loukash

Haha, touché! Well, that's the beauty of understanding the subject of typography, isn't it?

P.S. Of course, I'm not using Arial for PDF export or printing! Hey, I'm not that weird. It's just for the display layout.

That includes my trusty old pre-Retina MBP 2008 as well. In fact, my ambivalent relationship with Arial goes as far back as a purple iMac DV 400, back in 2000… Yeah, same here. For example, my main computer 1994–1998 was my then-flatmate's PowerBook 140 with a monochrome display and a whopping 40 MB hard drive. It could run PageMaker 4 though, so I was happy with it. It depends on the glasses: For reading and for computer work, currently I've recycled the spectacles I was wearing when I was like 12-13, i.e. 45 years ago. (I replaced the frames, of course…) They just work nicely for distances around 50–70 cm. I've posted this screenshot a few years ago in another context on this forum, but here it is, Arial in one of my FM databases in action: With Helvetica – or any other sans serif font for that matter – it just didn't work for me the way I wanted it. The core of this database is over 25 years old. In fact, one of my archived early versions was created on 19 August 1999… ~~~ Back on topic: Hey, it could have been worse! Comic Sans, anyone?

Speaking of Arial, it can cause me literally physical pain when I'm looking at it printed on paper. And boy, was I angry when one of my former clients decided to change their corporate identity and forced me to use Georgia (which is alright) and Arial (ouch!) for the brochures I laid out for them, replacing Helvetica Neue. But… There are instances when Arial is hard to beat in terms of readability, and that's when it's used at small sizes on a computer display. After all, essentially that's what it was originally designed and optimized for. For example, I do some FileMaker programming every now and then: Arial 9pt is perfect for UI labels, and Arial 11pt for text fields, easily readable on any of my 15" MacBooks. And yes, of course at first I tried Helvetica et al; Arial just works better in those situations, no matter how hard I tried…

I don't remember the default MacOS keyboard shortcut for "Emoji & Symbols" as I usually modify many of those shortcuts anyway (hey, my muscle memory goes as far back as System 7 and I don't like to change my habits all too often… ) But it could be that an Affinity shortcut conflicts with it, and overrides it.

@JoJu means the global MacOS Character Viewer which is – confusingly enough – listed in every Edit menu as "Emoji & Symbols" (at least on Ventura).

Yes, but that's in APu only. Exactly, at least in those that are apparently based on NSText. In Photo, you can e.g. use a field in the Metadata panel to temporarily input the shortcuts, then copy & paste into a text frame.

Probably because Affinity text frames don't utilize Apple's NSText framework. Which they can't because otherwise they wouldn't be compatible with the Windows versions. It works with third party text expanders, however. Keyboard Maestro can do it, among many others.

https://affinity.help/publisher2/en-US.lproj/pages/ObjectControl/objectDefaults.html

Bin ganz deiner Meinung! Be aware though that you can change your defaults to fit your workflow. My default font of choice is now Menlo. However, it can be a bit of p.i.t.a. to set up. I still don't remember the exact steps to make it work, but eventually I somehow made it work…

Hi Emilio, this bug still hasn't been fixed. We have explored a couple of very clunky workarounds here:

On Mac, there's a nice free app to batch edit PDF metadata: apps.apple.com/app/pdf-meta/id1595787174

Amazing!

It can read iView catalogs! Well, that's definitely something worth to try.

Ah, I should have read on before replying above… You're actually confirming what I just said. Cheers!

… is not "missing". It's literally called StudioLink. Um, nope. What actually ties Adobe apps together is Bridge. I, for one, couldn't care less about Lightroom. I'm a designer, not a photographer. Much like I, for one, couldn't care less about an "Affinity Lighttable" (or whatever it would be called). Affinity is a graphic design suite, not a photo editing suite, hence the "missing link" it needs is something like Bridge or iView/Expression Media.

Hm… the bot has been generally quite quiet lately. Is he/she also on summer holidays, perhaps…?

Yes, curves are not an issue. It affects only live text. ~~~ A possibly related bug: The Stroke popover panel in the Appearance panel is missing the Texture Line Style button when used on live text:

Affinity Designer, affects v1 as well as v2, also both MacOS desktop and iPad versions. Tested on MacBook Air M2 15", MacOS Ventura, and iPad 8th, iPadOS 16.7.2 Steps to reproduce: apply a vector brush stroke to text give the stroke any color set the stroke to "Order: Draw stroke behind" the stroke becomes black for solid brushes or "black-ish" with color tint for transparent brushes, even though the color well still displays the applied color Draw stroke in front: Draw stroke behind:

[offtopic] I know. Would you like to browse all my 42 pages worth of attachments for me to find that link…? (That was a rhetorical question.) But for the record: the Other Media > Insert Existing Attachment button in the Submit Reply form, on the other hand, takes me to a window where I can actually search the attachments by keywords. Yep, I'm giving my attachments reasonable file names so that I can get back to them later. But it doesn't tell me where they have been used. [/offtopic, please do not reply to this!]

As I said: For example, I had an ID brochure layout where I was in fact using tables as a clunky workaround because ID originally lacked other options to format the paragraphs the way I wanted, with multiple lines and background colors. At least as of CS3, that is; unfortunately I didn't have the budget to change the template layout after upgrading to CS5.5 where it maybe may have been possible. Nonetheless, it was a p.i.t.a. to maintain over the years, because the data came via XML import and auto-formating (something I still miss in APu though, duh!). But importing XML to table templates was (possibly still is?) a major p.i.t.a. in ID because it requires precise hierarchy, otherwise it will just silently fail. So in this particular scenario, I definitely don't miss it… Whereas the paragraph decorations in Publisher did exactly what I needed, even without XML, importing as a plain tab-separated text, combined with some smart conditional paragraph formating and Find & Replace. Formating the brochures in APu was then about twice as fast as in ID5.5: ^ Screenshot from my forum archives; apparently I've already posted this example before.

That's definitely a flaw. But there's a couple of workarounds, admittedly a bit clunky: Also, rather than using tables like in ID back in the day, in some scenarios I found a much easier workflow to simply use regular text frames with multiple paragraph decorations; in a way that wouldn't even been possible in ID (as of CS5.5 which was the last version I've used).

You can "squeeze" them with Affinity export as well. Just don't use the default presets. In the Advanced tab you have several options how to "squeeze" your pixels directly at export. It's mainly about DPI, downsampling, and JPEG compression. And also about ICC profile embedding; especially CMYK profiles will add additional MB.

That will rasterize all content. To keep the PDF file size low, this is definitely the last thing you would want to do. Adobe PDF is definitely classes better in optimizing the output than PDFlib which is what Affinity is utilizing. To work around that, make sure to avoid any unnecessary rasterizing in the document itself. Adjustment layers and layer effects are the most common culprits. When exporting drafts to send to clients, usually I'm massively reducing the DPI and the JPEG compression for downsampled images in the export dialog. E.g. for proof reading, my clients are usually fine with images being downsampled to 150 DPI at JPEG compression 60.

So they have four weeks to eat the cake and keep more than half of it, too. Ain't life great…?