Affinity Publisher locked by "Welcome screen"

[Harpenstreng]

When I start Affinity Publisher (1.7.0.238 Beta) the Welcome Screen fills the entire screen and the program is totally unresponsive. I can only activate the program by opening a Publisher document from the file Explorer. There seems to be no way of stopping Publisher from starting with the Welcome Screen.

[walt.farrell]

There's an option on the Welcome screen not to show it again. But if the other controls on that screen aren't available to you that one messy not be, either.

I'm not sure why the Welcome screen would be that big. What do you have set for your Windows Display Scaling setting?

Do you have multiple monitors attached?

[Harpenstreng]

Primary screen: 3840x2160 (scaling 250%). Secondary screen: 1920x1200 (scaling 100%).

I have only used my bigger secondary screen for Publisher work (mostly by opening existing documents), but I just opened Publisher on my primary screen and everything looked fine (unchecked the show screen option now). There seems to be a problem that should be addressed, though.

PS. Publisher does not suffer from the scaling problems that some Adobe products do (apart from the size of the very large arrows on handles).

[walt.farrell]

It sounds to me like Publisher was scaling the image to match the scaling of your primary monitor rather than the monitor you actually opened it on.

I don't recall if I've seen that mentioned as a bug previously, but I know there have been other multi-monitor issues. One of the Serif staff will have a comment, I'm sure

[Chris B]

Hey Harpenstreng,

I recently started using a 4k monitor alongside a 1080 monitor on Windows (200% and 100% scaling respectively) and it's a bit of a nightmare to be honest. At home I have 2x 1080 monitors and a 1440p monitor and never experienced any of this but I think this is because all three were using 100% scaling.

I'm finding occasionally right-click menus are either enormous or tiny, the Welcome screen on occasion has been far too big and the New Document window appears cut off at the top.

I would suggest doing what Walt said and disable the Welcome Screen but I think the issue is just poor Windows scaling. I never had these issues with a similar macOS setup.

These issues also affect a lot of other apps such as Outlook and some PDF viewers I have installed.

[Harpenstreng]

Hi Chris,

I find it very strange that Windows software made by big companies (e.g. Adobe) have these problems when many open source programs (like digikam - which is a product made primarily for Linux) handle different monitors without problems. And it doesn't surprise me that Apple has addressed these issues.

[walt.farrell]

7 hours ago, Chris B said:

but I think the issue is just poor Windows scaling. I never had these issues with a similar macOS setup

Have you run this by the Developers to see if there's some Affinity issue with multiple monitors, Chris?

I know that there was (is?) an Affinity bug when the monitors have different color profiles.

And though I don't know how scaling is handled, if there's anything special the program has to do then perhaps Affinity also has a problem when multiple monitors have different scaling values set, too.

[Chris B]

On 2/20/2019 at 6:11 PM, walt.farrell said:

Have you run this by the Developers to see if there's some Affinity issue with multiple monitors, Chris?

It affects all sorts of Windows apps so I haven't mentioned it yet, no. 

Harpenstreng even said that Publisher doesn't suffer from some scaling issues that some Adobe products do so we might already do something in this area. Is it possible to get a screenshot of the initial problem?