["Affinity Writer" - Writing Persona / Linked Text / Markdown Processing idea]

1 hour ago, Jimmod said:

Exporting a standard document file type to another does not inherently improve the workflow.

Unfortunately Markdown still isn't actually a standard format - there is no spec. There is CommonMark, and a handful of common spec patterns ( Github Flavoured Markdown, Multimarkdown etc. ) but would be nice to see some support, somehow.

I get that this isn't necessarily the responsibility of the page layout program, and is probably something you'd want across Designer, Photo, and Publisher - potentially as part of the "SmartLink".

I noticed that in the numbering sections for paragraphs/styles there a "reset after Stories" etc. etc. but that's pretty much the only place I've seen stories mentioned. Hopefully something soon will come out...

["Affinity Writer" - Writing Persona / Linked Text / Markdown Processing idea]

3 hours ago, dominik said:

Thanks for pointing me there. I found it. An interesting project. It would be worth doing some tests with several formats here: https://pandoc.org/try/ as this live tool offers RTF output as well.

I did some testing with writing out .docx files and dragging them into AFP - worked well, altho pulled in the styles in the doc with some standard I guess styling.  If I changed the styles in the AFP doc to something different, deleted the text content, and dragged the file back into the first text frame - all the contents flowed along nice - but the formatted did get reset to what was in the .docx ( dragging on a .rtf just crashed AFP ).

So that's something at least.

["Affinity Writer" - Writing Persona / Linked Text / Markdown Processing idea]

3 minutes ago, dominik said:

I just can't find .rtf in their matrix?

It doesn't seem to be mentioned in the matrix, but in the https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html you'll see "-trtf" as an output format. Doesn't look like it supports it as an input format tho.

["Affinity Writer" - Writing Persona / Linked Text / Markdown Processing idea]

Just now, dominik said:

Personally I'd prefer .txt or .rtf as a starting point. At the same point I am very curious about what Serif will come up with eventually..

.rtf would be acceptable I reckon. Using pandoc to convert N-formats into .rtf ( https://pandoc.org - which I see also supports converting to InDesign ICML XML documents - probably just Stories tho) would probably work for anything I'd want - that opens up a "Story Manager" feature.

["Affinity Writer" - Writing Persona / Linked Text / Markdown Processing idea]

1 minute ago, dominik said:

Basically I think it is a good idea to have linked text files. I leave it open what format(s) that might be. I have the feeling that markdown is a little too under complex to meet the possibilities of text styles.

Thanks for the welcome! I definitely agree with the limitations of markdown (that lack of a proper spec, Common Mark not-withstanding) are a somewhat a blessing and a curse (I'd favour AsciiDoc there, but it also has it's own issues) - I love the control that LaTeX provides me but that's also quite....  the beast to wrangle and understand - I have a long-standing love for the DocBook XML specs as they're (largely) human readable, structured, easily created by code/tooling - and separate from formatting.

If linked text was available, and some form of API for generating AP sub-docs/structural format one could write such things fairly "easy".

["Affinity Writer" - Writing Persona / Linked Text / Markdown Processing idea]

Hey all,

Long time lurker til the last few weeks when I reinstalled the Publisher beta to check up on it - I understand that AFP is predominantly a page layout focussed system (and after reading all the ePub threads I see that's a bug-bear for many people and I suspect "Affinity Writer" might be a good direction/bridge but let's avoid that for now).

I see that we can link/embed images so we can update the visual assets independently of the layout, but I've not seen anything similar for textual assets - which when writing more book/manual type content would be rather useful.

Coming from the tech world (software developer primarily) what I'd love to see is something like the following (that may be doable with simple scripting if/when that comes available):

1. Write my main content in a .txt file, or .md Markdown file - which is becoming a de facto markup format in the developer world
2. Processor app/script that takes the markdown, and converts that to a AFP source - mapping the relevant heading 1/2/3, bullet point, body, code styles to AFP styles before including that in an initial text frame.
3. Content appears in AFP rendered, with styles applied

This would allow me update the .md files independent of page layout, using an editing environment more suited to writing content, running the document thru Grammarly/ProWritingAid.

I guess this could all come under a "Writing" persona.

Is this is a crazy idea, or something worth thinking about?