help Affinity Online Help Resource (Printable)

[James Ritson]

Affinity Online Help

Hello all, we're happy to be able to offer you an online version of the in-app help!

Access Designer, Photo & Publisher Help here: https://affinity.help

Here are some of the additional features we're able to implement as a result of having proper browser support:

• Dynamic language switching: The help will determine your language and (if it's available) serve you a localised copy of the help. If you prefer to read in another language, however, you'll find a combo box at the bottom left which will enable you to change languages—and stay on the page you're currently reading.
• Print: Sounds simple, but with full browser support we can now implement printing of the topic pages. The print icon in the bottom left will give you a nicely formatted printout of the current topic.
• Share: Clicking the clipboard icon will copy the current topic's URL to your clipboard, which means you can easily point other people towards topics that may help them.
• Responsive: The help was responsive anyway, including off-canvas menu functionality so you could collapse the window and still read a topic, but this is taken further in this version of the help. The help is formatted nicely and usable even on a 4" iPhone SE screen.
• Search: we've implemented our own bespoke search for the online help which is fast and accurate. Access it via the tab system along the top left.
• Favourites: you can add topics to your favourites list to easily access them during future browser sessions. Simply click the + (plus) icon next to the "Favourites" tab to add the current topic.

 

With this online version you'll be able to print out topics and view them on your tablets/phones, which are two of the most common requests when it comes to help feedback.

As always, if you have any feedback or find any issues with this online version, please let us know! Hope you find it useful.

[Roger C]

Super responsive. Most excellently useful. For some reason I find it preferable to the in-app help. Along with the workbook it's the dreamteam.

Thanks, James & co.

[Polygonius]

Am i to stupide?

Can not download the whole file. Just print single-pages like in the old version?????

Why to hell, not just a simple PDF???? 

The help itself (and the localization) is very good, but the access to the chapters or keywords is from the for-last centurry.

 

But at least - its now zoomable!

[v_kyr]

7 hours ago, Polygonius said:

Can not download the whole file. Just print single-pages like in the old version????? ...

Well it's pretty much the same as the in-app help, namely a HTML based help system for webbrowsers. So it consists of a bunch of directory structured files instead. This is good for using it as forum related references to specific topics etc. - For printing purposes a single contents PDF file would be of course more handy, but hey Affinity want's to sell it books too here.

However you can fetch a copy of the online help for offline references via appropriate tools (like wget) for example:

Quote

Fetch recursively the whole English localization of Photo for offline reading, converting to local links and place everything into a aphoto/ directory, write the processing into a afflog file:

> wget --convert-links -nH -Paphoto -r https://affinity.help/photo/English.lproj/index.html -o afflog 

You can then further process/convert the local copy into some for you suitable PDF or eBook format.

 

[Polygonius]

Yeah, i like the Fetch-one and i have this already convert. Of course i would prefer in my native language, but on the other hand It helps me not to forget some of my seldom-used english words;-)

[v_kyr]

If your native language is (maybe) already supported for the online help ...

... just exchange the appropriate initial URL-path in the wget call.

[Polygonius]

Thanks, yup there is my languge-support in the online help, but not for the better Fetch-pdf-convert. But as said, its ok, i can life with that!

I just printed out the shortcuts in my language - thats very necassary (cuase the keys are sometimes on complete different places).

[Bri-Toon]

Oh nice. I was wondering what happened to this topic. I didn't realize it only got moved.

[dmstraker]

Response with Firefox (and similar with Chrome, IE...):

Secure Connection Failed

An error occurred during a connection to affinity.help. Cannot communicate securely with peer: no common encryption algorithm(s). Error code: SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP

    The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
    Please contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem.

(PC security software is Bitdefender, btw)

[walt.farrell]

7 minutes ago, dmstraker said:

Response with Firefox (and similar with Chrome, IE...):

Secure Connection Failed

What URL? I have no issues like that getting to the online Affinity help.

[Bri-Toon]

I've noticed that sometimes anti-virus can be a little too sensitive and block pages that don't need blocking. Back when iGoogle was a thing, I got a security warning on that site. Is there a way you can manage an exception with Bitdefender? And if so, does that work?

[walt.farrell]

The message he got is not usually from the local antivirus software. It's from the browser and reports an error with the certificate provided by the site as part of the TLS handshake used to handle the https protocol. 

[Wikinger]

15 hours ago, dmstraker said:

............(Le logiciel de sécurité PC est Bitdefender, btw)

 

Good morning.  

I also have Bitdéfender.

He's terrific but a little paranoid. He won't allow me to update DxO. (I had to change the path).

Bitdéfender also has a "paranoid mode", I never use it.

Did you try to whitelist?

With kind regards 

[dmstraker]

On 28/01/2018 at 2:30 AM, Bri-Toon said:

I've noticed that sometimes anti-virus can be a little too sensitive and block pages that don't need blocking. Back when iGoogle was a thing, I got a security warning on that site. Is there a way you can manage an exception with Bitdefender? And if so, does that work?

Yup. That was it. Added affinity.help to Bitdefender's whitelist and now everything hunkydory. Thanks!

[walt.farrell]

Thanks for letting us know. It will be useful to know that an AV program can also cause that particular error.

[R C-R]

On 11/29/2017 at 6:34 AM, James Ritson said:

This is currently no search functionality - we are aware it would be useful and are considering possible solutions.

I was surprised yesterday when I accessed the online Affinity Designer 1.6 help to see a Google-powered search field had appeared that was not there a few days ago:

So far there is not one for Affinity Designer but hopefully there will be soon.

[Bri-Toon]

Well that's good to hear.

[James Ritson]

It's something I'm trialling, was going to make a quick post about it at some point. From initial tests it seems to do an OK job (better than the in-app search, in fact ) - it's currently in Photo English, US and German. If it seems to be functioning well then we'll probably just roll it out across all languages and for both apps.

[Bri-Toon]

I very recently acquired a custom Google search for a website of my own, and it does do a very decent job. The only downside is that it may take a while for Google bots to collect all information, which makes sense. I'm sure you already know this though.  

[James Ritson]

Hello all, just letting you know that I've rolled out the search for Designer help as well now. English and US should be fully searchable, but I don't believe other languages have been indexed yet - I've submitted them, so hopefully within a couple of days you'll be able to search them too.

 

As always, if you discover any issues let me know and I'll endeavour to fix them!

[R C-R]

11 minutes ago, James Ritson said:

As always, if you discover any issues let me know and I'll endeavour to fix them!

Maybe not a real issue but when I open the US English Affinity Designer help page, it still refers to version 1.6.0:

Since we are now at 1.6.1 on Macs, I don't know if this means any updates to the help topics in that newer version (if there are any) would be found with the search or not.

[Patrick Connor]

Other than when you first arrive I am unclear how to find this page to use it. So how do I find that page having used the side navigation? Please can I have a Home link at the top of the list on the left and a search icon on the toolbar bottom left both of which navigate the main window back to index.html. (or is this there already?)

[walt.farrell]

36 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Maybe not a real issue but when I open the US English Affinity Designer help page, it still refers to version 1.6.0:

The first Affinity Photo help page also says it's for 1.6.0.

On the other hand, that's also what Help->Help... says, so perhaps none of the Help files have been updated since the 1.6.0 releases of Designer and Photo?

[R C-R]

10 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

Other than when you first arrive I am unclear how to find this page to use it. So how do I find that page having used the side navigation? Please can I have a Home link at the top of the list on the left and a search icon on the toolbar bottom left both of which navigate the main window back to index.html. (or is this there already?)

I am not sure about what you are asking but I have bookmarked https://affinity.help/designer/en-US.lproj/index.html & https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/index.html in my Safari browser for quick access to the online help.

[Patrick Connor]

45 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I am not sure about what you are asking but I have bookmarked https://affinity.help/designer/en-US.lproj/index.html & https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/index.html in my Safari browser for quick access to the online help.

 

I'm asking for.... a shortcut/bookmark in the UI to the search page, well 2 actually one called Home/Search in the words on the left and one with a magnifier icon in the buttons on the bottom LEFT

 

Knowing there is no way back to the home page and saving a link before you know you need to have done that takes some high degree of prescience. I'm suggesting that is not a good generic solution and we must provide one.

 

Say I'm reading something on one of the pages and want to search for that term. Without having already thought of making and saving away a bookmark what is 'Ms Average' meant to do to search the site for the term?