Affinity Designer Customer Beta (1.3.5.11 - RC1)

[MattP]

Purpose: Features / Improvements / Fixes 

Status: Release Candidate
Requirements: Purchased Affinity Designer
Mac App Store: Not Submitted
Download: Here
 
To use this beta, simply download the file from the link given above and double-click on the file to open the installer. Follow the instructions to install the beta version. The beta sits alongside the Mac App Store version and will not interfere with it. Please note that if you use features which are only present in the Beta version then save your document, it will no longer open in the Mac App Store version.

 

This is a Release Candidate build. It is our intention to submit this for review to Apple in the first week of December. Any help you could offer to stabilise and refine the product at this stage will be very gratefully received :)  We won't be implementing any new features now for this version and we will be focusing on stabilising the product for the immediate future. We will obviously start adding more features again as soon as this update goes live.
 

 

Features / Improvements / Fixes

 

- Implemented font-fallback logic. This means that users typing characters which are not in the current font should see the character represented by a fallback font automatically

- Artboards can now be dragged around by their labels

- Artboards now show guides and grids clipped to the current artboard. Margins update correctly during resizing artboards

- Artboards maintain their own snapping grid and show them correctly, clipped to the current artboard

- Ruler origin and Transform panel translation is aware of artboards now and correctly reflects the artboard origin.

- Artboards now automatically appear in the Export Persona

- Added ‘New Layer’ menu item (we already had ‘New Pixel Layer’ but had interestingly forgotten to add ‘New Layer’!)

- Recently used fonts section of the font dropdown now also includes all fonts in the current document

- Fix for crash when closing documents

- Miscellaneous translation improvements

- PSD export now handles Registration colour and tint. Miscellaneous import improvements for compatibility with other PSD originators

- Fix for rotation and shear not working reliably from the Transform panel

- Fix for redraw issues while transforming objects with wide strokes

- Fix for groups of horizontal or vertical lines causing stability issues in some cases

- Export Slice stability improvements

- Improved snapping for the Fill Tool

- TIFF export now correctly supports alpha in all colour formats

- Fix for importing very large TIFF images

- Many PDF export improvements

- Print panel now restores itself correctly to the last used settings

[My Strawberry Monkey]

Thanks for the update. Just noticed a couple of things. When I add a grid to a artboard and duplicate it the grids don't match up. Then if I delete the 2nd artboard a grid appears on the whole canvas until I click on the 1st one. See video...

 

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/pnlgry2pqoc92ih/Artboards.mp4?dl=0

[Grotesker]

Is it the changes you've made to font fallback causing several of my older type1 fonts (e.g. Bulmer) to not appear – I'd be sad to lose it!

[A_B_C]

There are some really handy additions in this update …  :)

 

But there are also some bugs:

• Already known. Moving an object out of an artboard by using the arrow keys breaks the clipping logic. The object doesn’t get unclipped from the artboard (i.e. doesn’t loose its descendant relation to the artboard in the layer hierarchy).
• Already known. The bright grey background does not always get drawn completely on artboard creation.
• New to me. Artboards as children of artboards create some weird redraw issues on moving.

Please have a look at my screen casts below …  :)

Thanks, Alex

 

Artboard_Background.mov

[Signguy]

Font fallback is great (It would be nice to know that the font is a fallback font by some type of notation).

Recently used fonts section of the font dropdown now also includes all fonts in the current document - GREAT ADDITION Thank you!

PDF export fixes are great.  Most of my issues are now fixed!

 

Thank you Affinity Team and have a Happy Thanksgiving!  Take some time off will you?  You guys deserve it.

[AshTeriyaki]

Us Brits don't celebrate Thanksgiving, just a regular day here :)

[Dave Harris]

Font fallback is great (It would be nice to know that the font is a fallback font by some type of notation).

They should be prefixed with an exclamation mark in the font combo.

 

Recently used fonts section of the font dropdown now also includes all fonts in the current document - GREAT ADDITION Thank you!

It's actually only 5 fonts from the current document, but we figured nobody would ever use more than 5 at a time anyway. We also try to ensure that the current font is always in the top section, so you shouldn't have to be scrolling up all the time.

[Dave Harris]

Is it the changes you've made to font fallback causing several of my older type1 fonts (e.g. Bulmer) to not appear – I'd be sad to lose it!

 

Ah, that's possible. I'll get it fixed ASAP.

[MattP]

Thanks for the update. Just noticed a couple of things. When I add a grid to a artboard and duplicate it the grids don't match up. Then if I delete the 2nd artboard a grid appears on the whole canvas until I click on the 1st one. See video...

 

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/pnlgry2pqoc92ih/Artboards.mp4?dl=0

Hi Allan,

 

I think a quick explanation is in order - it might help anyone else thinking some strange things are going on! ;)  Basically, an Artboard can have its own grid, or it can inherit the grid from its containing document... When you setup the grid on the first artboard, it got a custom grid showing only the spacing that you asked for. The second artboard doesn't have its own grid, so is using the document's grid. At present this is just the 'default' grid which is zoom-specific spacing and you can see that the two grids differ at different zooms because of this. When you delete one of the artboards you no longer have a 'current' artboard so it is showing the grid of the document itself. You could also see this grid if you just had a selection which was an object not owned by any artboard. You can set the grid while in this state and all artboards will use it (unless they've defined their own grid, of course).

 

I don't know if any of that makes sense at all?

 

Thanks!

Matt

[Tatyana]

They should be prefixed with an exclamation mark in the font combo.

 

It's actually only 5 fonts from the current document, but we figured nobody would ever use more than 5 at a time anyway. We also try to ensure that the current font is always in the top section, so you shouldn't have to be scrolling up all the time.

Hey, Dave!

 

Thank you for a new beta, with each output better and better :)

 

You write that there is a drop-down list of the five most recently used fonts, but I can not find it. Can you show me the way.

 

 

Thank you, Tatiana.

[MEB]

Hi Tatiana,

The recently used fonts are integrated on the top of the Font list. You can find the Font list dropdown in the context toolbar when you have a text tool selected and in the Character panel.

[A_B_C]

Hi Matt,

 

here's another question concerning art boards and grids. Say, I create two square art boards A and B and assign a custom grid to the second one. Now, when I move this art board B, it seems that the grid moves together with B. But when I try to snap the boundaries of B to the grid of B, I actually notice that the grid has not moved with the art board … that’s a bit confusing to me.

 

Am I doing something wrong?  :unsure:

Alex

Artboards_Snap.afdesign

[lexislav]

I am afraid AD keeps crashing when trying to file > export > pdf (clicking the PDF tab in export makes AD crash)

At least for old files made in AD. I have created a new one and it seems to work so far with new one.

Do You want me to share the crashing file?

[00Ghz]

So guys... why did you decide to disable char & paragraph panels? :D

 

They don’t work at all. They show as activated in view menu but they are no where to be seen ;)

[My Strawberry Monkey]

Hi Allan,

 

I think a quick explanation is in order - it might help anyone else thinking some strange things are going on! ;)  Basically, an Artboard can have its own grid, or it can inherit the grid from its containing document... When you setup the grid on the first artboard, it got a custom grid showing only the spacing that you asked for. The second artboard doesn't have its own grid, so is using the document's grid. At present this is just the 'default' grid which is zoom-specific spacing and you can see that the two grids differ at different zooms because of this. When you delete one of the artboards you no longer have a 'current' artboard so it is showing the grid of the document itself. You could also see this grid if you just had a selection which was an object not owned by any artboard. You can set the grid while in this state and all artboards will use it (unless they've defined their own grid, of course).

 

I don't know if any of that makes sense at all?

 

Thanks!

Matt

 

Hi Matt,

 

Thanks for the explanation, it made sense. TBH I preferred how it worked before this update. I would prefer it if an artboard copied the grid exactly, not pivotal though. But more importantly, the 'default grid' it conflicts with the artboard grid. If I could choose, that would be the priority that when I delete an artboard the default grid does not appear. Click on the screenshot to see what I mean.

 

Thanks for all the hard work, we're not gonna let you rest yet.... ;)

 

BTW any chance of changing the grid colour, its very difficult to make out sometimes. 

 

 

[retrograde]

Us Brits don't celebrate Thanksgiving, just a regular day here :)

Regular day here too in Canadaland.

 

We celebrate Thanksgiving, but in October. Happy Gobble Gobble to all Affinity afflicted Americanos!  :D

[Andrew Tang]

So guys... why did you decide to disable char & paragraph panels? :D

 

They don’t work at all. They show as activated in view menu but they are no where to be seen ;)

 

Can you try a studio reset? 

[Valentín Benavente]

There's an old bug in this release: node tool is unclickable when you have a group selected.

[predick]

wowww!

[Anon223029]

Dear Affinity - Development Team

About the Artboards - nice to have them already (before of the release of Affinity Publisher that is...)!

 

Now the feedback...

While i generally like your approach with the Artboards there are two little issues...

 

1.

While you provide Artboard presets for mobile devices iPad Pro / iPad or iPhone 6/6+ or 5 or the various Apple Watch sizes...

i figure its a little hassle when you work with print / or generally various Artboards. I can't drop in just Letter/A4/A3 Artoboards etc but various resolutions for phones / web / etc.  

 

BUT I can workaround this by making a new document (A4/A5 what ever) and copy and paste that over to the other document... 

that isn't elegantly solved i guess..  So it would be nice to have at least the same options you provide within the 'New Document' dialog.

 

2. 

I might be good to provide an Artboard Panel that allows to save your own presets / sizes .. your random res for your ever changing electronics world! Also it would be nice to be able to have outside the Artboards just a paste area where you still can see your objects... 

 

Other than that...  the software is a blast to work with!

 

There is one last for fun.. :-)

Your 'stroke' > shape conversion is still a bit messy (especially paths)... (for instance when you design Font Letters and convert them to a shape in order to export them to SVG/EPS or just over to Glyphs (a software for font creation))

[Pete123]

Probably a small bug...

 

I am creating an ad to send to the printer and upon PDF export I go into the "More" settings. I have chosen all my options and created a preset.

When I click ok to go out of the "More" settings, I see that the preset field on top of the Export dialog is still blank. My preset isn't listed either.

 

Only when I am in the "More" page, I see my preset.

 

Designer also just crashed when I exported my PDF... not sure why, I was typing this post and Designer was in the background, idle.

 

 

 

(ps : I just wanted to add that this release has effectively thrown both Indesign and Acrobat into my thrash, many, MANY thanks for that :-)

[Malcolm]

Here is one bug and one issue...

 

Bug

When using a curve object in Erase blend mode, if you add a blur filter it stops erasing. This works in MAS version.

 

Issue

When using drag n drop to add an image to a document (with multiple artboards) you have to drag into an artboard, if you don't it opens it as a separate image. This is confusing as I can have an object outside of my artboards in the document, so I assumed I could drag objects in - to outside of the artboards. Often i want to drag objects in for reference and don't want them in any artboard.

 

Cheers.

[MEB]

Thanks for the report Malcolm,

Issue (Erase blend mode) logged to be looked at.

[Pete123]

Another small problem

 

I am creating a document and seem to have problems with a font, however, in the app store version (1.3.5) the font renders correctly and does not show a problem.

 

In beta 1.3.5.11 I see a question mark in front of the font, and the font won't render

In app store 1.3.5 there is no question mark in front of the front and the font renders correctly.

 

I have also tried other applications to see if the font is corrupt, but this problem is only in the latest beta.

 

[Andrew Tang]

Another small problem

 

I am creating a document and seem to have problems with a font, however, in the app store version (1.3.5) the font renders correctly and does not show a problem.

 

In beta 1.3.5.11 I see a question mark in front of the font, and the font won't render

In app store 1.3.5 there is no question mark in front of the front and the font renders correctly.

 

I have also tried other applications to see if the font is corrupt, but this problem is only in the latest beta.

 

Did you use a font manager to handle that font recently? If you restart Designer, do you still have issues with this font for that document?