![]() ![]() The document I have been describing is the key, or legend, for the cross stitch pattern. Further work included setting the alignments and insets of the cells in the table which was quite simple to achieve with the Table tool active. I hunted around and found a button on the context-sensitive toolbar labeled “Transform Objects Separately.” I was in business! Having clicked this, I typed in 4.4mm and all of the images increased in size in unison. The bounding box on the screen surrounded them all and… the scale window now showed the total size of the group. A click on one end of the layer list and Shift-click on the other got me all 37 selected in a snap. While I was doing that I noticed the layers palette contained a single layer per image and, as I had inserted them one after the other, they were all together. But how could I efficiently scale the other 37 images? I started selecting all of them using the Command key and clicking, but that seemed fussy. With the move tool selected I could click on an image and either drag or type in a new dimension. Each image was 2.2mm square but I needed them bigger. Having inserted 38 images into their respective cells, the next problem I had was scale. Anyway, once I knew where it was, it was a cinch. What I was missing was that the menu command to insert the image file was on the File menu - a menu I always think of as containing only “whole of document” actions. Then I found a way but it seemed very inefficient, so I asked in the Affinity online forum and was pointed to the almost obvious answer. ![]() At first, I couldn’t work out how to do it. With the final release version installed, I decided to tackle my image-containing table. What follows is not so much a review as a telling of my early experience… and joy… in using the product, but I will give you a an idea of the breadth of features at the end. As a beta tester, I was offered a healthy discount and, on my limited experience and my faith in the other Affinity products, I took the offer. The beta program ran for nine months and concluded with the first general release on June 19th, 2019. I did try one other document type and was successful, but decided I would wait until the final product was released. I have an absolute need to insert small images into table cells and the early beta could not do that. I have to say I hit a hurdle almost straight away. I joined the beta program right away to see how Publisher would fare. Imagine my joy when Serif, makers of Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer - both “Adobe killers” in their own right - released a public beta of Affinity Publisher. As a page layout application, Pages is at the very simple end of the capability scale. In fact, I had to subtly change some of the design elements where Pages could not easily replicate the original InDesign capability. Although I had access to Microsoft Word, I’ve never been a fan of it, so I turned to Apple’s Pages. ![]() Roll forward some years and I had to let go of InDesign. I was learning as I went, not least with the help of my brother who is a professional graphic designer and long-time Adobe user. In the beginning, I had access to Adobe InDesign and used that to lay out the various documents required for each product. While she is the one with artistic flair in our family when it comes to putting together a printed product, that falls to my technical abilities. Years ago my wife started a small business designing and selling cross stitch patterns online. Allister Jenks here, back again with a first look at some fantastic new software. ![]()
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