Transferring Prism graphs to Affinity Designer

Affinity Designer (AD) is a popular vector-based design program for Windows and Mac. If you try to bring a Prism graph (or layout) into Designer, you may encounter some problems but these can easily be bypassed.

Here are the issues we know about and workarounds (as of Feb 2019). 

Windows:

If you copy/paste into AD, there are issues in rendering the plotting area, lines in the embedded table, text objects, angled text objects, segmented axes, axis ticks, etc. Fortunately, there is a great workaround. Export from Prism as a PDF file and import it to Affinity Designer. PDF is a vector-based format which renders properly in AD and can be further edited.

Mac:

If you copy/paste, graph elements randomly lose their text, color, transparency and some components are in the wrong place. The workaround is to first copy in Prism (on the Mac, the clipboard format is PDF) and then use (in AD) ’File->New From Clipboard’. Alternatively, export from Prism as a PDF or EPS file and import that into AD.

We are looking into ways we can make Prism more compatible with AD, but transferring PDF works great.