Affinity Designer Affinity Photo Palette Format

[astar]

Hello Richard,
First of all thank you for creating such a good software.
I have some questions and requests.

• Is it possible to add Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo palette format (*.afpalette) to this wonderful app? If you want I can add a sample palette file for you.
• Is there a way to add alpha information to colors for supporting palettes?
• I want to translate this app to Turkish, can you provide necessary xml (or any other format) scheme for internationalization?
  
• Can you add portable version to dowload section? (installation is problem because of admin rights at offices)
  

[Richard Moss]

Hello,

Welcome to the forums and thanks for the questions!

Ideally, I'd like Palette Editor to support as many formats as possible, assuming I have a documented format to work with, or sample code. I have issued #29 logged for Affinity Support. A sample palette would be helpful, especially if it includes a matching palette in another format as a reference. However, unless the format is easily deciphered or has a specification published it may take (much) longer before support is available.

The current builds of the editor don't allow the alpha channel to be edited, although behind the scenes it is fully supported. This is mainly because the editor was originally conceived for editing "old school" palettes for which alpha wasn't a concern and I didn't really want to expose features that would be "lost" if you saved palettes between formats. I had plans for introducing a new editing tab which would allow you to directly manipulate the raw values (including for color spaces the software currently doesn't support), at which point I intended on allowing alpha editing as well.

The palette editor was the first application I deliberately added localisation support too, as I naively thought it a simple enough application to do it in  The main issue is that all strings are auto translated using Azure cognitive services which I think may have issues with small phrases and no context. As with a lot of other things, I had planned on adding an extension that would allow you to edit the strings directly, but at the same time I wanted to wait until I was sure I wasn't going to be adding or changing strings.

In the installation folder (e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\Cyotek\Color Palette Editor\) there is a language folder, with a sub folder for each supported language. In each of these folders are 3 files

• language.json has a description of the language
• language.txt is a list of key value pairs for the languages
• language.dat is a simple binary version of the text file which the editor uses

You can edit the text file, but the program won't pick up your changes as it uses the binary file by default. There is an override system by having a text file in your application data folder structure, but I haven't tested this formally given I don't provide any tools yet for allowing easy editing of the source values, nor the ability to easily reconcile the changes.

I would love to have some user supplied corrections to auto generated text, I should probably write a KB article and put some tools in place. Or use a more "standard" format like po.

I've attached a machine translated Turkish version to this reply - if you do make any corrections to the text file that would be helpful but please don't go out of your way to do this as I can't guarantee that I wouldn't change the original English phrases in subsequent updates which could potentially cause the affected statements to be different. Also note that there may be duplicates as it is working on UI keys, not phrase uniqueness. As I noted, the system is in a bit in flux and will definitely be improved over time!

Alternatively, if you can clarify how accurate the machine translation is and if it's not totally junk I'd be happy to include it in future builds of the software.

Finally, in regards to the portability. This question comes up every so often and apologies for not answering directly, but instead point to this answer I made in 2016. I regret saying this, but things haven't really changed - supporting WebCopy is eating so much time that nothing progresses any more unless it is critical. That will change soon though so hopefully I'll finally be pushing updates to the other products. I'm pretty sure I've said that before too 

I hope this helps, if not please let me know.

Regards;
Richard Moss

[astar]

Thanks for your fast reply. And sorry for answering late.
I have a look for the machine translation file you shared.
It is not junk, it is %90 ok at least for menus (long paragraphs a little problematic)
To give you an opinion I attached the translated parts that should be changed on the top menu bar only.

For your decision about don't adding properties that can be lost during palet transitons, according to me as long as user knows what will be lost during saving (just like you do while saving act files) it is not a problem.

For portability, I am really looking forward it. Anyway is there any other way to get rid of need for admin rights to install?
I know some installation programs that can be installed to any place but don't want admin rights to install.

I also attached affinity photo version of a palette that you share with the palette editor sample files. (arne-v20-16.ase)