Couple Requests: Easy measure change, pasting, linked files

[StrawDogDesign]

I've been slowly transitioning to using Affinity Designer (and Photo) and loving it.

However, there are a couple sore thumbs that I thought I would bring up here for future additions:

1. The ability to right-click on the rulers and change your document measurement units.
2. Paste in Front/Back. I've seen this mentioned a couple times before and the general attitude seems
3. "Smart Object" functionality for placed items. The other day I placed 25 Affinity Photo documents into a big Designer file, and then went back and edited half of them in Photo. I assumed they would update, but after some digging learned that placing actually meant embedding the Photo documents inside my Designer project. I ended up creating a file that was over a gig and needed to re-edit and replace them.
4. Clearer visual isolation of groups and subgroups. When I start clicking into various groups of elements, it can be difficult to tell what Inception-like layer I find myself in. The way Illustrator greys out outside elements really helps.
5. Not having "background" selected by default in the Export persona.
6. Always having artboards align to full pixels. I create a ton of artboards, and a big part of my Designer workflow has become taking time to go through them one-by-one and make sure there's no extra pixel rows or columns being added.

And while I'm on a roll…

6. The ability to edit pathfinder objects after-the-fact. For example, if I subtract a circle from a square, it would be great to pop back in to this shape and adjust the circle instead of having to deal with the new curve outlines of the resulting shape. See Figma and Sketch as an example.

Apologies if some of these are actually features that exist. I've tried to dig down on all of them and haven't found anything concrete. Keep up the good work!

[MEB]

Hi StrawDogDesign,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
Thanks for your feedback.A few notes about your points:

1. Select the View Tool (the hand icon) and go to the context toolbar to quickly change document's units.

2. There's three icons on right end of the main toolbar that let's you specify where the object will be pasted (see Targeting objects in the Help file):

3. Linked files will be supported in a future version (besides embedded files). They will be introduced with Affinity Publisher then ported back to the other apps.

6. Consider enabling Force Pixel Alignment from the start in the Snapping MAnager to ensure duplicates of artboards are created (or moved) by whole pixels. Disable Move By Whole Pixels (also in Snapping Manager) to prevent existing artboards placed in non-integer values to keep the decimal part when you move them.

7. To create non-destructive geometry operations press and hold ALT while clicking the respective geometry operation icon in the main toolbar. This will generate a compound object (see Layers panel) which can be expanded to access the original objects used to create the compound. You can adjust them any time - the compound will update to reflect the changes you have made.

[StrawDogDesign]

Awesome! Thanks so much MEB! Sounds like a bunch of this was sitting right under my nose the whole time