Step and Repeat

[wonderings]

15 hours ago, FrustratedandConfused said:

i guess, i appreciate your feedback.  I do however find it very interesting when a question that is framed regarding Adobe is asked - that same attitude and position is not taken. 

What question is asked about Adobe that compares to what you asked? Indesign was not an update from a completely different app, it was from scratch just as Affinity has done with Publisher.  Think I am missing something as I am not sure what you are referring to.

[wonderings]

6 hours ago, Petar Petrenko said:

We may expect Adobe will start again to redo its trio from scratch. i don't think they are very happy what is happening here with Affinity.

I don't think Adobe is worried about Affinity. Now if Adobe's user base was dropping then yes they might look at reasons like Affinity but as far as I can tell their numbers are slowly rising. From 2017 to 2020 they grew their user base 85% for the CC. They have gone from 12 million users in 2017 to 22+ million in 2020. Not everyone is hindered by the subscription fee, it really is not all that bad for pro use. For those not making a living with the apps or just small projects here and there then yes it is cost prohibitive, but this is pro software that is vital for may businesses. 

[MikeTO]

8 hours ago, Petar Petrenko said:

We may expect Adobe will start again to redo its trio from scratch. i don't think they are very happy what is happening here with Affinity.

I doubt Adobe is planning to start over.

The original crop of 1980s page layout apps needed to be scrapped and replaced because they were written in assembler. At some point their code became too complex to maintain and and the developers couldn't wrap their head around the text composition code so with increased RAM it was easier to rewrite them in C.

The next generation of page layout apps were written in C but not in an object-oriented language such as C++/Objective C/Swift. While this code was much easier to maintain than assembler it was still crude by modern standards. For example, when you click on a text frame in an app written in an OO language, the text frame's event handler is triggered automatically, the text frame object "knows" it's been clicked on. If you write your app in just plain old C, your code will be informed only that the user clicked on a specific x/y coordinate and then your code has to figure out which of the many objects on the current page is the top-most object at that particular coordinate and what part of the object was clicked. This is a trivial example but page layout apps are so complex that at some point each company realized that rewriting in an OO language would reduce the amount of time that developers needed to debug their code.

There are few reasons to start over if your app is written in an OO language. One reason to do so would be because you want to go cross platform or add support mobile and your existing code is too platform dependent to easily port. Another reason would be because you realize that your original architecture is constraining your ability to add the features you want so it's better to start with a fresh architecture.

[daveindezmenez]

I think a function like the Step and Repeat that Quark has would not only be useful for Publisher but for Designer and Photo as well.

[gcvrsa]

Over 5 years since this thread was started, over a year since I made my own thread about it, and there's still no Step and Repeat. This is, of course, not the only thread that points this out, just the oldest one I can find (edit: I subsequently found a thread from 2015, 9 years ago, that points this out, as well).

Step and Repeat is absolutely essential to many professional precision workflows, so it's perplexing that a feature that has commonly existed for over 30 years in industry standard desktop publishing software like QuarkXpress and Adobe InDesign, even in the open source Scribus (where it is called "Multiple Duplicate", still does not exist in the Affinity suite.

Without this feature, I cannot make use of the software, at all, and cannot in good conscience recommend that any of my colleagues purchase it.

Neither "Quick Grid" nor "Power Duplicate" are an acceptable substitute. It really feels like the developers of the Affinity suite just don't care to listen to their licensed users, are committed to doing whatever they want, regardless of how professional users repeatedly tell them what they need, and that these forums are populated by amateur fanboys who will argue until they are blue in the face about why nothing in Affinity needs to change, and demand that you prove to their satisfaction that this feature is necessary, despite it being a standard feature of competing applications for over three decades.

It never occurred to me that an application suite for graphic design would not include this feature, so it didn't occur to me to check before I paid for the full suite universal cross-platform licenses, and I feel like I've been ripped off.

 

[GarryP]

10 minutes ago, gcvrsa said:

Without this feature, I cannot make use of the software, at all

Did you try selecting a layer and pressing the ENTER key?

That functionality is documented in the Help as Move Data Entry.

(Screenshot is from Designer but it works in Publisher too.)

[gcvrsa]

16 minutes ago, GarryP said:

Did you try selecting a layer and pressing the ENTER key?

That functionality is documented in the Help as Move Data Entry.

(Screenshot is from Designer but it works in Publisher too.)

No, I haven't, because how would I even know such a feature even existed? There is no menu item for it in any of the menus or submenus, not even when secondary-clicking the object, and it does not appear in the Transform tools palette, where one might reasonably expect to find it if it existed anywhere, at all. The only indication anywhere on the screen that this feature exists is the tool description in the status bar at the bottom of the screen, which is so far out of anyone's line of sight that I doubt anyone notices it.

But, thank you for pointing it out.

 

[GeoffM33]

Ah ha! This rings a bell now you mention it. I came across this somewhere then promptly forgot it. It maybe was in an Affinity features article. But as you say, because it's a "hidden" feature it's easily missed. Should definitely be in a menu.

[walt.farrell]

3 hours ago, gcvrsa said:

because how would I even know such a feature even existed?

Some possibilities: from the documentation (Help), or the What's New section of the Affinity Store (2.2) or 2.3, or the Release Notes in the announcements and in the FAQ for the V2 updates for 2.2 or 2.3, or perhaps from articles in Affinity Spotlight, such as this one for 2.3 or the several for 2.2 like this one.

But yes, it should be more discoverable in the interface and in the Help than it is.

 

[Petar Petrenko]

Some features, like this one, should be named the same as the ones from the Affinity big brothers -- Quark, InDesign...