Distill7

There is no timeline for the moment.

+1. My best workaround is to create any document of any size, drag drop one of the stock images in it. "Ctrl+C" to copy, then "Ctrl+Shift+Alt+N" to create a new document from clipboard.

If the client is going to comment on the file for you to do more edit, just share a jpg/png, I don't see the need to share the native files like this.

You can either copy/paste the text into a text frame, or place a document into a text frame. Then it's the same step, select the text frame, go to the right edge at the bottom, hold shift and left mouse click, this will create additional pages and fill them with linked text.

I know that they use their own text engine, it just supports simple text like Latin and Cyrillic, it doesn't support complex text like Arabic and Devanagari, I'm talking about them using the help of other engines to support those languages.

How did you find that they've already done a new text engine for Complex Text?

Good to hear that. I also designed book covers for Amazon Direct Publishing and they were all accepted, just in case you needed to work with that platform too.

But waiting to create a new text engine will take a lot of time and Serif is not even considering it. Also Adobe has two option, "Adobe paragraph composer" and "Adobe world-ready paragraph composer", why doesn't Affinity try to do the same, using their text engine for Latin/Cyrillic text shaping, and using a toolkit to work with another text engine for Complex scripts, This will make the software usable for billions of people until they develop their own solution.

If your print document contains 1 page, I see sending images and vectors to publisher adds one more unecessary step. And if you'll need to edit the graphics again, you'll need to do more unecessary roundtrips. Another thing to know is that photo, designer, and publisher use the same core code with extra functionalty in each one. For example, the basic typing tools are the same, but you can put text on a path in designer, and flow through multilpe frames in publisher, if you don't need any of those features, photo will produce the same results.

Only margins and bleed are supported for now. You might think of creating another file for special instructions to send it to printed.

Let's say you want to create a movie poster, you'll affinity photo to create 1 page and put some images and text on it and export for print. Let's say you need to create a logo, you use affinity designer to create 1 document and draw the logo there, then you export to png. Now let's say you want to create a book of 100 pages, you can't just create 100 different documents in photo or designer and copy paste small pieces of text to each one, and what if you change the font size, you need to re-arrange documents again and again. So for these tasks that need Multiple-pages documents, you need desktop publishing/layout software like Affinity publisher or InDesign. They are not designed to create photos or vector art, but to gather and re-arrange them through a lot of pages. They have special automated features like moving text from one page to another, automated page numbering... Some case scenarios for using a desktop publishing app are books, magazines, reports... You notice they're all composed of a lot of pages.

There are two types of scripts, simple scripts like Latin and Cyrillic where you can place each character next to the other, and Complex Scripts where you need: · Bidirectional text, from RTL and some LTR text inside it. · The shape of character changes depending on the character before or after it like Arabic. · Re-ordering of display of characters from the one you typed them in like Devanagari. To write CTL you need to use a text shaping engine that reads the characters case by case and extracts the correct glyph from the font and determines the order of their display. There is currently 3 major text shaping engines: · Core Text for macOS · Uniscribe used with Universal shaping Engine and DirectWrite for MS Windows · Pango with Harfbuzz, open source text engine used in Linux, Chrome OS, PlayStation.. An important thing is that a software can use a text shaping engine either directly or via an intermediary toolkit that translates the text shaping engine into the software engine. I watched a special video about HarfBuzz, I was shocked that in order to produce a usable text shaping engine, you’ll need to test on huge amounts of text and search for errors and correct it case by case (the mentioned notes were to improve HarfBuzz and not to create in the first place). I believe a representative of Affinity has mentioned that Affinity apps use their own text engine, and that adding CTL languages take a lot of time to implement, that they have decided to give other features a priority. What I’m suggesting, is that instead of re-inventing the wheel, why don’t you just use one of the pre-established text engines via a toolkit, for example Harfbuzz is open source and you can use it free of charge. Also HarfBuzz is under MIT license, you can incorporate it any proprietary software as long as you mention that it was used it and a copy of the copyright. Affinity software doesn’t need to be under MIT, only the HarfBuzz part of it. I own an old copy of DrawPlus, and it mentions a GPL license for a lot of its components, so this is not new for Serif.

It's just that photo and designer can be a solid replacement to photoshop and illustrator in the majority of time. So people had same expectations for publisher to replace InDesign, but after testing it, a lot of people found it lacking essential features and they can't use it for a lot of publishing work.

You'll have to waiiiiiiiiiittttttt for that dream of HTML and ePub support.

Yes, this will work fine with text only and even with text+inline images, and because they are the most common type, it'll work most of the times.. As for images heavy books like cooking books that are pinned all over the place, you should probably use text frames and IMAGE FRAMES ON MASTER, then resize text frames, image frames, and paragrah/text styles. You should also use different sections/pages as much as possible, as autoflow can disrupt everything. You should also put in mind that risizing a book to a different aspect ratio, is never an easy task.

It seems Publisher is the most lacking in terms of features compared to photo and designer.

Just delete all of the pages except page 1, resize the text frame on page 1, then autoflow it again. It'll produce new pages that has the same new frame text size.

For long books and floating text, I don't really recommend putting the main text frame on the master page, just create it independently on let's page 1, then autoflow the text. Then you can change it independently for parts and chapters openers.

Recreating this table is relatively easy, You can select multiple cells in a row, column, or both, then right mouse cilck and choose "merge cells". For the colors, you can select multiple cells again and in the toolbar choose fill and change the color. You can also create a table style as in the following image for 2 alternating rows after the header, but you'll have to merge the cells of the header again. You can also select a pre-formatted table, go to the assets and under a subcategory, click add from selection, then just drag it from there anytime you need it again. Check the afpub file and import the afassets file. Tables.afassets Table.afpub

I tried it and it doesn't produce a clickable table of contents.

Is there a way or a plan to implement a clickable table of contents in the exported PDFs?

You'll need affinty designer for this. Copy the curve that has a stroke applied to it. Paste it a document in affinity designer, go to layer menu => Expand stroke, and then paste it back to publisher. You might be able to do this within publisher once official release comes out and the photo and designer personas are activated.

This depends on their knowledge of the software and how much their edits will change the layout. For example, if they were to change one worker name to another on a business card, that is fine, but if they need to change 200 words on a text frame with 500 words, the text frome will overflow and they'll need to do more complex job, like going to the master page, edit the text style...

I have mentioned the biggest languages "For example" as I said, if you count other languages with smaller populations, the numbers will add up. And even 3.1 billion out of 7.7 (according to wikipedia) is not considerably small at all.

Serif should make more effort to support international typography, if it's not their top priority I don't know what should be. For example: Chinese script: +1340 million users Arabic script: +660 million users Devanagari: +820 million users Bengali: +300 million users If not making the product usable for more than half of earth's population, I don't think what should take more priority than that.