Other Improvements in 2.6

[Patrick Connor]

Apps: Designer, Photo and Publisher
Platforms: Various (improvement specific)

Miscellaneous Improvements

• Selection Box can now be set for Objects Rotated by 90°, 180° or -90°
• Stroke Width Tool - better handling of size variance and pressures that have profiles or are inverted. Size variance is extended to cater for the range of the control point the user is editing.
• Stroke Width Tool - added 'Reset' button to the context toolbar
• Preflight will now warn if text flows contain mismatched scaling
• Vector and Pixel Brushes are now searchable. A search field is present just above the category selector. (only searches the currently selected Category)
• (Desktop) Stroke Width Tool - Added a right-click context menu (when you're not right clicking over the actual curve itself)
• (iPad) Sliders behaves like a normal slider (i.e such as the Opacity and Noise ones on the Colour Panel). A tap/click on the slider will move the slider's handle to that position. Tap/click then drag will move the handle to match the touch/cursor position.
• (iPad) Quick Shapes: When there is no shape selected apply values to the default shape.
• The Tags Panel has been updated to allow users to use Alt Tag and Extended Description XMP tags inside images (added 2.6.0.2831)

[Affinity Info Bot]

Known Issues in this feature
A list of unresolved issues for this feature, reported by users

• AF-4753 - Improve wording of Mismatched frame text Preflight error.

Released Fixes
A list of issues for this feature, available in the current beta build

• AF-4754 - Add Expand Stroke to Right Click Context Menu
• AF-4906 - Tags Panel background has a grey stripe when in Light UI
• AF-4911 - Alt Tag and Extended Description XMP Tag text Won't Display in the Tags Panel Until the Associated Hunspell Dictionary is Installed
• AF-5081 - The Tags Panel Doesn't Show Available Languages in the Language Dropdown for Tagged Images When Publisher is First Launched
• AF-5082 - A Tagged Image Including the Welsh Language Displays as Welsh (Cyprus)

[MikeTO]

22 hours ago, Patrick Connor said:

Preflight will now warn if text flows contain mismatched scaling

This is a great idea! I tried it out and it works exactly as advertised.

If there are 100 frames in a story and one frame is scaled I will get 100 preflight errors. But that's okay, mismatched scaling is so bad that the app should be shouting at me.

The profile text uses internal names for stories and text frames, using "text flows" and "frame text":

"Checks for mismatched frame text scales in text flows. These can result in unexpected changes in font size."

Perhaps it could be simplified as:

"Checks for mismatched scales in linked text frames which can result in unexpected changes in font size."

[Benfischer]

No support for Apple Pencil Pro 😕

[HCl]

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[HCl]

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[Sean P]

17 minutes ago, Return said:

Sorry but I don't see it on windows

 

 

Your video is showing it at 0:19s. It appears when you're not right clicking over the actual curve itself. Previously this menu wasn't appearing at all.

[HCl]

.

[Sean P]

6 minutes ago, Return said:

Ah, right, was expecting a contextual rightclick menu for tool settings like expand stroke.

I would have expected to see Expand Stroke on that menu along with the other associated options (Convert to xxx, Rasterise etc), though I do wonder if this was missing due to space/congestion. I'll pass this on.

[EmT]

2 hours ago, Benfischer said:

No support for Apple Pencil Pro 😕

The Apple Pencil Pro is working ok for me on iOS, are you having an issue with yours in the apps? If so could you please expand so we can look into it.

[Juhani]

On 10/21/2024 at 6:29 PM, Patrick Connor said:

Vector and Pixel Brushes are now searchable. A search field is present just above the category selector. (only searches the currently selected Category)

Haven’t tried this out yet but why would it search only within currently selected category? If i know how the brush is called then one of the main challenges is to find the category where it is located. Current implementation could also promote dumping all brushes inside a single category to make the search more functional.

[ronnyb]

3 hours ago, Juhani said:

Haven’t tried this out yet but why would it search only within currently selected category? If i know how the brush is called then one of the main challenges is to find the category where it is located. Current implementation could also promote dumping all brushes inside a single category to make the search more functional.

Maybe #tags and 🔴🟠🟡🟢🔵 for Brushes/Categories?

[Benfischer]

7 hours ago, EmT said:

The Apple Pencil Pro is working ok for me on iOS, are you having an issue with yours in the apps? If so could you please expand so we can look into it.

I played around with it and barrel rotation does work. I’d never seen an update on the, but it’s there in the settings. I was hoping for a user selectable option for what the squeeze does, that than just opening the quick menu. 

[Benfischer]

On 10/21/2024 at 7:59 AM, Patrick Connor said:

Vector and Pixel Brushes are now searchable. A search field is present just above the category selector. (only searches the currently selected Category)

Thank you!

[Frozen Death Knight]

On 10/22/2024 at 3:24 PM, Sean P said:

I would have expected to see Expand Stroke on that menu along with the other associated options (Convert to xxx, Rasterise etc), though I do wonder if this was missing due to space/congestion. I'll pass this on.

Really good workflow change in that case. I hope this type of menu gets added to other tools as well like for pixel selection tools in Photo, since I think it could come in handy there and it would also behave more like people are used to when coming from Photoshop.

[Adish Sagarawat]

Upon such a great update, I'd like to bring the attention of Dev Team to an ongoing issue with the Unicode typing display error (AF-3329), which has been persistent for long. This bug poses significant challenges for those of us working with regional languages, and it discourages many from using the Affinity Suite for such projects.

Addressing this bug in the upcoming updates would greatly enhance the usability for users like myself. I hope this fix can be given the priority it deserves.

[bbrother]

On 10/22/2024 at 1:48 PM, MikeTO said:

If there are 100 frames in a story and one frame is scaled I will get 100 preflight errors. But that's okay, mismatched scaling is so bad that the app should be shouting at me.

I strongly disagree @MikeTO, such implementation defeats the whole idea of preflight which is to warn you about existing errors precisely indicating the problem and location. This needs to be improved, one entry in preflight must refer to a specific frame with a scaling problem. 

Just an example. See the screenshot below. Now guess which entry actually leads to the frame that has a scaling problem😮. And there are two of them and I was very reserved in preparing this simulation, in reality it can be much worse. How is something like this supposed to help you find the problem and fix it.

[fde101]

10 hours ago, bbrother said:

Now guess which entry actually leads to the frame that has a scaling problem😮

How do you know that the one which is different is not the one which is right?

More importantly, how do you expect the software to know that?

All it knows is that they are different.

[MikeTO]

It could report each scale change, so if frame 6 of 10 was scaled, it could report the scale change from 5 to 6 and from 6 to 7 which would reduce the preflight warnings from 10 to 2.

[fde101]

It could also reduce it to 1 by reporting once per flow instead of once per frame.  The feature to jump to the issue could then cycle among the frames within that flow, or better yet, could open a separate window listing the individual frames and their scales, if they wanted to go that far.

[bbrother]

 I would prefer preflight to work this way for this:

1. Check if there are any text frames with scaled text in the document and if they are part of a text flow (linked to other text frames).
2. If it finds any, create a (single) separate entry for each frame found. 
3. For entry label use: "Text frame in flow has scaled text".
4. For profile text it could be "Checks for text frames with scaled text in text flows. This can cause unexpected font size changes".

This could be further expanded, e.g. by adding a checkbox in the rule settings labeled: "Check only in text flows" or "Check only in linked text frames". With that addition you could decide whether to limit the scope to only linked frames (text flows) or to trigger a warning for any frame scaled. Preflight entry label should have two variations in this case:  "Text frame has scaled text" and "Text frame in flow has scaled text" to stay precise all depending on the scope.

All I need is a warning that there are scaled frames with scaled text in the text flow, and links to them so I don't have to look for them. I'll take care of the rest myself.

[Edit: I misunderstood how mismatched scaling check works and proposed invalid solutions]

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4 hours ago, fde101 said:

or better yet, could open a separate window listing the individual frames and their scales, if they wanted to go that far.

Or expand an list under the preflight entry (grouping)...

[fde101]

40 minutes ago, bbrother said:

• Check if there are any text frames with scaled text in the document and if they are part of a text flow (linked to other text frames).
• If it finds any, create a (single) separate entry for each frame found. 

This would be a different test than the one they added.

What you are asking for would find any non-default frame scaling in a text flow, even if every frame in the flow had the same scaling.

What Serif implemented is to find frames in a text flow with scaling different from that of other frames in the text flow - in other words, as long as they all have the same scaling, it doesn't matter what it is.

 

42 minutes ago, bbrother said:

Or expand an list under the preflight entry (grouping)...

Yes, that would certainly work too.

[bbrother]

1 hour ago, fde101 said:

This would be a different test than the one they added.

You're right, I see it now. In that case your suggestion to report once per flow instead of once per frame is the most preferable for me, or at least group the entries under one warning, anything so that the warnings don't flood the panel

Thanks for pointing out that I misunderstood. I edited my previous post, crossing out the incorrect suggestions.

[Patrick Connor]

The Tags Panel has been updated to allow users to use Alt Tag and Extended Description XMP tags inside images. To do this your image will require the XMP data to be included as either Iptc4xmpCore:AltTextAccessibility or Iptc4xmpCore:ExtDescrAccessibility respectively. When an image is placed with this data you can select the dropdown in the Tags Panel as appropriate.

I've attached a zip containing an image with these tags already embedded as well as its sidecar file.

AccessibilityTags.zip

[Dazmondo77]

On 10/21/2024 at 1:59 PM, Patrick Connor said:

Vector and Pixel Brushes are now searchable. A search field is present just above the category selector. (only searches the currently selected Category)

This is a great idea, for those with huge brush library's, especially if we can get the option to search your entire brush library in the future, although, currently I can only get this to work with standard affinity brush sets, custom brush and purchased sets show no results.