Affinity Publisher Color Settings - PDF Print vs PDF Export

[betzalel@project314.org]

I'm using Windows 10 and Publisher 1.7.0.305, and I had problems with outputting a PDF that was balanced in color.  

My document had three elements; 1) a parchment type background, 2) a smaller white semi-transparent overlay, and 3) text and images on top of these things.  Originally, I tried to apply a light shadow feature beneath the white overlay with the "outer shadow" function, and found that in many cases the shadow blended or collided in very strange ways with the parchment layer beneath when I generated a PDF file (using the "print" function).  I was able to get the shadowing and transparency to work out after trying different blend modes and color formats and profiles, but after doing so, I was getting strange blending effects and tinting between the my monitor (based on the default WYSIWYG / editor palette color settings) and the actual PDF file that the print driver would output.  It seems that no color formats or profiles could yield satisfactory results until I used the EXPORT function instead of the PRINT function. 

I don't know if this is how the program is supposed to work, but this is contrary to every other program that I have used, which tend to give either a perfect match or a very close match between the screen and the PDF print driver output.  It may be how this is supposed to work (for sophisticated print functions), but I will say that using the export function is not intuitive for me, and where I've used programs which do exports, there is a match between the files regardless of the use of the PRINT or EXPORT function.

Apart from colors, I had a number of problems with margin/bleed/crop/page size settings.  These functions worked fine in the Affinity Publisher program, but it would be nice if these functions were integrated into the same tab or dialogue box or window, along with a little (visual) guideline as to briefly explain how these are typically used.  I was using KDP and was getting a lot of errors on the file even though all of my content was within print areas as defined for a 8.5x11" book because I didn't fully understand what KDP expected, and I think if these are soft settings embedded in the PDF file that the KDP is using these parameters in the background to determine if the file is suitable or not.  Theoretically, there should be a number of ways that one could express these parameters and get an acceptable output, unless, of course, the printer has expectations as to how the file particulars (i.e., margin/bleed/crop/page size) are configured.  Like I said, I wouldn't consider this to be a bug, but I think there's room for improvement and consolidation to make this bleed/crop process more logical.