a standard part of all Affinity Suite applications.

https://affinity.help/publisher/en-US.lproj/pages/Workspace/customizingToolsPanel.html

[chessboard]

11 hours ago, Pšenda said:

Try disable Make item visible in export (Export Persona, Layers panel). 

https://affinity.help/designer/English.lproj/pages/ExportPersona/exportPersona_layersPanel.html

Would be possible, if I was working in Designer solely. But for the reason to switch quickly between Publisher, Designer und Photo (which is essential because only Photo offers linked layers, while only Designer offers a Contour Tool and Publisher is needed for other reasons), I was working in Publisher. And there's no export persona in Publisher nor in the personas for Designer or Photo. And Designer reads only the first page of a Publisher file, so no way either.

As for many other functions it would be much easier to have just the option to exclude layers from export and printing. Especially for a software for print design, what publisher is, this is rather a core functionality. No need for workarounds, just the direct way, would be nice. It's not too helpful to allways have to go through the backyard first and then crawl through the basement window, just to get into the house.

The great advantage for my sticker project was, that I could handle the outlines, the bleed mask, the placing and the illustration in one software. But even when it was the best workflow for this kind of project so far, it was a lot of switching between the personas. It is not really comprehensible, why Designer and Publisher are missing the link panel (no I didn't get it to be shown, even while looking for easter eggs 😉) and why there's no export persona in Publisher. BTW: Linking the fill parameters in Photo works only for one colour fills. Gradients are not linked. And linking line style parameters links only one outline, even when the other object has mutiple outlines. Why?

11 hours ago, Pšenda said:

The View - Customize Tools menu is a standard part of all Affinity Suite applications.

https://affinity.help/publisher/en-US.lproj/pages/Workspace/customizingToolsPanel.html

You're right here. My fault. I was too hasty and read the menu just until "customize toolbar" first. So I take back the criticism on this point.

[Pšenda]

2 minutes ago, chessboard said:

You're right here. My fault. I was too hasty and read the menu just until "customize toolbar" first. So I take back the criticism on this point.

Finding Easter eggs in Affinity products is probably your big hobby 🙂

 

8 minutes ago, chessboard said:

And there's no export persona in Publisher nor in the personas for Designer or Photo

Menu File, Edit in Photo/Designer...

 

8 minutes ago, chessboard said:

And Designer reads only the first page of a Publisher file, so no way either.

See Status bar.

 

[chessboard]

8 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

Finding Easter eggs in Affinity products is probably your big hobby 🙂

Not mine. I refered to @loukash, who called it this way in an other thread, where he managed to bring the link panels up in Publisher and Designer. I have no time to look for such things. I want the functions to be clearly visible where they are needed. Using software is no hobby of mine, it's my job.

11 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

Menu File, Edit in Photo/Designer...

Maybe a way in some cases. But why not in Publisher directly? Workarounds, as much as they are appreciated, are no answer to missing functions. You see the problem? In the end I need three open apps to handle one document, just because some functions are accessible in only one of them, though all apps support them. All apps can handle linked layers, and only Photo let you link layers. All apps can export into other formats, but only two can exclude layers from export.
This switching between apps may be no problem, when it's done once or twice. But when you need to switch 40, 60 or 80 times to access some funcions (which come together fast, when you have to deal with 20 and more stickers), it becomes really annoying.

16 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

See Status bar.

 

Well, that's really interesting. Since when can Designer handle multi-page documents and how do I make a mulit-page document in Designer? Another hidden feature, that obviously only shows up in special cases. Same as the link panels, that are obviously there in all apps, but you can't show them up in Publisher or Designer via the usual ways.

I'm sorry to say so, but the UI-Design of the Affinity apps really needs some brushing up.
Now enough for that.

[loukash]

8 minutes ago, chessboard said:

how do I make a mulit-page document in Designer?

You use Publisher to create pages.
Keep in mind, though, that it's either pages or artboards. You cannot mix them.

10 minutes ago, chessboard said:

Another hidden feature, that obviously only shows up in special cases.

Not at all! That's been part of the universal and "app agnostic" Affinity document file format concept from the start.
That's also what the much advertized Studio Link feature is all about!

13 minutes ago, chessboard said:

Same as the link panels, that are obviously there in all apps, but you can't show them up in Publisher or Designer via the usual ways.

Fair enough, that may seem odd. But I'd assume that's more of a business strategy decision, to make a clear distinction between the three apps, and to encourage users of just one app to purchase the other apps, too. From that point of view, this is basically a smart move. It's just the UI execution that is not so smart, as in: Once you have all three apps anyway, they should be "smart" enough to simply enable the UI for the shared features in all of them.

18 minutes ago, chessboard said:

Using software is no hobby of mine, it's my job.

It's neither my hobby, nor my "job". It's my profession (vive la différence), it's what I do for a living. Exploring and learning new things that I can do with my tools is an integral part of my profession. (Auf Deutsch würde ich es als Weiterbildung bezeichnen.)

Hey, back in the 1980s when I was in the art school learning my profession the analog way, we'd spend like weeks alone to learn and practice how to properly use a small snap-off blade cutter to cut paper, Ulano film, you name it. My very first Aristo triangle can tell the whole story of this process; I still may have it somewhere…
(Do young designers these days even know what a cutter is…?)

[Pšenda]

1 hour ago, chessboard said:

In the end I need three open apps to handle one document, just because some functions are accessible in only one of them, though all apps support them.

I guess no one is surprised that Adobe Photoshop doesn't do what InDesign does, and that InDesign doesn't do exactly what Photoshop does. If all applications did exactly the same as the other - the reason for their existence would disappear completely.

[loukash]

3 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

I guess no one is surprised that Adobe Photoshop doesn't do what InDesign does, and that InDesign doesn't do exactly what Photoshop does

… let alone being capable of opening and seamlessly editing each others' proprietary document file format.

1 hour ago, chessboard said:

In the end I need three open apps to handle one document

Um… no.
You need all three apps to be installed and licensed, in order to enable the Studio Link "killer feature" in Publisher.
Then, you don't have to ever launch the other two at all, unless you'd need their specific personae (Export, Panorama, Develop, etc.). And even then, they're just one menu command/keyboard shortcut away via File > Edit In Designer/Photo.

I don't know about you, but initially I thought the Adobe "Bridge" concept was supposed to be about something similar, when I first got it with CS3 (skipping the CS2 upgrade myself). I couldn't have been more wrong, as I quickly found out. In all those years, all I've ever used Bridge for every now and then, was for editing and batch applying XMP metadata to file formats that couldn't be accessed by other means…

[loukash]

By the way:
Do you always want to open an afdesign document with Publisher by default?
Nothing easier than that!
Simply change the document suffix from afdesign to afpub.
That's all.

And vice versa:
Do you need to create an afphoto document but you're "too lazy" to launch APh while working in APu?
Nothing easier than that!
Create a new document in APu's Photo persona, save it as afpub, close it, then change the Finder suffix to afphoto.
Voilà.

Take that, Schmadobe!

[chessboard]

  

2 hours ago, Pšenda said:

I guess no one is surprised that Adobe Photoshop doesn't do what InDesign does, and that InDesign doesn't do exactly what Photoshop does. If all applications did exactly the same as the other - the reason for their existence would disappear completely.

😉 I knew, this point would come up. But it's not Affinty Photo's core functions for image editing or Designer's core functions for vector editing, I meant. For me there's no logic behind establishing links and showing linked layers in the layer palette solely in Photo, while this is feature that at least Designer could also use. It's not a function, that makes exclusively sense in a photo editor. So, at least there could be the little chain icon in Designer and Publisher, to show that some layers are linked.

Of course sharing one file format is a big advantage of Affintiy's concept. I never denied this. All I say is, that the UI isn't ready yet and you often need more clicks than necessary to check or adjust things. "Is this layer hidden in print?" -> Leave Publisher, go to Designer, go to Export Persona, scroll layer panel and check layer. Then back to Publisher again. Isn't it comprehensible that a small icon, or even better a button, in the layer palette in ALL apps would directly show what's going on?
As I said, this may be no problem when done only a few times. When it has to be done over and over again, it's just annoying.

2 hours ago, loukash said:

It's neither my hobby, nor my "job". It's my profession (vive la différence), it's what I do for a living. Exploring and learning new things that I can do with my tools is an integral part of my profession. (Auf Deutsch würde ich es als Weiterbildung bezeichnen.)

Of course your job is fun. Mine too, otherwise I won't do it as a freelance illustrator for about 24 years now. You can even call it "profession", if that sounds better for you. The point is, that you don't have always time to "take the adventure" and explore your tools. Sometimes you just want to use them straightforward and not upside down. Exploring a software is fun, when you have time. It's a nuisance, when you have a deadline to meet.

I have no problem with new software. I had no problem to learn blender or ZBrush, whereby both are criticized for having a terrible GUI. But I can see the inner logic in both programs. In the Affinty suite it's not all logical. Some features are accessible in all apps, while they don't make too much sense (multi-page in Photo or Designer, for example. That's not their task.), while other features like linked layers are just accessible in one app, though they make great sense in the other both.
You can't deny that it's common in a publishing program to use layers only for layout and not to include them in print, which is why you set them to "non-printing". Nothing really special. But you have to switch to the photo editor or the vector editor to adjust the layer visibility for printing. Not really logical.

BTW: I do know Ulano Film 😉. I used it for a semester project due to the absence of a color printer to colour parts of my design.

 

[loukash]

21 minutes ago, chessboard said:

The point is, that you don't have always time to "take the adventure" and explore your tools.

Fair enough, at this time I do have the time. That's also why it took me quite some time to even begin with the Adobe-to-Affinity transition only last December, even though I've been an "early adopter" of each of the Affinity apps. If you look at my post history on these forums, until the end of the last year I was also mainly just "bitching".
But then I took my time to learn to use my new tools of choice, and it has paid.

21 minutes ago, chessboard said:

when you have a deadline to meet

… you should not be using tools you're not familiar with inside out in your sleep.

21 minutes ago, chessboard said:

In the Affinty suite it's not all logical.

Neither was in PageMaker, XPress, Freehand, Adobe, you name it. Yet we've learned how to work around those illogicalities over the years.

Speaking of "logical": is Apple's (formerly Emagic's) Logic Pro logical? I'm attempting to tame and master it for 20 years now. But since audio editing and mastering is only my "second job", sometimes I'm having breaks of many months, and then it feels like having to start all over again, re-reading whole user manual chapters that I've read like ten times already, etc., etc. Until it eventually starts to make sense again.

21 minutes ago, chessboard said:

You can't deny that it's common in a publishing program to use layers only for layout and not to include them in print, which is why you set them to "non-printing". Nothing really special.

Some Affinity omissions and UI flaws are truly mind boggling…

21 minutes ago, chessboard said:

I do know Ulano Film 😉

I still have a few 30 years old sheets right next to me in a shelf. They don't take any extra space, so what. I'll keep them.

 

[chessboard]

35 minutes ago, loukash said:

… you should not be using tools you're not familiar with inside out in your sleep.

That's right. Therefore this sticker sheet was the very first project I really used the Affintiy Suite for. Aside the two points I mentioned in the first comment, it all worked quite well, so far.

For other projects I still stick to Photoshop and Illustrator, not least because I have to share data with the art directors and editors at the publishing house. But that's a different problem.

35 minutes ago, loukash said:

Neither was in PageMaker, XPress, Freehand, Adobe, you name it. Yet we've learned how to work around those illogicalities over the years.

Oh, yes! There're some things in Photoshop and Illustrator that are missing some inner logic, that seem (or indeed are) kind of flanged on and that make me also grumble about.
The more it would be an advantage if Serif brushes up it's UI-Design and reduce the need for workarounds and make some of the functionallity more visible in the GUI.

[loukash]

39 minutes ago, chessboard said:

it would be an advantage if Serif brushes up it's UI-Design and reduce the need for workarounds and make some of the functionallity more visible in the GUI.

99.9999999% agreed! (rounding errorrrrrrr… )