FILE NAME OPTIONS

[JodyN]

I love my Affinity Designer program, but the one issue I have is when I want to save there are restrictions to the characters I can use. I do a lot with the church so I put together a lot of scripture designs. When I save I would like the option of using a colon (:). Can anyone give me a reason why there are limitations on character use for file names? Thank you.

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums, @JodyN.

Filename restrictions are generally imposed by your OS, not the applications you run.

What OS are you using?

[Wosven]

5 hours ago, JodyN said:

When I save I would like the option of using a colon (:). Can anyone give me a reason why there are limitations on character use for file names? Thank you.

Some characters are reserved for the OSes, and used with special meanings for this effect, or at special places (like files beggining by "." or "-").

If you want to be able to open later your files, and to send them by email or share them to other people I would suggest using simple characters from a or A to z or Z, and numbers and - or _

Those are common on and will be displayed correctly on every systems, language, etc. If you export images, you can add extra datas in the metadatas, like caption, author... or explanation in the message or page when sharing them. Loosing files or works for a bad name is always annoying. Not being able to delete those problematic files can happen too, today.

[uneMule]

Bonjour à tous
Oui, c'est exact.
Même si la longueur du nom du chemin d'accès peut être modifiée au delà des 255 caractères (Windows), il est préférable aussi de contenir la longueur des noms de fichiers.

https://docs.microsoft.com/fr-fr/windows/win32/fileio/maximum-file-path-limitation?tabs=cmd

*****

Hello to all
Yes, that is correct.
Although the length of the path name can be changed beyond 255 characters (Windows), it is also preferable to contain the length of the file names.

[fde101]

macOS doesn't allow colons either.  On classic macOS (prior to OS X) they were used as directory separators (the forward slash "/" character is used now due to UNIX sitting underneath OS X/11), so for compatibility the file system still doesn't allow them.

[fde101]

Good catch... you can do it from the terminal; I believe that at least with HFS+ it is storing a "/" when you ask for a ":" and translating between them automatically but that would be transparent to the user unless they try to access that same volume from classic macOS...  regardless, even Finder for example won't let you use a ":" when naming a file or folder.

[uneMule]

Si vous êtes sur MacOs il y aussi la possibilité d'ajouter des mots clés dans la zone d'information du fichier ou d'utiliser les tags.
Plus ou moins simple ou contraignant.

*****

If you are on MacOs there is also the possibility to add keywords in the file information area or to use tags.
More or less simple or restrictive