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11 hours ago, R C-R said:

FWIW, I just started testing this & ran into a bit of a snag: I do not have that many large image files to test with.

How about some of the Hubble Space Telescope images like this one?

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Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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3 hours ago, Alfred said:

How about some of the Hubble Space Telescope images like this one?

Thanks for the suggestion. I just downloaded that one, but even though I have a very fast internet connection it took 5+ minutes to download it from the site's servers. One 3 times larger that I am downloading now looks like it could take 15-20 minutes or more. At that rate it will take quite a while to collect enough jumbo images for testing. I may download a few more from that site but it isn't an ideal source for this.

EDIT: FWIW, the second file (about 400 MB as downloaded) took ~16 minutes to download. It's 18000 × 18000 px, probably the largest sized tif file that has ever been on the HD of any of my Macs.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
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1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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2 hours ago, R C-R said:

Thanks for the suggestion. I just downloaded that one, but even though I have a very fast internet connection it took 5+ minutes to download it from the site's servers. One 3 times larger that I am downloading now looks like it could take 15-20 minutes or more. At that rate it will take quite a while to collect enough jumbo images for testing. I may download a few more from that site but it isn't an ideal source for this.

EDIT: FWIW, the second file (about 400 MB as downloaded) took ~16 minutes to download. It's 18000 × 18000 px, probably the largest sized tif file that has ever been on the HD of any of my Macs.

I’m surprised to hear about those download times, given how very much faster than mine your connection speed usually seems to be! I can generally download a 400 MB file in 400 seconds (i.e. ~7 minutes) or less.

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Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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I have created a 16 pages document with Publisher, with texts and images, very quickly and easily.
The interface is very convenient, really excellent, better than that InDesign, and I haven't encountered any problem.
The PDF export gave a very good quality file and rather light in view of the content.
Excellent first impression!

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3 hours ago, Muadib24 said:

I have created a 16 pages document with Publisher, with texts and images, very quickly and easily.
The interface is very convenient, really excellent, better than that InDesign, and I haven't encountered any problem.
The PDF export gave a very good quality file and rather light in view of the content.
Excellent first impression!

Did you crop your images using the Image Frame? I really don't like the usability of that thing. It's awful and I hope they provide an easier alternative.

But performance in my case was very good. My problems arised at page 30 with about 200 images. I put up to 8 images on a page with lots of effects.

After 30 pages It's getting sluggish and crashing. I'm glad to say that on the thread for that there is a progress. Staff managed to reproduce the problem (in the Windows build) and it's now with the devs. :)

Do you have a Mac or a PC? It's unknown if either no Mac tester build such a huge project - at least I did not hear of one and @R C-R is not ready yet - or if it is a Windows build issue. We will see.

If you're on Mac you may also want to push your project to 40 pages to help answering that question.

Windows 10 Pro x64 (1903). Intel Core i7-9700K @ 3.60GHz, 32 GB memory, NVidia RTX 2080
Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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27 minutes ago, Steps said:

Did you crop your images using the Image Frame? I really don't like the usability of that think. It's awful and I hope they provide an easier alternative.

But performance in my case was very good. My problems arised at page 30 with about 200 images. I put up to 8 images on a page with lots of effects.

After 30 pages It's getting sluggish and crashing. I'm glad to say that on the thread for that there is a progress. Staff managed to reproduce the problem (in the Windows build) and it's now with the devs. :)

Do you have a Mac or a PC? It's unknown if either no Mac tester build such a huge project - at least I did not hear of one and @R C-R is not ready yet - or if it is a Windows build issue. We will see.

If you're on Mac you may also want to push your project to 40 pages to help answering that question.

For image frame i'm according with you, little better but it's still ok.
And I have a Mac.
I have duplicate a page with complex vector file and big image, until 63 pages, and I have some display bugs, colored square on pages side. But no crash

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3 hours ago, Alfred said:

I’m surprised to hear about those download times, given how very much faster than mine your connection speed usually seems to be! I can generally download a 400 MB file in 400 seconds (i.e. ~7 minutes) or less.

My download speeds from fast web servers averages around 350 mbps, so theoretically I should be able to download a 400 MB file in a little over 10 seconds. Real world speeds are typically 2 to 5 times longer, but anything over a minute for a file that size suggests the servers spacetelescope.org uses can't deliver content very quickly.

 If you want to try downloading the 400 MB file yourself, it is the "Fullsize Original" version of this one, "Hubble's sharpest view of the Orion Nebula." It might be useful for various tests.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
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1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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10 minutes ago, Muadib24 said:

I have duplicate a page with complex vector file and big image, until 63 pages, and all it's ok, Publisher Works fine for me.

Unfortunately duplication does not help here. Publisher is pretty smart on reusing your image for all pages.

Every page needs different linked high-res images. For a quick test this is some work.

In my project I did not attemp to do a test drive. After a quick test like yours I started a big production project that took me over 30 hours.

I lnow that this was risky, but I proceeded with care. After each finished page I saved the Apub file under a new name and exported a backup PDF.

I first noticed problems as Publisher crashed on PDF export. Shortly after the whole app did start crashing on me. At this time I knew my project got bigger as Publisher can handle. It quickly used up 10 GB of memory after opening.

I loaded the last stable version of my apub file and rasterized every image layer. After that memory usage was about 3 GB.

Building up a new page and rasterize all images after final placing let me proceed from double-page 30 to final double-page 43 without any performance issues or crashes.

Today I have already two printed copies of my photobook in shelf and two more are shipping. I needed to adjust some things after a first test print.

This is my story.

I plan to use Publisher again for the next book, but I will do cropping outside the app. It's just to annoying.

Windows 10 Pro x64 (1903). Intel Core i7-9700K @ 3.60GHz, 32 GB memory, NVidia RTX 2080
Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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3 minutes ago, R C-R said:

loading the 400 MB file yourself, it is the "Fullsize Original" version of this one, "Hubble's sharpest view of the Orion Nebula." It might be useful for various tests.

Fullsize original with over 300 MB is a real stress test. :D

My used images more correspond to the 4 MB publication JPG.

But Serif QA may use those 300 MB files to build their own worst case Apub file. At this time I think they have no such a project.

Windows 10 Pro x64 (1903). Intel Core i7-9700K @ 3.60GHz, 32 GB memory, NVidia RTX 2080
Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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6 minutes ago, Steps said:

Fullsize original with over 300 MB is a real stress test. :D

It's kind of funny. I added two pages to my test document (the one with 70+ 4-5 MB jpeg images on page 1) & dragged & dropped the 100 & 400 MB Hubble files onto the new pages one at a time. Since I have set the document to prefer embedded files, each time I dropped a file, APub opened a window asking if I would like to link to the file instead to keep the file size down.

It was almost like the app was pleading with me not to stress it that much. xD

But remarkably, even though the responsiveness of every other application process running on my iMac slowed to a crawl, once the two jumbo images were embedded into the document, the responsiveness of APub itself was only slightly slower than for a one page document with very little on it.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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51 minutes ago, R C-R said:

It's kind of funny. I added two pages to my test document (the one with 70+ 4-5 MB jpeg images on page 1) & dragged & dropped the 100 & 400 MB Hubble files onto the new pages one at a time. Since I have set the document to prefer embedded files, each time I dropped a file, APub opened a window asking if I would like to link to the file instead to keep the file size down.

It was almost like the app was pleading with me not to stress it that much. xD

It may one of the problems that this does not reduce stress at the moment the way linking actually works.

This warnig dialog which you can't turn off is at the moment only nagging, but not helping.

Windows 10 Pro x64 (1903). Intel Core i7-9700K @ 3.60GHz, 32 GB memory, NVidia RTX 2080
Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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On 1/15/2019 at 1:02 AM, fde101 said:

This is highly dependent on what you are doing.  For some types of projects one of those features will save more time than the other, and for other projects it will be the reverse.

When working inside of a company, even a small one (like the 8-person company I worked for before I went freelance again), with separation of labour, these are the kinds of workflows we're dealing with.

Heck, even in most professional work I've done individually as a freelancer, I wasn't even asked to do colour correction or retouching because the materials arrived at my digital doorstep in ready or near-ready form. I'd say more than half of the use cases in the DTP market – save perhaps for a zine/self-publishing thing, and herein lies the issue if that's the market Serif is aiming for –, benefit more from layout automation than from cross-app file manipulation.

May I remind you that I've worked on events, both of the artsy and the medical (really boring) kind, publications (both just the book covers and the whole enchilada, with hundreds of images and hundreds of text pages)…? Never once have I missed this functionality. I keep all my files tidy, and I can get at them quickly and relink them in a heartbeat (well, I only wish right-clicking them in the Links panel wouldn't grind InDesign to a halt, but that's a whole 'nother matter). Not being able to quickly set thousands of words and resize my layout so I can check, on the fly, how they behave, on the other hand, is an absolute non-starter.

I'm not questioning your assertion; of course it would be the reverse for other projects. A minority of them. Which would still be doable without said cross-app editing feature, whereas the projects I am speaking of just can't be done in a serious and professional fashion without basic DTP features. I know this sounds very “road-to-Abilene-ish” (and am I repeating myself here? It certainly feels like it), but it's better to have a decent app which appeals to everyone, professionals and prosumers alike (i.e. current users of Adobe CC, Serif's actual competition and the package it will be compared to by default by reviewers, whether any of us likes it or not), than a superb prosumer app which will be completely panned by professionals (i.e. which will only appeal to users who are content with apps like Corel in the early days, Serif's own defunct Plus suite, MS Publisher, etc. etc.). The latter scenario would make Publisher effectively DOA, whereas the former would buy it some time to limp along with the rest of the Affinity suite while it played catch up with InDesign. While not an ideal situation, that was precisely how Adobe killed Quark in the long run, so I wouldn't be betting against Serif just then if that was the case.

I stand by what I've said: if Serif is investing on that functionality over the missing stuff some people have been clamouring for here in the forums, that's utterly misguided. There's no point in differentiating from your competitors if the basics just aren't there, sorry. If that's what you're all fixated on, the brand new reinvented wheel Serif is selling you, and believe that's the end-all, be-all of DTP, I have a nice, red suspension bridge just like the Golden Gate to sell you as well. ;)

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  • Staff

The readers of this thread would like to try our initial attempt at adding the Master Page text frame and picture frame behaviour and features as discussed in some of the posts in this thread.

Please create new bugs forum threads for any bugs you find or post in this discussion/suggestions forum for missing features.

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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17 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

readers of this thread

Not sure that was relevant to this thread... 

 

18 hours ago, JGD said:

if Serif is investing on that functionality over the missing stuff some people have been clamouring for here in the forums

First of all, some of that functionality stems from a design decision at the start of the Affinity suite that the applications share a common file format.  Some of the existing functionality in Publisher is "inherited" from the design of Designer and Photo, and the ability to transition the files back and forth among the programs ties directly into the common file format that has already been established.  It probably would have taken them much longer to get Publisher off the ground if they did not already have that base to build on, so I don't think that their priorities are even remotely incorrect on this point.

Sometimes a feature you are begging for is best implemented by making use of code or software infrastructure that needs to be put in place first.  If putting that in place makes it easy to provide a less-requested feature that is still useful without significantly more effort, while the "bigger" feature that people are asking for still requires a lot of extra work, I don't think it makes sense to expect them to not provide the "low hanging fruit" features that are made possible along the way.

Some things take longer than others.  There are complexities involved with any large project like this that people on the outside are not necessarily going to be able to identify looking from the outside in.

There is also the fact that different developers have skills in different areas.  Software development is a big and complex field and not all participants have the same skill sets or interests.  Some of these features they are adding might require the skills of one developer while there could be a different developer, with the relevant skills, working on the more important areas that simply take longer to do.

 

Patience...

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20 minutes ago, fde101 said:

Not sure that was relevant to this thread... 

Woops, sorry. Over eager

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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Well, colour me impressed. There's this thing with the pages not auto-linking when empty that doesn't fully convince me, but when there's content in the equation, it does seem to be behaving nicely. I found some other issues, but I'll post them in the appropriate thread instead.

I'll give it a proper spin ASAP, even without the anchored object functionality; either feature would've gotten me to try the beta in earnest, and it's great to see you tackled the most important one first. Even in setting your priorities right, you prioritized right as well (how meta).

Anyway, kudos! You're getting there…

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