Masterpages and Layers

[ol4f]

Hi!

Lets say I have a lot of pages filled with images and I want to add a tv-station like logo as you can see in the attached 'manually' (1) file where I have done this manually.

If you copy the logo to a masterpage and apply this masterpage to a new page and then place an image on this new page, all the masterpage items are behind the new placed image (see 'masterpage')(2) and you have to move the masterpage itemes on top  of the page to get the intended look (see 'masterpage_moved')(3).

Any other way to do this? Could be also usefull for pagenumbers...

Maybe we can have an option for masterpages to always stay on top or something.

(1) manually:

(2) masterpage:

(3) masterpage_moved

[ol4f]

*push*

I still think there are various scenarios where you want to place the content of the masterpage above the content of the page. Logo, Watermark, Pagenumbers, ...

At the moment the only way I see to do this is by hand and this can be a lot of work. Easy to do in InDesign by the way

 

[Old Bruce]

Hi I agree. the only "trick" I have found is to choose any page where the Master Page item is needed n the top and select it in the Layers Studio and use the toolbar 'move to top' icon. All  the items will move on all the pages. But I think we need a way to set a 'On Top of Everything' per item on the master page.

 

[fde101]

or for an entire master page, as there can be more than one master assigned to a page - you could have one for stuff on the bottom and another for stuff on the top

[Old Bruce]

So we would probably only be able to assign one Master page to be on top of all the stuff we put on regular pages. I think I could live with that.

I am thinking of avoiding conflicts like "the first Master Page made is above all the subsequently created" and in an update we gain the ability to reorder the Master Pages in the Pages Studio and chaos ensues, or other weird kinks. This is not going to be trivial in programming.

[fde101]

I am thinking more of a "keep on top" checkbox in the properties of the master page.  If that master is already the top layer then when objects are added to the page they are added below that master instead of on top of it, otherwise it could be ignored.

I would think something like that would be relatively easy for the Affinity team to implement quickly, probably much more so than global layers, and could fill the gap for a lot of use cases until global layers became available to cover the other cases.

 

Such a master should also be added by default instead of replacing an existing master, and should be added as the top layer instead of the bottom.

[Old Bruce]

47 minutes ago, fde101 said:

I am thinking more of a "keep on top" checkbox in the properties of the master page.  If that master is already the top layer then when objects are added to the page they are added below that master instead of on top of it, otherwise it could be ignored.

 

I agree

48 minutes ago, fde101 said:

I would think something like that would be relatively easy for the Affinity team to implement quickly, probably much more so than global layers, and could fill the gap for a lot of use cases until global layers became available to cover the other cases.

I maybe, sort of agree. It will be easier than Global Layers and it will fill the gap but I think that anything beyond choosing just one Master Page to have the abilities we are discussing will be non-trivial. 

I frequently mess things up to the point where making a new Master Page is quicker than fixing the mistakes. In that case I would like to just delete a Master Page, rebuild it (properly) and select it to be the "on Top" Master.

I think we have some good Ideas and arguments for them here and they should be introduced before the final release.