Mike W077

Dear Affinity: There has been resistance in the developer community to porting apps to Linux, but now would be a good time. I think with ONE professional content creation company making the move, there would be a flood to the apps and platform.

We are way out in the weeds here but I seem to recall a situation where I had to apply some sort of over-ride in a long paragraph to keep the text in one a frame.

Hi SPaceBar:
That you for your attention to this. Caused me great angst. I was able to finish the publication on my 27" Intel iMac (2017, I5, 24gb, AP 1.9). However, even it had crashing problems. On the new M1 (2020, 13" Air, 16gb, AP 1.9.1), I was able to get it to load without crashing one time. It is a 24 page large format, magazine style newspaper, with lots (50+) of different stories and links ads. Plus photos. The ads are in both PDF and native designer. We are out of the office now, but I will send it on Monday, March 8, if that's OK with you.

My feeling is that those workarounds are more trouble than just using separate text frames until such time as real column spanning is implemented. Having a separate text frame is not so bad when it is at the top of a story. Spanning columns is really helpful when it is needed somewhere other than the top of the story, but these workarounds don't seem to be any help in such cases.

On this site www.phoenixaerospace.us you can download the complete Corel Ventura 10 User Guide. It would be nice if the A-team read it and implement some of its capabilities in Publisher.

Note concerning split/span columns.
Split columns is a poor imitation of Ventura's ability to have "side-by-side" paragraphs. That applies to both ID & QXP. Split columns, if Serif sees fit to implement split columns, they should haver offsets configurable (unequal column widths) if desired.
Span columns as available in Both ID & QXP, have certain limitations. Should Serif sees fit to implement them, how text flows following the span should be configurable.

Sorry Tags is an old expression for styles. You'll  need to create a style for the first line or paragraph of text that is under your No Break text. Ideally the first line should be empty, just a hard return.
Then adjust the Below Paragraph spacing to force the text below the No Break text and even with the text in the left column.
Regards, M@

My first Xerox Ventura GEM workstation in the mid 80's was comprised of a 80386 PC with a Wyse 700 monochrome monitor and a Xerox 4000 laser printer cost $35,000!
Xerox allowed me to use the setup for a month as a trial because they really wanted to sell these setups.
I did a demo of the system to the senior managers at the time and I showed them how fast I could import a 300 page budget document and format the entire document in a day. At that time our budget documents were printed on dot matrix printers the bound together in a huge book (11"x17"). I also showed them how I could import a pre-tagged document and drastically reduce the amount of time it would take to complete a document design.
They were really impressed and so began my career as an computer-based graphic designer! Fun times!
Ventura was unmatched in power and productivity for years. I used to laugh out loud at PageMaker and Quark users who would have to pay several hundred more dollars for their software and still not even come close to half the features of Ventura.

Thanks Peter!
I agree. Span Columns doesn't seem to be a feature that would be that hard to implement given they're half way there with the No Break feature.
Let me know if you have any issues or questions.
Regards
M@

Many thanks mliving,
I'll have a go in the morning.
But why is it so difficult to mimic what was so easy in InDesign CS6. At least now I can create style sheets so customers can "just use them" rather than struggle, or create a page full of multi frames!
I too was on Ventura from the early days of DOS. I joined the Ventura User Group and even offered myself as a prize at a few major meetings in London, offering to give a day's training to the lucky prizewinner. Which went very well and became a firm friends and colleagues.
Like you I moved on I needed something for much more integrated page layouts ... but first to Pagemaker, QuarkXpress then InDesign beta then through the CS series and now ["thank the gods"] Affinity Publisher. 
Cheers Peter

Column Span YES!
Here's my work around for column spanning.
Create a paragraph tag for the text/paragraph you want to span and uncheck No Break in Positioning and Transform. Create a column break tag for the bottom of the column that matches the current text/paragraph settings for the text to force it to the next column.
(This tag also helps you find column overflow problems) Create a top of column tag and set its Below Paragraph spacing to match the paragraph immediately below the text/paragraph you created the No Break tag. Now you can quickly use tags to manage column span and break in an easy and efficient manner. Hope this helps! I've had a smile on my face while reading the comments from all the old Corel Ventura users in this forum.
Believe it or not I used Ventura Publisher when it was first introduced by Xerox back in 1986. Back then my desktop was the ONLY stand-alone PC desktop in an organization full of Mainframe terminals. I was always amazed by Ventura's ability to handle virtually every type of document and/or publication I threw at it, especially very large documents (500pgs+). SGML tags blew me away and it did not take me long to harness their power. I had office automation groups teach basic tagging to users that regularly sent me large documents for design and importing these pre-tagged documents into Ventura saved an incredible amount of production time, literally hours spent tagging document elements.
I stuck with Ventura until the mid 2000's when I sadly had to move to Adobe CS for production and compatibility reasons.
The last Adobe CS version I purchased and still use is CS6, the final stand-alone version. I refused to pay a monthly subscription for my software.
Since Adobe CS stand-alone versions were end-lifed I've had been looking for an alternative and thank the gods for Affinity! I have been very pleased with Affinity's Design Suite and only hope more professional designers give this amazing software a try.

Hey fellow Affinityites, serious question: What is the deal with this missing feature? I use all 3 Affinity products to design our monthly publication, but back in 1990s, we used Corel Draw to design our ads (I had a gap in my publishing career :-)). Draw had this feature back then. Affinity users have been clamoring for this feature for years now (times flies!). I didn't use it a lot back in the day, and I know there are work-arounds using Photo, but the fact that it is missing from Designer seems to diminish the reputation of the software. So, why is it missing? Is it difficult to implement in the code? Is Serif trying to give users a reason to pay for an upgrade to 2.0? (We would upgrade anyway.) It seems the same with the inexplicably missing "Span columns" feature in Publisher. It's a basic feature and the lack of it seems to diminish the reputation of the software vis-a-vis Adobe. Does anyone have any insight, or maybe some inside scoop on this? Any idea when, or if, it will be implemented? Are these features just hard to implement? No snark please. I am sincerely asking. Thanks.

This is how i approached it, Paul. There may be smarter ways, though.
1. Duplicate the layer/object
2. Apply a New Live Filter of the type Gaussian Blur
3. Add a Mask Layer to the blurred layer
4. Apply a black to white gradient. Black will reveal the bottom layer, the one that isn't blurred.

You can also change the units from the Context toolbar when the View Tool (hand) is selected. Quicker than going into the Document menu.

Pariah73: Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Serif and Affinity. I use their products daily to produce work. I even bought products (Publisher, iPad Designer and Photo) that I can't/don't use just to support the company and its wonderful efforts. Here's the concern: When we bring up these basic features that are missing, there is no feedback or response. Will they be added at some point or not? Is the company hearing daily users? Do they realize that while we can work around or live with missing features for a while, it would be nice to know that someone is listening and perhaps if and when they might be coming. Just that would make all the difference. In any relationship, communication is the key 🙂. BTW, the snarky comments from Affinity preview version testers — I am not referring to you — who seem to regard themselves as our betters, don't help and just turn people off. Just FYI. 

I'd like to add my request for Para Style to include the option to span all columns in the frame.
I suggest this is essential for structured consistent page layouts.

Adding my vote for this feature. Span/Split columns is hugely useful.

would be

I want the multi column text / span column feature too
+1

I think it depends on your work. For people whose text/article blocks can move or be rearranged during production, it's a must. Also, it just seems like a basic function that got overlooked and now programmers aren't sure how to implement/integrate it. It's not a sin. Things get overlooks. Maybe it's hard to implement. Who knows? However, without it, I cannot make Publisher my production program and have to stick with ID. That's just me. It would be nice if they would let us know where it is in the roadmap. 
I do want to point out that the greatest, most powerful yet easy-to-use page layout program, Corel Ventura, which was cruelly euthanized by its owner, had the span column feature back in the 1990s, over 20 years ago. It was, like most things with Ventura, elegantly implemented and easy to use. It just seems that 20 years later a program that deigns to be a professional tool would include Span Columns as a matter of course. Again, just my view. Don't freak out, people, I actually own and (try to) use Publisher whenever I can.  

I think it depends on your work. For people whose text/article blocks can move or be rearranged during production, it's a must. Also, it just seems like a basic function that got overlooked and now programmers aren't sure how to implement/integrate it. It's not a sin. Things get overlooks. Maybe it's hard to implement. Who knows? However, without it, I cannot make Publisher my production program and have to stick with ID. That's just me. It would be nice if they would let us know where it is in the roadmap. 
I do want to point out that the greatest, most powerful yet easy-to-use page layout program, Corel Ventura, which was cruelly euthanized by its owner, had the span column feature back in the 1990s, over 20 years ago. It was, like most things with Ventura, elegantly implemented and easy to use. It just seems that 20 years later a program that deigns to be a professional tool would include Span Columns as a matter of course. Again, just my view. Don't freak out, people, I actually own and (try to) use Publisher whenever I can.  

Ah, Ventura Publisher, a favorite of mine.  I dearly wish Corel had spun it out or sold it off to another software company nstead of letting it simply die.  I have an install of VenPub that just barely runs on Windows 7 with lots of screen update glitches.  There is no hope of getting it running reliably on Windows 10.
Yes, there are lots of things you can (could) do in VenPub that you can't yet do in AffPub.

Sorry, no. The Span Columns feature is very simple: Just add the optional paragraph attribute "Span Columns" and a variable of how many columns you want a particular paragraph, such as a title or heading, to span. That's it. When this feature is invoked, the paragraph with this attribute will go across the number of column specified, but only that paragraph. It will have all the formatting assigned to it, but just span across columns.  It is vital for making headlines where you need the title or headline to span the entire text box while the rest of the text flows into the columns in the text box. It is very handy and essential when resizing text boxes. If the headline is in a separate text box. you have to resize and reformat TWO text boxes and make sure they are correctly aligned every time you change something. What a pain! This "Span columns" is really elementary stuff. As I have said before, Quark, ID, and even the old Ventura Publisher have had this basic, essential feature since the 1990s. I am not criticizing, just observing and making the point that for me as a newspaper, magazine publisher for more than a quarter century, it is an essential feature. I would LOVE to switch to AP, but really can't as long as this feature is missing. I am probably not the only one. 

It's funny, the importance of key features like Span Columns that are vital to everyday users, seem to be obtuse to programmers. Then, when users point out the need for these key features, programmers seem to get their back up and refuse to put them in on some kind of "principle." The late, lamented, Corel Ventura Publisher had the span columns feature back in the 1990s. SMH  Because of this lack of one basic feature, I am still using Adobe InDesign. 
I also don't use Adobe Illustrator because of 2 simple feature quirks: 
1) You can't align strokes on text to the outside, meaning that you always have to have strokes impeding in on the text. That is insane. I use this technique quite a bit for super-imposing text on noisy backgrounds. Yes, there are kludgy workarounds, but users shouldn't have to figure something like this out. Yet, AI programmers refuse to implement this basic feature. Nothing but sheer stubbornness can explain it after all these years. 
2) And this second one is the worst of the two: When selecting objects in AI, EVERYTHING your cursor touches is selected, including the background. That's insane. When you do many projects, as I do, you reuse elements rather than recreating them each time. You want to quickly select just a particular group of elements without selecting everything else, With Illustrator this is impossible. AI users have complained bitterly about this for DECADES, yet, there is still no option just to select those things INSIDE a selection box.  Again, nothing but sheer stubbornness or hubris on the part of programmers can explain it after all these years. It is the single biggest reason I use Affinity Designer, rather than AI. 
That said, I hope that Affinity programmers don't fall into the same, "we know better" arrogance as the Adobe programmers. No "span columns" is one of those worrisome things. 

I think it depends on your work. For people whose text/article blocks can move or be rearranged during production, it's a must. Also, it just seems like a basic function that got overlooked and now programmers aren't sure how to implement/integrate it. It's not a sin. Things get overlooks. Maybe it's hard to implement. Who knows? However, without it, I cannot make Publisher my production program and have to stick with ID. That's just me. It would be nice if they would let us know where it is in the roadmap. 
I do want to point out that the greatest, most powerful yet easy-to-use page layout program, Corel Ventura, which was cruelly euthanized by its owner, had the span column feature back in the 1990s, over 20 years ago. It was, like most things with Ventura, elegantly implemented and easy to use. It just seems that 20 years later a program that deigns to be a professional tool would include Span Columns as a matter of course. Again, just my view. Don't freak out, people, I actually own and (try to) use Publisher whenever I can.