Affinity Designer Customer Beta RC2 (1.1.2.23562)

[smallreflection]

Sorry for more headaches here too, but with the new beta I'm still getting the same error message I mentioned from the last beta, upon attempting to save a file on my local work network, which isn't happening in the app store release.

 

"Save failed because access to the file was lost."

 

Pity, I love all the new features!  :unsure:

[MattP]

Hi Smallreflection,

 

I mentioned in the other thread but you might not have spotted it - we'd like to get to the bottom of this, but obviously don't get this behaviour here so can't reproduce it. Could you help us by telling us what kind of network share it is? Is it running on an OS X Server machine or a Windows/Linux machine? Anything you could tell us about it might help :)

 

Thanks!

Matt

[smallreflection]

Sorry I missed that, MattP. It's an apache webdav server. I'll send the file over, but I doubt the problem is there.

 

Just caught one more thing, a tiny request—in the absence of a glyphs panel currently, could we at least add support for Apple's shortcuts for em and en dashes? Kind of an important typography thing. ;)

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_make_dashes

[smallreflection]

Yeah, pretty sure it's just pertaining to the connection to the apache server, because I tried saving locally from the desktop and no crash. So not a huge deal then, but I'll be working locally for awhile. ;)

 

You guys are awesome!

[MattP]

Hi Smallreflection,

 

I've asked the team to set up an Apache webdav server (I have no idea what one is!) so I can test it out tomorrow...

 

The beta of Designer should already work with Option+'-' and Option+Shift+'-' for en and em dashes - I just tried mine and it seems to work for me?

 

I'll let you know how we get on - thanks! :)

Matt

[smallreflection]

Cool. I barely know myself... :) Working smashingly on my local machine though. Ah, the Option shortcuts are working for me now—may have been a temporary hiccup.

[A_B_C]

Hi Matt and Andy,

 

I have very good news for you ... it’s quite incredible, but I was able to solve the startup issue and the duplicate font entry issue myself ... and let me say at first, that I am so sorry for all the headaches I have given you. Please believe me, I am not responsible for the issues myself ...

 

I just wanted to check one last time, if the issues resulted from faulty or incompatible fonts on my system (and believe me, I *hate* messin’ around with my font library, considering all the things that depend on it), but I decided to try my luck this afternoon ... so I disabled *all* the fonts on my system except the ones that are essential for the OS itself. And of course there were no duplicates in the family list ... now I started to reactivate font family after font family to find out if there could be a corrupted font file on my system, and indeed, I could not believe it, but there was an incompatible version of Monotype’s Onyx typeface (version 1.51) on my system, that is responsible for *all* the issues. I double checked this, also with my older Mac Book Pro. I think this font came with an early version of Microsoft Office. Incredible. Doing a quick web search revealed that the Onyx typeface has also caused issues with other applications. See for example

 

http://support.pixelmator.com/updates

 

under "Pixelmator 2.1.4 (Released on December 14, 2012)". I don’t know how Andy managed to get duplicate font list entries, but I do know how to get them for myself now.  :)

 

Thank you again for all your efforts,

and I hope you are not mad at me about this ...

 

Cheers,

Alex

[Andrew Tang]

Hi Matt and Andy,

 

 

I have very good news for you ... it’s quite incredible, but I was able to solve the startup issue and the duplicate font entry issue myself ... and let me say at first, that I am so sorry for all the headaches I have given you. Please believe me, I am not responsible for the issues myself ...

 

I just wanted to check one last time, if the issues resulted from faulty or incompatible fonts on my system (and believe me, I *hate* messin’ around with my font library, considering all the things that depend on it), but I decided to try my luck this afternoon ... so I disabled *all* the fonts on my system except the ones that are essential for the OS itself. And of course there were no duplicates in the family list ... now I started to reactivate font family after font family to find out if there could be a corrupted font file on my system, and indeed, I could not believe it, but there was an incompatible version of Monotype’s Onyx typeface (version 1.51) on my system, that is responsible for *all* the issues. I double checked this, also with my older Mac Book Pro. I think this font came with an early version of Microsoft Office. Incredible. Doing a quick web search revealed that the Onyx typeface has also caused issues with other applications. See for example

 

http://support.pixelmator.com/updates

 

under "Pixelmator 2.1.4 (Released on December 14, 2012)". I don’t know how Andy managed to get duplicate font list entries, but I do know how to get them for myself now.  :)

 

Thank you again for all your efforts,

and I hope you are not mad at me about this ...

 

Cheers,

Alex

 

 

Hi A_B_C,

 

I'm very glad that you have fixed your font issues on your machine! This is actually very useful information indeed and something we have to keep in mind. In fact I appreciate the time and effort you have put into solving this problem! :) Hopefully you can start to enjoy using Designer again. Thanks for the update and the information. :)

 

AndyT

[Mark Ingram]

Sorry I missed that, MattP. It's an apache webdav server. I'll send the file over, but I doubt the problem is there.

 

...

 

Hi smallreflection, we've setup an Apache WebDav server, and connected to it using the built in Mac OS X client, and I can confirm the error message that you're seeing.

[Haluke]

Hi everyone!

 

The bug I mentioned earlier in this post still exists. (Both for Designer and Photo.)

Basically, the state of the "relative" checkbox on the selective colour layer adjustment panel doesn't get saved with the document.

 

I'm hoping that it gets fixed before the apps hit the MAS.

 

Cheers!

[Signguy]

I agree with headwrong.  Division operation is not working.

 

Two rectangles drawn at 90 degree angles.  Select both rectangles and divide.  Grab small square in the middle and move it.  It is still same size as original vertical rectangle and was not divided.

 

See Attached.

 

I'm not sure that I would push this to Apple Store the way that it is.  

SimpleCross.afdesign

[A_B_C]

Thanks, Andy, that you don’t mind this complicated way to a solution ... I can’t explain myself how a single font can cause these issues and affect the whole font library like that ... and what is even more strange: there was no error or incompatibility notification by Apple’s Font Book when I installed the typeface ...

 

But fortunately everything worked out fine for me ... and yes, I enjoy using Affinity Designer very much ...  :)

 

Thanks again for your hard work,

and my best wishes,

Alex

[Andy Somerfield]

Haluke,

 

I've just fixed your SelectiveColour bug - thanks for the heads up. The fix will be in the next Photo / Designer beta.

 

Andy.

[Haluke]

Haluke,

 

I've just fixed your SelectiveColour bug - thanks for the heads up. The fix will be in the next Photo / Designer beta.

 

Andy.

 

 

Thank you Andy, that's great news!

[n8o]

Completely changed the way we deal with high-DPI documents. There is now no ‘retina’ checkbox and all documents for physical devices are specified in points with a given DPI

 

 

This is great. I also notice that the iPhone templates have a more useful 144 dpi setting.

 

Thanks!

[specworkfan]

The positive feedback is that I love the path tools for text. It is a huge time saver compared to other programs. :-)

 

The bad news is that there seems to be a memory leak still in this beta. I have tested with fastest configured Macbook Pro currently (16GB RAM and 760MB/s SSD), and with a 2010 Macbook Pro (8GB RAM and SSD), and a 2012 Dual Core Mac Mini (16GB RAM and SSD).  While as you would expect, the most recent Macbook Pro is lightning fast compare to the others, Affinity Designer quickly degrades after some time with many layers open no matter which mac I am using.

 

At first I thought it was because I was externally booting on the mac mini, but there was no disk access. Could this be due to history itself entering RAM and not being dealt with properly?

 

I am not even maxing out RAM before vector brushes, dragging things between layers, and toggling layers becomes very laggy. It's really annoying!

[MattP]

Hi specworkfan,

 

I've got a 2008 MacBook Pro (which works so well it's scary!), 2013 MacBook Pro (not the fastest model - just the base one with 8GB) and a 2011 iMac and they don't appear to be showing the symptoms you're describing - nor do the about a dozen different variants of iMacs and MacBooks in the Creative and Documentation departments here, so I'm having a hard time reproducing this to see what's going wrong! :(  I completely believe you're seeing what you're seeing, but without seeing it myself it's hard to guess what's happening...

 

Is there any chance you could email me a video of your screen when it is lagging badly? We are able to accept very large files on our support@seriflabs.com email address. If you want to record your screen you can just go to spotlight and type 'quicktime', press enter and then make a new 'screen recording' and it should work nicely :)  Vector brushes require such a small amount of memory that you can have millions of them before even starting to think about memory, the back-end (where everything is stored and manipulated) cannot 'leak' because of how it's designed, so really the only bit that conceivably could is the UI part at the front (which doesn't seem to be leaking as far as I can tell), but that should be fairly easy for us to find if we can see what you're doing exactly :)

 

Thanks again,

Matt

[Mark Ingram]

Hi smallreflection, we've setup an Apache WebDav server, and connected to it using the built in Mac OS X client, and I can confirm the error message that you're seeing.

 

Just to let you know, I've checked in a fix for this, so it should be available as part of the next release.

[ronnyb]

The Offset Tool is still missing from Layer > Effects palette. (Layer Effects palette and Effect Studio tab) It doesn't make sense to have controls in two places and different ones in each place. If there is an Offset tool in the Effects palette (Outer Shadow, for example), that same tool ought to appear in the Layer Effects palette as well.

 

I'm assuming this is an oversight?

[Katesull]

Can't zoom in (using shortcut) while using text tool.  You can zoom out, just not in.

[MattP]

The Offset Tool is still missing from Layer > Effects palette. (Layer Effects palette and Effect Studio tab) It doesn't make sense to have controls in two places and different ones in each place. If there is an Offset tool in the Effects palette (Outer Shadow, for example), that same tool ought to appear in the Layer Effects palette as well.

 

I'm assuming this is an oversight?

 

I agree, that doesn't really make too much sense! :S

[specworkfan]

I will do this soon, maybe next week if you can't spot anything.

 

It's reproducible. It is possible that the cintiq 13HD I am using is causing an issue, but it seems unlikely. 

 

I am PMing you a dropbox link of a very light file. Only 1.7mb. It lags the same as 100mb files. I think it makes no difference raster or vector. It starts to lag at the same time no matter the size. It makes me think something is wrong with history.

 

 

Hi specworkfan,

 

I've got a 2008 MacBook Pro (which works so well it's scary!), 2013 MacBook Pro (not the fastest model - just the base one with 8GB) and a 2011 iMac and they don't appear to be showing the symptoms you're describing - nor do the about a dozen different variants of iMacs and MacBooks in the Creative and Documentation departments here, so I'm having a hard time reproducing this to see what's going wrong! :(  I completely believe you're seeing what you're seeing, but without seeing it myself it's hard to guess what's happening...

 

Is there any chance you could email me a video of your screen when it is lagging badly? We are able to accept very large files on our support@seriflabs.com email address. If you want to record your screen you can just go to spotlight and type 'quicktime', press enter and then make a new 'screen recording' and it should work nicely :)  Vector brushes require such a small amount of memory that you can have millions of them before even starting to think about memory, the back-end (where everything is stored and manipulated) cannot 'leak' because of how it's designed, so really the only bit that conceivably could is the UI part at the front (which doesn't seem to be leaking as far as I can tell), but that should be fairly easy for us to find if we can see what you're doing exactly :)

 

Thanks again,

Matt

[MattP]

Thanks for that! I'll take a look and hopefully I can find something out! :)  Incidentally, I've got a Cintiq 13HD too, so I doubt that's the key :)

[Markus Dierolf]

Hi Markus,

 

Your second question is much easier to answer, so I'll start with that one... Basically, when you change your document's colour profile you will by default be set to convert to the other profile. The mapping specified by your source and destination profiles chooses the colour values we give to your objects afterwards. This means that when you choose to convert to Generic CMYK that your document's profile will become the Generic CMYK profile and all your colours will be converted (i.e. modified) to become their best representations in the new profile as specified by the mapping from source to destination profile. If you do not want to perform this conversion (and you are basically saying that you don't) then just change it to assign, not convert. This sets the document profile but leaves the colours alone. I don't believe there are any issues here, it all works faultlessly in my trials.

 

Your first question about EPS import colour is simply because we can export CMYK colours to an EPS, but when we read an EPS file there is nothing in it to say what colour space it was meant to be in, so it defaults to an RGB space. We can probably be smarter in the future and guess that it was meant to be a CMYK document, but this isn't a quick fix... When Illustrator writes an EPS file, it writes an 'Illustrator EPS' file with an embedded Illustrator file at the top of its stream so that it can get back to exactly the document you were working with in a seamless way - but we have no way of reading this embedded Illustrator stream. The PDF file does contain information of its intended document format, so when we open the PDF file we can correctly set the document's colour format, which is why it appears to work as intended.

 

Thanks,

Matt

 

Dear Matt,

first of all I want to thank you so much for taking time and the explanation of the mechanisms. :)

 

Assign and not convert just looks like what I need. But where can I assign it? I only found the document setup profile which changes the whole doc?! Maybe you can explain that a little bit practical?

 

Hmm, an EPS file (also from AD) does contain basic information of the colorspace used (for every object, without the Illustraot header), example: "/DeviceCMYK setcolorspace" as here for the red rectangle. So it is wrong in my opinion to say: hey, that EPS is generally RGB. If it's unsure what colorspace is contained it should at least ask which profile should be used - or else EPS is rendered useless cause all were basically RGB for AD. In professional printing environment CMYK is more important than RGB, even if you work with an RGB workflow - and I don't even know a EPS that holds RGB data here in printing environment. Sadly there are some agencies that asks still for EPS files, even if you have sent PDF  :unsure: But for the most part definitly PDF will the export format to be used.

 

So thank you again for your help and patience, it is really appreciated :)

[MattP]

The EPS files you generate will correctly contain CMYK data - it's just that if you import them back into Designer we are currently not trying to guess what format you actually meant. As I said, we can definitely add this - but it will be after this Mac App Store update is released. We could even try to add it for the first beta after the update (which would probably be available to download at almost exactly the same time!) 

 

When you go to Document Setup, just under where you choose a colour profile from the dropdown there is a button that defaults to 'Convert' with another that says 'Assign' next to it - that's the one you're looking for :) I have to confess that I have no idea why the 'Transparent background' check box is sat in between those two controls because it has nothing to do with either of them and is possibly the reason for your confusion - I'll look at moving that right now! :)