Unable to replicate the following workflow from Illustrator in Affinity

[Blake_S]

I have a lot of different templates for printing stickers of various shapes and sizes, here is how one of them looks:

https://i.imgur.com/9XKj277.png

There are two layers - one with the black vector contours which will be saved separately and fed into the cutting plotter, and the other layer where all the PDFs are placed into, which will be used for printing.
Then I can instantly replace all linked PDFs there when printing a new job with different files, but the same sticker size, and get a new print file.

And this doesn't work in any Affinity programs.

I can recreate the same layout of course, but replacing the PDFs fails - they are always placed with incorrect scaling settings and end up the wrong size as a result.

By default the same thing will happen in Illustrator too, but it has a setting to prevent this:
in Links panel, link Placement Options, select Preserve:File Dimensions

After this, no matter which files you replace with, all of them are placed without any scaling,
so you can make sure that a 50mm circle for example will remain 50mm.

Meanwhile, in Affinity a 50mm circle may end up as 30mm, or 77mm, or whatever else size.

Affinity only seems to place PDFs with correct scale when you place them for the first time.
As soon as you use Resource Manager to replace PDF, or replace them externally by renaming the files, all bets are off.

The problem seems to be that Affinity will try to shove the replacement PDF into the dimensions of the old PDF, and re-scale it to achieve this, thus a new placed PDF ending up with the wrong size. I have not found any way to prevent this.

[Blake_S]

1st thread is an entirely separate issue.

That 2nd thread was a feature request.
Here I am asking if anyone might have solved this problem in some way that I just don't know about.

[firstdefence]

I've just tried this, I created several labels - circles all 50mm and 300DPI and exported them to PDF. Then using the resource manager I changed the initial PDF file for another, in all instances the PDF's maintained there 50 size so the only thing that changed was the fill colour and the white text.

I also exported a few of different sizes such as 60mm and Affinity maintained the relative size of 50mm to fit within the 47mm black cut lines I had created. Even changing the DPI to 96 from 300 didn't affect the 50mm scale.

Could you upload your file and a few of the PDF assets you are using for us to test with?

[Blake_S]

You probably didn't test any files with bleed, I did, since most of the files we get require it.

Already uploaded the test here:

When you place one of the PDF files, and then use Resource Manager to replace it with another, the new one is re-scaled to the wrong size

[Blake_S]

Here are screenshots from that test:

Placing t1 file:

https://i.imgur.com/kG8ne4v.png

Green square is 50mm, image frame is 60mm and is not used, its just for comparison

Now replacing it with t2 file:

https://i.imgur.com/l0Try5L.png

Green square is now less than 50mm

 

 

[Pšenda]

9 minutes ago, Blake_S said:

Here are screenshots

Why don't you post images directly to the forum where they are also immediately displayed to users?
Some users (myself included) will not click on links outside the forum.

[Blake_S]

14 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

Some users (myself included) will not click on links outside the forum.

There is no "image" component when making a post, only link. So I didn't even know you could do this here.
Also other forums can preview the images that are linked directly, but here it doesn't work for some reason.

[Pšenda]

1 hour ago, Blake_S said:

There is no "image" component when making a post, only link.

You mean this?

Or Ctrl+C on image source, and Ctrl+V into post text.

[walt.farrell]

It would help if it mentioned you could paste in an image... But Serif has no control over that.

[Blake_S]

13 hours ago, Pšenda said:

You mean this?

No.

Typically you would have an "Image" component right next to the "Link", so that you could put an url of the image there, and it would be displayed.
Or a "Link" component would display an image if it was linked, which doesn't work here.

Attaching files is for your local files.

[R C-R]

10 hours ago, Blake_S said:

Attaching files is for your local files.

Yes, that is exactly what it is for, so for example when you take a screenshot on your computer, since it is saved as a local file, you can simply drag that file into the area of the right of the paperclip at the bottom of your reply, or click on "choose files..." there to open a Finder (Mac) or Explorer (Windows) window where you can navigate to wherever it is stored in your computer's file system & select it there.

There is no need to upload it to any other file sharing web site like imgur.