Weirdness with linked documents

[casterle]

On 6/13/2022 at 8:31 AM, Hangman said:

Not quite sure why such a high dpi is required but that's not really relevant here.

I choose 600 DPI because it's the native resolution of my printer and I thought I might get better results that way. I need lots more education on printing! 

[casterle]

On 6/11/2022 at 6:44 PM, casterle said:

I've got a document with examples of business cards for our church.

I resolved the issue by removing the linked artboards, changing the document to 'Prefer Embedded' and embedding them. Worked perfectly.

I'm sorry I didn't include the original files and, once vestry made their selection, killed the losers.

[casterle]

On 6/13/2022 at 10:57 AM, thomaso said:

From that perspective it appears more flexible to export the logo layouts as PDF and place this in the business card document (instead of placing their .afdesign). This workflow requires an additional export action but maintains the linked property and may be a helpful way to get changes done to the logo layouts transferred to the business cards.

Interesting. I hadn't considered that I could embed non-Affinity files. 

[casterle]

On 6/13/2022 at 12:00 PM, Old Bruce said:

I use linked Affinity files without the type of problem that the original poster showed. I would not use the multiple artboard layout that was shown. I would use one artboard with the six different "cards" in separate layers and then just turn on / off the relevant needed layer where needed in the layout. I would also use publisher and its picture frames' ability to scale to particular scaling.

Should note that @casterle hasn't replied to any of the posts so we may never know if anything suggested here is/was useful.

Sorry for the late replies. Turns out that someone wanted my car more than (he thought) I did and helped himself; it's been a week so I'm not getting it back. I'd solved the issue by using an embedded image by that time and forgot to check back until this evening.

[casterle]

On 6/13/2022 at 12:02 PM, thomaso said:

Does it matter, whether it is embedded or linked?

In this case, yes. When I switched to embedding the document rather than linking it everything worked as expected. Of course embedding isn't what I wanted because the embedded logo won't update with the embedded document, but now that we've finalized this it doesn't matter.

[casterle]

On 6/13/2022 at 12:21 PM, thomaso said:

Like @Hangman I would rather expect Affinity documents to work like a charm if linked in Affinity documents.

When you used Affinity files successfully, did your secondary, parent layout display the entire content of the linked – or did you need to clip their content in any way, respectively one page or artboard manually selected via the Context Toolbar?

I wonder if a workaround would be to layout the logo variations in an .afdesign without artboard (free logo positions and sizes), and place this document as full artboard (or page) size in a parent Affinity document and then use a clipping object for each wanted detail (e.g. logo) and accordingly copies of this layer with different clippings.

Currently this thread appears useful to me even without feedback of the OP, just because this and the other thread and their possible solution are slightly confusing and unclear. Not because of "Asset" as unclear term (InDesign calls it "Library") but because of the missing feature of linking either Asset (ID's "Library" objects ARE linked) or Affinity document to get the chance and advantage of auto-updates in case the resource got altered. That is, what linked resources were meant for (aside file size), right?

I did not need to clip the linked content. I did adjust the size of the logo on a couple of the cards to fit proposed card text layouts.

One thing artboards give me is a unique coordinate space for each. That way I can set my guides on one artboard, then add guides to the same positions on the other artboards without doing any math in the process. Lordy how I wish I could copy/save/restore guide settings!

[casterle]

On 6/13/2022 at 12:48 PM, Hangman said:

Which is fine if you have Publisher but wouldn't be an option if you only have Designer...

I also have APub to complete the suite, but I've never used it. It wouldn't occur to use APub for a single-page document...

[casterle]

On 6/13/2022 at 12:48 PM, Hangman said:

Hopefully we'll get a response and can then figure out the cause of the issue...

I'm sorry, I was on a short timeline and didn't try anything beyond embedding the document which solved my issue.

In a previous post I mentioned that I had deleted those of interest, but if there's interest I *may* have them on a disk backup image. Let me know and I'll go hunting.

[casterle]

On 6/13/2022 at 12:53 PM, Hangman said:

duplicate the artboard times five and simply change which artboard appears in each iteration...

And I wish I had done that with the business cards as it would have saved me a lot of manual work with setting guides. As it was, I created the artboards first, then created guides on the first and found no way to copy them to the others. Fortunately, artboards have separate coordinate spaces so I could just copy settings for the new guides without having to calculate new offsets.