Creating mulitpage PDF in Designer

[Sparkie Shock]

Hi .. I'm having a real hard time creating a PDF format of my graphic novels. If I try to use 'Comic life' to produce a PDF is ends up gigabytes in size. My acrobat creator is so old that it barely runs and when it does it crops all sides of the image so I'm missing parts of the pics as the PDF is created (I have tried everything to resolve this). So looking at apps that handle PDF creation I saw that designer will do this. I already use Affinity Photo and like it .. but I can't for the life of me find any user manual info on how to create multiple pages in designer for export to PDF.

I've seen screenshots of an 'overview of pages' mode in designer so I know it's possible .. but how do you do this? I can only open up stuff independently. I'm going out of my mind here can some one PLEASE explain this so I can create a PDF and move on with my life!

Any advice is MUCH appreciated.

Sparkie

[MickRose]

Designer uses "Artboards" rather than pages but they act similarly. The Artboard (A) tool is next to the Move Tool (V). Once you click it you can insert as many Artboards as you want. You can export the file as a PDF with the Artboards coming out as PDF pages. Why don't you download Designer Beta & give it a go?

[Sparkie Shock]

Well I bought the app outright on the app store .. after seeing that it could do PDF creation. But upon opening it there was no obvious 'page' layout .. and the help topic does precisely nothing. Typing 'How to create multiple pages in Designer' in google produced absolutely nothing .. it's one of those REALLY simple things that no you need to know and yet inexplicably has never once been asked on the internet .. ever!

So thank you for answering this .. I'm not really clear on how one creates multiple art boards with a 16:9 ratio at 4000 x 2250 pixels easily .. but at least I have something to go on now. Man making PDF's is WAY more headache than it should be.

Yes I've tried making them from pages .. but that takes forever to load up a document with all my stuff .. and then if you make a mistake you can't re-order or insert new pages (I have no idea why .. but with graphics it does NOT allow you to do that).

Anyway .. I shall go try this out and see what happens. Frankly I'm not sure what Designer does that's so different from photo .. and there's no real explanation of the differences anywhere .. even on the app store the description is kinda vague. I LOVe Affinity photo .. even though I know how to use about 1/2 a percent of it's features.

[Sparkie Shock]

Okay well I created an art board .. seems there's no way to easily just ask it to create a specific size .. one has to zoom right in and carefully pick the pixel size. But now I have this is there any way to have an image snap to the shape of the artboard? Manually aligning these things is going to be tedious otherwise.

NB .. Never mind .. I just found the magnet tool .. does the job nicely.

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, Sparkie Shock said:

Typing 'How to create multiple pages in Designer' in google produced absolutely nothing ..

Try "multiple pages in Affinity Designer," or just click this.

3 hours ago, Sparkie Shock said:

I'm not really clear on how one creates multiple art boards with a 16:9 ratio at 4000 x 2250 pixels easily ..

You could start by creating a new document, ticking the "Create artboard" item in the top section & using (for example) these settings in the Dimensions section:

Then just use the Artboard Tool set to "Size: Document" to create more artboards with the same dimensions.

Note that because Designer artboards are not really directly equivalent to pages, if you export the Designer document to PDF format, the 'page' order will be from bottom to top in the layers panel. If you need to reorder or insert a new artboard, you can do that by dragging artboards to the appropriate place in the Layers panel, but it is going to be tedious if you need a lot of artboard 'pages' because Affinity Designer isn't really intended for this.

A better choice will be Affinity Publisher, but currently it is still in the beta testing stage & not suitable for production work. (If you want to try it out, go to the Affinity Publisher Beta Forums & download the Mac or Windows version from the link in the first post of the 'report bugs' sub-forum, but be sure to read the usage notes in the first topic.)