Once I create a custom workspace in Designer, can I 'package' it and distribute it to other licensees in our company?

[OldDave]

Background:

We're going to a DITA environment for publications and other digital needs - a central repository of all our digital / graphic assets, textual information, documentation and so on.

We intend to use Designer initially to create labelled diagrams, screen shots, etc., that will have layer-based text for localization. In other words, the primary pictorial work for a given graphic will remain the same, but text overlays will be in English, German, Japanese... etc. based on which text layer is active during output as a bitmap or SVG. 

The sources for the content of the various language versions will be employees from our global offices. They have deep technical knowledge but not digital graphics knowledge, nor do they know anything about Affinity Designer.

If we could reliably provide them with a hugely simplified UI with just the features they need, all would be well - they could just edit their language and save the file.

The need:

After we've created this hugely simplified environment, is there a way to package that interface and apply it to other copies of Designer? If so, how would we go about the process? For example, is there a server or network version of Affinity Designer (a quick search turns up nothing along this line)?

[walt.farrell]

24 minutes ago, OldDave said:

After we've created this hugely simplified environment, is there a way

First, you'd have to explain exactly what you did to create that simplified environment.

Then, no, there's no server/network version of any of the Affinity applications. You could copy some internal files/directories around, but that's not a supported function so it's somewhat risky.

[OldDave]

The diagram reviewer would have only a few Layer operations, minimal edit / font tools, some movement tools, possibly color controls, but not much else. 

I haven't tried to simplify yet and in fact have worked only with the default UI, so I don't know the details. The idea is to leave the reviewer with just enough to access that person's text language layer and then edit the text to make it comply with native speaker language norms. 

I was hoping that there would be some sort of environment file in which we could store the simplified view - based on the ability to reset the workspace to factory default, which I would think would be via a call to a default UI file.

[Old Bruce]

You might be better off with Publisher and its Merge capabilities. Then you could have a spreadsheet with the text from the spreadsheet's cells which would be merged overtop of the image.

[thomaso]

From your rough description I guess another workflow would be more satisfying. Consider that simply hitting a number key in Affinity can influence the appearance of an object in an irritating way, so with an object selected pressing "1" reduces its opacity to 10% = transparency to 90% and make it nearly disappear. This is just one simply example of various possible edits done by your colleagues unintentionally. Even if you would clear every keyboard shortcut you can't limit each UI panel in all its available details and thus you can't avoid using parts of the UI which aren't meant to get used and can't prevent mistakes this way. The need for individual user support could get larger than expected.

As a workaround, it might make more sense to offer the design in a PDF with editable text fields as a form. But choices for different languages or colours wouldn't be included.

But there exist a smart way already to offer a specific, custom interface with editable items to a certain group: a website. It can be designed like an Affinity document, can get scaled on various screens and can offer exactly only those editing tools you want to be included. Furthermore it can be stored on / delivered by a server or optionally could be delivered as download. As the viewing + editing app your company could simply use a browser app which is installed already on every computer.

Finally, the cost of programming such a web application is probably far less than the costs of Affinity licence fees for all your colleagues. Not to mention that such a solution – if well designed – does not require user instruction or support in case of problems, as it has a simple design, tools and options and offers only obvious and necessary elements. Last but not least as web version it could get adjusted, changed, updated quite easy without the need for any installation at the users end.

[OldDave]

Good points and ideas, all. We're re-thinking the process. Tomaso's web page idea is attractive.

[thomaso]

On 5/9/2022 at 7:30 PM, OldDave said:

web page idea is attractive

I just run into this example of a Web App (running on a Web Site). It offers editable text content + editable font style and colours + various layouts. Simply click "Visualize" or define your choices in the left column first. It demonstrates quite nicely the advantages of …
• selective choice of tools
• and options
• in a custom interface design.

https://wordart.com/create