Placing images from Affinity Designer file should link to artboards

[Aloof]

Hey,

so I thought that if I use Affinity Designer to design assets, I can simply place them into the Affinity Publisher document. Then when I make changes to the assets, I simply need to update the links with one click and it's done. Apparently, there is no such support available, which is very dissapointing. First of all, there is no vector file format that Affinity Designer exports without errors, even in the simplest cases if masks are used. No SVG nor PDF setting work. Second, Affinity Publisher does not allow to select and link to a particular artboard or asset from Designer.

The only way to do this is to use rasterized files – for a print document, this is a no go.

Work on this, please. The fragmentation in Adobe is solved better with linking from Illustrator artboards to InDesign files.

[igi1996]

I was just about to start a post on the same topic. For me it is a must in every layout program that you can link imported files and then only have to replace the respective file in Explorer. It would simplify changes extremely.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Aloof said:

Second, Affinity Publisher does not allow to select and link to a particular artboard or asset from Designer.

I'm not sure if this helps you, but when you Place a .afdesign document into Publisher you get to choose whether the entire file is used, or whether one specific artboard is used. That's in the context menu for the placed document. E.g.,

[Aloof]

22 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I'm not sure if this helps you, but when you Place a .afdesign document into Publisher you get to choose whether the entire file is used, or whether one specific artboard is used. That's in the context menu for the placed document. E.g.,

Hey Walt,

thanks for pointing that out. However it does not resolve the intended behavior. I want to have a LINKED document. As you can see in your screenshot, that document is embedded, creating a virtual copy, bloating the AFPublisher document and making it impossible to store that document in a proper folder structure on the disk.

This makes it a poor solution. There should be a dynamic link between Affinity files in all programs. Otherwise, the programs are less compatible than Adobe (which, as we all know, set a fairly low bar to compatibility).

I do not quite understand if the vector and photo personas are supposed to help somehow, but they are not accessible in Beta.

Regards

[dominik]

2 hours ago, Aloof said:

I want to have a LINKED document.

I do not know this but I assume this will come as soon as the 1.7 line of Designer and Photo arrive. This can't be too long away 

d.

[walt.farrell]

Even if you place a linked file the context menu in Publisher and the Layers panel show it as an (Embedded document). I believe that describes the "kind" of document ("embedded", because it's one document appearing inside of another) not the method that was used to make it appear there (Linking or Embedding). This is confusing, though, and I hope that Affinity changes it eventually.

(I also hope that, again eventually, "linking" to a file actually makes the .afpub file smaller than "embedding" a file. So far, it doesn't.)

[Aloof]

Unfortunately I cannot see the file as LINKED in the Resource Manager. Instead, it creates a .tiff which is Untitled, which is even more odd.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Aloof said:

Unfortunately I cannot see the file as LINKED in the Resource Manager. Instead, it creates a .tiff which is Untitled, which is even more odd.

We would probably need to see some screenshots, for example when you have just Placed the .afdesign file, and then of the Resource Manager showing the odd .tiff file.