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News & Updates

Affinity 2.3 is here!

by Melanie Khareghat
Version 2.3 introduces the highly requested Spiral Tool as well as some great new capabilities and improvements. Here are five things you need to know about our latest update, which is free to download for V2 customers.

1. You can easily create complex spirals

The addition of a Spiral Tool allows the quick and easy creation of a wide variety of complex spirals including, Linear, Decaying, Semi-circular, Fibonacci and Plotted.

In this video, our in-house product expert, Katy, explains how to use the Spiral Tool and take advantage of its customisable parameters for greater flexibility.

Learn how to use the Spiral Tool – new in version 2.3.

2. A new Pixel Grid is available in all apps

UI designers and photo editors alike will benefit from the new Pixel Grid option, which can be turned on in addition to the main grid and appears when zoomed in for precision editing.

For Affinity Designer users, the new grid feature provides a valuable supporting visual aid when doing UI work such as designing icons.

In Affinity Photo, this option is especially useful when editing zoomed-in images as it helps editors visualise the pixels. Moreover, using a different grid colour can help when there is little colour variance in the image. While a grid option has been present in Affinity Photo, users now have the option to toggle it on and off.

Learn how to enable and use the Pixel Grid in Affinity Designer for workflows where pixel-based precision is required.

3. You can create and place password-protected PDFs

As data protection and security demands become ever-tighter, Affinity products now allow users to create and place password-protected PDFs.

Our product expert, Ben, covers how to password-protect PDFs exported from Affinity Publisher, including restricting operations such as printing and editing, in this video.

Learn how to password-protect PDFs exported from Affinity Publisher.

4. Affinity Publisher has a new Tags Panel

The new Tags Panel in Affinity Publisher allows you to add alt text to any image or object when exported to PDF for accessibility purposes. Ben covers how to create custom alt text descriptions, utilise XMP data and mark elements as decoration, in this video.

Learn how to make your digital PDFs more accessible by leveraging Alt Text supported by screen readers.

5. We’ve made improvements to Move Data Entry

After reviewing feedback from the previous beta, we’re pleased to say we’ve been able to implement a few requests to Move Data Entry.

  1. You can now choose to create duplicates in front or behind the original using the new Insertion mode options
  2. Scale has now been added, allowing you to quickly resize an object by a given percentage (when creating duplicates, the scale percentage will also apply to every subsequent duplicate—this can also be combined with other transforms)
  3. Properties of the object being transformed can now be adjusted without dismissing the dialog.
User-requested improvements have been made to Move Data Entry.

Find out more about Affinity 2.3

For a full list of new features and improvements, visit the Affinity website: affin.co/WhatsNew.

Don’t own Affinity V2?

If you’re a new customer or wish to upgrade from V1 to V2, check out our purchase options or sign up for a 30-day free trial.