Artboards as pages or canvases (split)

[Lutz Pietschker]

I have a similar question to this thread, but symbols are no help for me. In AI I use layers primarily to switch visibility during the drawing process and to make sure that certain objects are always and reliably on top of certain others (for example, all text above art, and everything on top of a background picture, which for me translates to 3 layers: from top to bottom, text > art > background). Also, I might wish later to make all objects of a certain layer, say, 50% transparent. All this should work across all artboards.

How does that (rather common) use of layers mix with artboards in AD? Since artboards are part of the layer hierarchy I see no way to do this. In https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/53445-artboards-and-layers/ you say "you can think of them as several canvas on the same document all sharing the same layer stack/hierarchy", but "canvas" is exactly what they should be, but are not – they seem to be, for all purposes, just layers with the additional ability to break the document down into pages. Currently it seems to me that artboards should be top-level objects in the layer hierarchy to achieve the paging, but at the same time my layers should be the top level to achieve my use case. Is there a solution to this dilemma?

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, Lutz Pietschker said:

Currently it seems to me that artboards should be top-level objects in the layer hierarchy ...

In Affinity, the top level object is the document itself. Every layer the document is one or more levels below that. Artboards can be at any level, for example as a child of a capital L container Layer or a child of a Group container layer, or even as a child of a container layer that is a child of another container layer. You can think of Artboards as a separate canvases but they are completely independent of all the other layers only if they are not child layers of any other layer.