Global Layers (in Publisher)

[Thomas Geist]

Just revitalizing this huge thread from the 1.x version since this crucial (but rather complex) feature still has not made it into Publisher. 😢

The original discussion is here.

[fde101]

Agreed, and this is the biggest disappointment for me in what I have seen from the 2.0 apps so far.

[Opera]

Here obviously an emergency program for Publisher 2 was run. No global layers. We have been waiting for this for so many years. Obviously there are no potent DTP programmers - otherwise I can't explain these insufficient new features.

[F+C]

*sigh* Really surprised on the lack of Global Layers. Everytime I try to bring Affinity products into a professional production environment, they always come up short.

I really applaud Affinity for what they are trying to do, and often come so frustratingly close to achieving it. And never because of some wacky, edge-case use either, just lacking in production level, everyday use features.

Affinity, I know you think we're "just complainers", or "just out of touch" but keep in mind that some of us have been doing this longer than you've been alive, and believe it or not, we actually do know why these "boring" features are critical in professional use. When you're pumping out 100's of pieces a year, these things make or break production teams.

I wish you'd at least hire a consultant with more than just peripheral professional print production experience. There are real-world reasons why these things are being asked for, we're not "just being dicks".

[Seneca]

7 hours ago, F+C said:

I wish you'd at least hire a consultant with more than just peripheral professional print production experience.

Don't you think that your sentence above is slightly insulting.

First of all, the Global Layers are being worked on. There was quite a long discussion between the Affinity team and this forum regarding how this feature is expected to work. You shouldn't find it difficult to search for that here in the forum.

Second of all, the 2.0 release is by no means done. The team is about to release version 2.1 with a host of new features and additional features will find their way into 2.2, 2.3 etc.

So, while I understand the disappointment that the Global Lagers didn't make it into 2.0, this is not the end of the road for version 2.

I'm not trying to defend Affinity here, I too would love to see Global Layers now but to say that they don't understand the importance of this is quite a stretch.

[Opera]

On 5/16/2023 at 6:02 PM, F+C said:

*sigh* Really surprised on the lack of Global Layers. Everytime I try to bring Affinity products into a professional production environment, they always come up short.

I really applaud Affinity for what they are trying to do, and often come so frustratingly close to achieving it. And never because of some wacky, edge-case use either, just lacking in production level, everyday use features.

Affinity, I know you think we're "just complainers", or "just out of touch" but keep in mind that some of us have been doing this longer than you've been alive, and believe it or not, we actually do know why these "boring" features are critical in professional use. When you're pumping out 100's of pieces a year, these things make or break production teams.

I wish you'd at least hire a consultant with more than just peripheral professional print production experience. There are real-world reasons why these things are being asked for, we're not "just being dicks".

We will do the upgrade only when Global Layers are implemented. Our workflow has been back in InDesign for a while now. Unfortunately. We also work with Windows Enterprise versions - and there the installation of Affinity - which is only possible via the Windows Shop - is actually not possible at all. Hopefully there will be "someday" ;))) also again a professional setup with a professional installer. I think the programmers have nothing to talk about, only money talks here.

[walt.farrell]

3 hours ago, Opera said:

We also work with Windows Enterprise versions - and there the installation of Affinity - which is only possible via the Windows Shop - is actually not possible at all.

V2 on Windows does not require the Microsoft Store. It did, originally, require MSIX support which is similar, but it is now available using an EXE/MSI installer as V1 was. 

However, there are other issues that still rule out Windows Enterprise, I believe, as the Affinity apps require Windows 11 or Windows 10 with a build number of 19041 or later.

[F+C]

On 5/16/2023 at 12:35 PM, Seneca said:

Don't you think that your sentence above is slightly insulting.

Thanks for replying - but no. Especially as it's been asked for since v1.

Let's say you have halitosis - and didn't realize it. Most people won't say anything (to your face at least). But a true friend will. He just wants you to know about this shortcoming - he still thinks you're awesome.

Programmers tend to do be attracted to "cool" features - they're fun to think about, fun to figure out and interesting to implement!

But, just like when you go into a professional kitchen you won't see many wacky kitchen machines, professional production for the most part is pretty dull. The big creative stuff is already done so production is all about execution. And that is often where a good chunk of the profitability comes from. These pretty dull "features" might not be that critical for a home or occasional user, but when you're interacting with the program for 8 - 10 hours a day and creating hundreds or 1000s of pages a year, these things really add up.

Affinity is doing some great stuff and there is a real interest in the market for what they have, and they have a lot of "wow!" and "creative" features that are fun to play with, but they often lack day-to-day workman like features that make it unsuitable for a professional use.

Just like the guide colours issue - if they sat down with an experienced (as in 5 - 10 years of production experience) print production person, they'd use the program and say "oh yeah, you just need to be able to change guide colours and you never know what kind of wacky background the art director has come up with". These aren't edge use cases but just a "we have to pump out 200 plates, one every 3 mins for the dinner service" kind of thing.

[StewartTower]

I'll give a similar nod on this feature. My workflow in InDesign was to build documents with layers for specific types of content. One global layer for text, another for photos and another for vector art. For example; this would allow me to lock or hide the text layer while I scanned through a long document for an overall view and edit of the other content. I'm fine with the expanded layer view for content, page by page, but this seems better suited to Designer (Illustrator) which would be more prone to many separate vector elements such as a busy graphic.

Being new to Affinity products I'm more than happy to date. I'm being careful not to make a direct comparison to my Adobe background since I'm in a new country now with new ways.

One last point; when Adobe first released InDesign, it did not have a TOC generator. This floored me since Adobe had PageMaker at the time which could generate a TOC. The point is that a feature like global layering can still find its way into the program without giving up on Affinity. I'm happy and hopeful.

[grabuge]

Really need global layers too !!! so many absurd ways of dealing things at the moment with publisher, preventing it from being a great software : worst being layers management and facing pages / double page documents system.

[fde101]

I don't think anyone is going to argue that this is a sorely missing feature, but you might want to take a look at the new Layer States feature that was added to version 2.4 in the meantime.

When combined with use of master pages this may give a reasonably usable work-around to this missing feature for some use cases.  By no means is it ideal for all cases, but it should at least make some of them reasonable to deal with, and may even be better for a few.

That said, I too look forward to an eventual implementation of the real thing.

[StewartTower]

As I've spent more time with these products I've come to better understanding of the methodology behind the layering. With Design, I've come to appreciate the functionality of its layering. It's very different from my experiences with Adobe but it also works very well once you've adjusted to it. I'll admit I don't spend much time in Publisher since my long document days are behind me so the impacts there are less. Affinity is a different country from Adobe so the ways will also be different. Different is not bad, just different. Overall I'm very happy with my Affinity experience and pitch the software where ever I can.

That aside; there are two other areas that Publisher could explore. One is enhancing the GREP find/change. I used this feature a lot with long documents since it's a massive time saver and a great design tool. The other is variable glyph scaling. Publisher already offers variable word and letter spacing. Adding variable glyph scaling in addition would be a bonus.

Thanks.

[walt.farrell]

16 minutes ago, StewartTower said:

One is enhancing the GREP find/change. I used this feature a lot with long documents since it's a massive time saver and a great design tool.

Are you talking about some kind of enhancement to the current Find/Replace handling of regular expressions? (And if so, what?)

Or are you talking about adding regular-expression processing to Text Styles, so a Text Style will be applied automatically when certain conditions occur? This has been requested, I know.

[GarryP]

21 minutes ago, StewartTower said:

That aside; there are two other areas that Publisher could explore.

This thread is about global layers.

Those issues you mentioned should be addressed in one or more different threads so that the discussions don’t get mixed up together.

[StewartTower]

Yes to both; Walt. I've attached a PDF cheat sheet from my former career. It has explanations of the use of each grep search plus screen shots of the find/change dialog (I often preached this stuff to other staff). My career was with a provincial government, working with long Word files from departments. Very few people understand long document text flow so I used these particular greps daily. 

grep affinity.pdf

[walt.farrell]

5 minutes ago, StewartTower said:

I've attached a PDF cheat sheet from my former career. It has explanations of the use of each grep search plus screen shots of the find/change dialog (I often preached this stuff to other staff). My career was with a provincial government, working with long Word files from departments. Very few people understand long document text flow so I used these particular greps daily. 

Thanks, but regular expressions for Find/Replace are already supported. My question was what enhancement you needed.

It looks like you want to be able to save particular expressions for easy reuse. That is certainly needed, and has several Feature Request topics, if I remember correctly.