Open and close wings easily

[levelbest]

I only just opened Designer. It looks promising. I looked through what I could find and I did not see any easy way - or any way, to open and close the wings. This means the left and right panels - not the skinny tools menu but the wide area for page views and adjusting colors, etc.

Perhaps this is a known issue and will be out later in a beta release? I am working through something now using Swift Publisher. Not really in the same league but perfectly useful for what I am doing. I want to maximize my screen space on a vertical monitor while I work on a layout. Naturally I also want to open a side panel fairly often to adjust an element. This makes it imperative that there is a quick and easy method to open and close each wing so that the work flow is not interrupted.

Swift allows this. I can't imagine why Publisher wouldn't also do this.

[MikeW]

ctrl+shift+h hides the Studios (as they are called).

tab hides studios + tools.

Hiding the studios likely could be reassigned to some other keystroke combination if desired.

[levelbest]

4 minutes ago, MikeW said:

ctrl+shift+h hides the Studios (as they are called).

 

Thanks, there was no mention of how to do this using the help menu and no obvious way to adjust this in the view menus. It might be a good idea to think about how to make this more clear to the user. But, I'll take it.

Can they be individually hidden or is this all or nothing? There will be times I want to see a strip of pages in a document that I want to quickly arrow back and forth. This seems to exist in the left "studio". Other times I want want to keep the right studio open to adjust some page elements and leave the left studio closed to maximize screen real estate while I am working.

[MikeW]

All or nothing. There is no facility (that I know of) to open one particular studio by a key command or to set one (or more) studio(s) to not hide when ctrl+shift+h is invoked.

The Help is not in any way finished in this beta. I've not used it so I don't know whether it is there but in a hard to find location or not, wrong keywords, etc.

You can find this command drilling down in the View menu commands in preferences should you wish to assign a different keystroke. As well, it is in the application's View menu, Studio, at the bottom it shows this command.

[levelbest]

Just now, MikeW said:

All or nothing. There is no facility (that I know of) to open one particular studio by a key command or to set one (or more) studio(s) to not hide when ctrl+shift+h is invoked.

 

OK, then that is a clear bit of feedback to the Affinity Designer team. Please make it so that you can expand or collapse either the left or right studio, or both of them. I am working now with Swift and I am opening and closing mostly the right side panel quite often with occasional use of the left side panel. Each panel has a way to independently open or close it. This keeps the most screen real estate available at any given time. 

[carl123]

The default left-hand Pages & Assets studios can be permanently moved to the right-hand studio hierarchy as extra tabs in the existing panels.

Giving you permanent extra screen space on the left-hand side of the screen, without you losing quick access to those studios as and when needed.

You can then quickly hide/unhide all the right-hand studios using a keyboard shortcut (as previously mentioned).