Placement of canvas/controlling work area in Photo

[uburoibob]

On 9/4/2023 at 2:42 PM, R C-R said:

BTW, I do not know why the other screenshots after the first one were included or what they are supposed to show unless they are somehow what you get after using CMD+0 or View > Zoom > Zoom to Fit. Are they?

The collection of screenshots were included to show the HUGE pasteboard area. THAT is what we are talking about. Not getting the document to match the pasteboard. Just the document floating in this huge sea of pasteboard. It doesn't do this in Photoshop or InDesign. Perhaps some of you have been using it so long you are just used to this. But coming from the industry standard apps, it's awkward, time consuming, and frustrating. You'd think Affinity would want to attract the audience Adobe has.

[R C-R]

9 minutes ago, uburoibob said:

It's the annoyance of constantly scrolling WAY past the live area of the document on a seemingly ridiculously large pasteboard area - at least compared to InDesign or QuarkExpress.

The pasteboard area is dependent on the zoom level & the size of the document, so if the zoom level is much lower than what is needed to show all of the document, then of course there will be a huge pasteboard area. But since the zoom factor is totally under user control I do not understand why you would set the zoom level lower than needed to show what you need to work on in the document (which might be the entire document or just a small part of it).

[uburoibob]

1 minute ago, R C-R said:

The pasteboard area is dependent on the zoom level & the size of the document, so if the zoom level is much lower than what is needed to show all of the document, then of course there will be a huge pasteboard area. But since the zoom factor is totally under user control I do not understand why you would set the zoom level lower than needed to show what you need to work on in the document (which might be the entire document or just a small part of it).

I guess we simply aren't explaining it well enough. It has nothing to do with Zoom.

[Return]

2 minutes ago, uburoibob said:

I guess we simply aren't explaining it well enough. It has nothing to do with Zoom.

So try to do better.

[R C-R]

1 minute ago, uburoibob said:

The collection of screenshots were included to show the HUGE pasteboard area.

Which, as has been mentioned, is totally dependent on the zoom level being so low that the document occupies only a small faction of it.

It has everything to do with the Zoom level, which is why CMD-0 is the shortcut for Zoom to Fit.

 

[uburoibob]

Here's a screen recording of moving around in Publisher... It's that scrolling WAY past the document in any direction at any zoom level that is the issue. How can we make that area smaller so we don't have to deal with scrolling so far?

[uburoibob]

Here is how it works in InDesign:

 

 

[uburoibob]

So, it comes down to the document's relationship with its background. In InDesign and Photoshop, the background never lets the document scroll mostly out of the active window - especially not top-to-bottom. All I'd like is a way to reduce that area so that there's maybe an inch above and below the document in the pasteboard instead of the six that are there in Publisher.

I see what you are saying about the dependence of Zoom, as that large area of the pasteboard, above for example, is dynamic reading as as 3" at 200% and 24" at 25%. Where as InDesign, the relationship of the pasteboard and the document is constant, rather than dynamic.

And I apologize for being snarky, but it's frustrating to us folks who've made our living for the last 20 years using the big two. It'd be GREAT to have an opportunity for another option that isn't hinged on a subscription, but when the interface is so odd, it's tough to get a grip on. I am retired now and have kept Adobe for a year after retirement "just in case" older jobs from clients needed to be reopened. Now, I'd like to retire Adobe, and I'd LOVE to be able to have the option of having the Affinity apps work somewhat similarly at the basic levels.

[R C-R]

4 minutes ago, uburoibob said:

Here's a screen recording of moving around in Publisher... It's that scrolling WAY past the document in any direction at any zoom level that is the issue.

How specifically are you scrolling & why are you doing that? I ask because I cannot duplicate that behavior with the Move Tool selected unless I move the mouse pointer into the scrollbars & scroll the view that way.

[Return]

Try to understand that the affinities is actually 1 program build as 3 separate programs.
It uses shared code to make the opening between the 3 work seamlessly.
To cater for large panoramic images, multiple page layouts and multiple artboards it needs to fit all possibilities  that's why it doesn't constrain the view/scrolling as one sees in other programs.
 

[uburoibob]

16 minutes ago, R C-R said:

How specifically are you scrolling & why are you doing that? I ask because I cannot duplicate that behavior with the Move Tool selected unless I move the mouse pointer into the scrollbars & scroll the view that way.

I am on a Mac and using their Magic Mouse, with the touch scrolling on top. If I am editing text at the bottom of the page, a slight scroll can send the live area of the document flying way past the top of the doc. That's an off-the-top-of-my-head example. For you, imagine if you wanted to scroll to the top of the window we are chatting in right now and instead of getting to masthead, it simply kept going into a field of emptiness. Instead, you hit to top of the window with no extra space that does nothing, as happens in Publisher.

[uburoibob]

4 minutes ago, Return said:

Try to understand that the affinities is actually 1 program build as 3 separate programs.
It uses shared code to make the opening between the 3 work seamlessly.
To cater for large panoramic images, multiple page layouts and multiple artboards it needs to fit all possibilities  that's why it doesn't constrain the view/scrolling as one sees in other programs.
 

I appreciate that. And I don't think it'd be a stretch for them to address the issue. Perhaps they'd attract the massive number of people that use those other programs? It was offputting for me when I got version one, which is why I seldom used it and had to hang onto Adobe. I'd REALLY like to retire Adobe, as I am now retired. Perhaps it never will, but I don't see why it couldn't. Accommodate a wider user base with the shared code, adapted to appeal to pro users of the Adobe suite.

[Return]

3 minutes ago, uburoibob said:

And I don't think it'd be a stretch for them to address the issue.

I think most users here are accustomed to the way this works and perhaps you can too.
 

[R C-R]

2 minutes ago, uburoibob said:

I am on a Mac and using their Magic Mouse, with the touch scrolling on top.

But I still do not understand why you are scrolling around the document that much, unless it by accident. Frankly, as I have written in several other topics, I consider the Magic Mouse to be very poorly suited for use with any app that allows scrolling because it is so easy to scroll accidentally when that isn't desired.

Also, please note that this topic was originally about AP, not APub, & your APub example shows the simplest possible document, one with just a single document page. If you add more pages, you will see that vertical scrolling allows you to quickly move up & down among them, which is why it doesn't confine vertical scrolling. There is more to it than that because since APub offers two other personas if all 3 apps are installed where there are also reasons not to limit vertical or horizontal scrolling, but hopefully you can at least see the reason these apps are designed as they are.

[R C-R]

13 minutes ago, uburoibob said:

Accommodate a wider user base with the shared code, adapted to appeal to pro users of the Adobe suite.

How could Serif adapt the code shared among the 3 Affinity apps to be more like Adobe, where Adobe's major apps don't even share enough that they all can open documents created in one without performing conversions, some of which lose or alter part of the original content?

[uburoibob]

13 minutes ago, R C-R said:

But I still do not understand why you are scrolling around the document that much, unless it by accident. Frankly, as I have written in several other topics, I consider the Magic Mouse to be very poorly suited for use with any app that allows scrolling because it is so easy to scroll accidentally when that isn't desired.

Also, please note that this topic was originally about AP, not APub, & your APub example shows the simplest possible document, one with just a single document page. If you add more pages, you will see that vertical scrolling allows you to quickly move up & down among them, which is why it doesn't confine vertical scrolling. There is more to it than that because since APub offers two other personas if all 3 apps are installed where there are also reasons not to limit vertical or horizontal scrolling, but hopefully you can at least see the reason these apps are designed as they are.

 

4 minutes ago, R C-R said:

How could Serif adapt the code shared among the 3 Affinity apps to be more like Adobe, where Adobe's major apps don't even share enough that they all can open documents created in one without performing conversions, some of which lose or alter part of the original content?

The Mac and Magic Mouse are just fine with every other app out there. That isn’t the issue. And why I need to scroll around a document when laying out a catalog should really comes down to my working style after 40 years of doing it. 
 

I don’t see a lot of point in continuing this here. I will try and reach out to Affinity directly. Thanks. 🙄

[R C-R]

22 minutes ago, uburoibob said:

And why I need to scroll around a document when laying out a catalog should really comes down to my working style after 40 years of doing it. 

You can scroll around any Affinity document with the View (hand) Tool & temporarily switch to it by holding down the spacebar. IIRC, it is the same in Photoshop.

[uburoibob]

13 minutes ago, LondonSquirrel said:

With the 14 inches square example, imagine you have several images on top of each other. You can drag a whole 14 inch image onto the pasteboard. What happens with Adobe? I don't know, I'm asking.

You place them, you size them, and that’s it. They may sit on top of each other for a second or two. I never found a need to place them all in the pasteboard, when I can see them all in the finder. But I can see if you have all this real estate, one might want to find something to do with it.

[uburoibob]

48 minutes ago, R C-R said:

You can scroll around any Affinity document with the View (hand) Tool & temporarily switch to it by holding down the spacebar. IIRC, it is the same in Photoshop.

Perhaps, but I am talking more about Publisher.

[uburoibob]

23 minutes ago, LondonSquirrel said:

I do use the pasteboard as I described above. But, yeah, I do see the point of at least putting some sort of restriction on it. Even document_width * 2 would be an improvement.

If that could be defined by the user, voila! All users happy!

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, uburoibob said:

4 hours ago, R C-R said:

You can scroll around any Affinity document with the View (hand) Tool & temporarily switch to it by holding down the spacebar. IIRC, it is the same in Photoshop.

Perhaps, but I am talking more about Publisher.

It works the same in all 3 Affinity apps so I am not sure what your point is about that.

Apart from that, I'm still trying to understand why you would intentionally scroll the document around so much that you would need to set limits on how far the UI would let you do that. After all, it is up to you to stop scrolling when you have the document placed in the workspace window where you want  it, right?

[thomaso]

13 hours ago, uburoibob said:

Here's a screen recording of moving around in Publisher... It's that scrolling WAY past the document in any direction at any zoom level that is the issue. How can we make that area smaller so we don't have to deal with scrolling so far?

12 hours ago, uburoibob said:

I am on a Mac and using their Magic Mouse, with the touch scrolling on top. If I am editing text at the bottom of the page, a slight scroll can send the live area of the document flying way past the top of the doc.

In your video I don't understand why you scroll horizontally at all. Is it just to experience / demonstrate a possible width of the pasteboard? If you feel "the live area of the document flying way" by scrolling, wouldn't it be useful to reduce the scroll speed for your Magic Mouse in the macOS system preferences?

Just in case: instead of scrolling from one APub spread to another there is also a keyboard command: In my setup it is fn + cmd + arrow key up/down. The active spread gets displayed in the center of the main window while the current zoom level is maintained – which accordingly may cause unexpected pasteboard height for the first or last spread at a zoom level below cmd-0. (Note, though it is not related to the pasteboard question: this forced auto-centred positioning was reported before as unwanted by quite a few users, same to the forced auto-zoom when a spread gets selected with a doubleclick in the Pages Panel)

Or is it rather that you expect a general limitation of the pasteboard width in APub, plus a max. height in single page documents? – If yes, what do you want to see in small zoom levels instead of a large pasteboard? Nevertheless, a limited pasteboard size might conflict with the mentioned compatibility of Affinity file types and its three apps: While APub allows a simple vertical spread arrangement only (with a fixed vertical pasteboard between spreads), AD allows to arrange its artboards in an unlimited area (as for instance also AI does and Freehand did) and APhoto displays only one canvas or one APub spread at a time but is also able to display all artboards of an AD document, whereas APub's Photo Persona displays all pages and spreads of a document.

[uburoibob]

55 minutes ago, thomaso said:

In your video I don't understand why you scroll horizontally at all. Is it just to experience / demonstrate a possible width of the pasteboard? If you feel "the live area of the document flying way" by scrolling, wouldn't it be useful to reduce the scroll speed for your Magic Mouse in the macOS system preferences?

Just in case: instead of scrolling from one APub spread to another there is also a keyboard command: In my setup it is fn + cmd + arrow key up/down. The active spread gets displayed in the center of the main window while the current zoom level is maintained – which accordingly may cause unexpected pasteboard height for the first or last spread at a zoom level below cmd-0. (Note, though it is not related to the pasteboard question: this forced auto-centred positioning was reported before as unwanted by quite a few users, same to the forced auto-zoom when a spread gets selected with a doubleclick in the Pages Panel)

Or is it rather that you expect a general limitation of the pasteboard width in APub, plus a max. height in single page documents? – If yes, what do you want to see in small zoom levels instead of a large pasteboard? Nevertheless, a limited pasteboard size might conflict with the mentioned compatibility of Affinity file types and its three apps: While APub allows a simple vertical spread arrangement only (with a fixed vertical pasteboard between spreads), AD allows to arrange its artboards in an unlimited area (as for instance also AI does and Freehand did) and APhoto displays only one canvas or one APub spread at a time but is also able to display all artboards of an AD document, whereas APub's Photo Persona displays all pages and spreads of a document.

Put simply, I’d like it to perform as the two leading DTP programs perform. In particular, as InDesign performs. WHY I’d like it scroll in any direction has nothing to do with anything. Any more than me asking you WHY you don’t. Reducing my scrolling speed to a crawl for everything else I do with my Mac seems a bit extreme. And the obtuse workarounds are fine, but the issue shouldn’t HAVE to be worked around. Just please provide the option to set the size of the pasteboard space.

While I am at it - WHY have such a HUGE pasteboard area above the first page in a multipage document, and then have the pages so close together vertically for the rest of the pages? If I’d need it above/below page 1, would I not need it for every other page?

[Return]

35 minutes ago, uburoibob said:

Put simply

Buy another mouse.
Don't blame the software for your lack of using decent hardware.

[R C-R]

4 hours ago, LondonSquirrel said:

It happens to me unintentionally using an Apple magic mouse. It is remarkably easy to scroll when I don't want to.

I believe that is an inherent design flaw in the design of that rodent that manifests itself not just in the Affinity apps but also in others, notably Safari & other browsers where it is very easy to accidentally scroll when just trying to click a link with the result that the click lands on something else.