Toshchak Pёs

Variables that you can base on paragraph / character styles are crucial for making complex and maintainable documents like catalogues and books.
It would be nice to, for example, use multiple variables in one heading (document-wide brand or product names etc.), then it also pulls itself into a running header on a master page based on the paragraph style. 
Didn't have a chance to mess around with Publisher yet, maybe this functionality is already in there, so correct me on that. Right now feeling a bit hesitant to make a switch...

Variables that you can base on paragraph / character styles are crucial for making complex and maintainable documents like catalogues and books.
It would be nice to, for example, use multiple variables in one heading (document-wide brand or product names etc.), then it also pulls itself into a running header on a master page based on the paragraph style. 
Didn't have a chance to mess around with Publisher yet, maybe this functionality is already in there, so correct me on that. Right now feeling a bit hesitant to make a switch...

Yep! I feel your pain. The absence of a preflight checker practically renders Publisher "almost useless" when coming to the export feature. Having InDesign CS6 still installed, I definitely wouldn't want to start creating a document with more than 4-8 pages or so...

+1

Hi, thanks for the good work on the Affinity products!  Having spent some first moments on tuning in with Affinity publisher I'm missing a preflight checker. That's why I have the following feature request:
User Stories:
As an Affinity Publisher user I would like Affinity Publisher to check whether my document layout and the document content fulfills before-configured criteria in order to not export unwanted documents. I would like Affinity Publisher to provide sane default values/configurations for the below-mentioned checks. I would like Affinity Publisher to enable me to define and administrate (create,read,update,delete) several preflight profiles. Desired checks: The checks that I would like Affinity publisher to perform are:
Image resolution: I would like to get notified which image does not match a document's defined resolution to prevent pixelated prints. Image colour space: I would like to get notified if an image potentially contains colours which might get lost when producing a exporting a document, e.g. for CMYK printing. Content-bleed-distance: I would like to get notified which contents are too close to a document's bleed, e.g. a background image that should expand to the "bleeding edge". Outdated links: I would like to get notified which objects displayed in Publisher do not represent the latest version of a referenced file. Missing external resources: I would like to get notified which external resources cannot be located by Affinity Publisher anymore. Text overflows: I would like to get notified which text boxes have an overflow issue. Background: My first project is going to be a simple poster. But I plan to recreate an old InDesign project using Affinity Publisher, a poetry anthology with several pictures etc. I definitely need the software to notify me if I accidentally messed up my layout, e.g. by adjusting a paragraph style etc.
I hope you are already on it. Such a preflight check definitely is part of what I would consider a professional desktop publishing program.

Wish: support for Text Variables. Very handy e.g. to define revision numbers and other stuff and inject document metadata (date printed, modified, created, etc.) at appropriate places. Makes the document more evolvable (maintainable).
Wish++: share Tet Variables across documents (Designer, Publisher, Photo).

Columns in text boxes is good, but option to Span columns, so that a title can span the 2 columns of text it's above, without having to make a separate text box for the title please.

Span attribute in paragraph style options would be great.

"Paste without format" would come in very handy inside the context menu (not only in the top menu) - to paste text without textstyle data.

Packaging files is a must! 

Packaging the document to include all assets and fonts etc ( like InDesign)  is a feature that would be 100% mandatory for me to be able to switch from InDesign to Affinity Publisher.  and oh boy do I ever want to switch to affinity Publisher!!!

Hi ch1ptune
We do not support packages for this initial release. It may be something we look at doing in a future update. Current if you want to send the file you just need to send the afpub file, or export it to something like PDF if it's just for review.
Our reveal in finder is currently only for the main document itself rather than a resource. If you were sending files they can use the resource manager to replace the files but they would still need to search in finder for where they placed them
These two things are not bad feature requests so I;m going to move this post to that section
Cheers 

When I replied to this, I thought a bit more about the way color swatches work atm.
I just don't think there is a need for a color swatch that is not "connected" to the objects that are using it. If I change a color swatch, I want to change all the objects that use it.
InDesign does it this way, and it makes sense. I know that Illustrator does have "unconnected" swatches as well as "global" swatches -- but I never understood the reason for that. If there's a use case for "non-connected" swatches, please let me know   I believe any such use should still be possible with "connected" swatches only. So all the swatches should behave as if they were a "global swatch". Or do "global swatches" have additional features that I haven't found out yet?
 

Importing INDD requires that Publisher has the stable features to replicate what ID does. This is why you're not going to see INDD/IDML/INX import immediately.

@Chris_K
Is there any planned timeline for this? Are we talking months, years?

Great to hear, because it will be a pretty important option in my opinion 

It's not available yet. The best you can do is to create different sections and put a variable based on the section names.

They should add running head variables that are based on paragraph/character styles.