sfriedberg

Forgive me if this is too basic, but you should be creating two distinct master pages and creating your document with facing spreads. Assign the left and right master pages to the appropriate pages of a spread, then newly created spreads should be set up correctly.

No, MS started adapting the Creature House Expression technology in Expression Design and Expression Web, but those adaptations really aren't the same thing. MS clearly changed their minds about branding several times, breaking the single C.H. Expression product into what was supposed to be an entire Expression-branded suite of graphics tools, and then rapidly dropping the entire suite. My impression is that the product line managers were very web-centric and when web-specific graphic design did not immediately catch fire, they simply moved on to something else. The last time I looked, MS Expression Design 4 did not have all the skeletal stroke features of C.H. Expression 3.3. Perhaps they are hidden somewhere in the the UI, but I've felt no desire to do a detailed point-by-point comparision. Expression 3.3 is basically legal abandonware at this point. It has been released for free but is extremely difficult to locate on MS's website. They have changed the download link multiple times and the last couple of times I searched for it, it was not indexed. [Added in edit] If you look at the Expression Design 4 link you provided, you will see it is a non-Microsoft website established precisely because finding Expression Design 4 on the MS website is next to impossible. So I will stick by my earlier expression of "before Microsoft purchased the product and buried it". However, my point was that the skeletal stroke features of Creature House Expression were extremely powerful, flexible and easy to use, and that it would be desirable if Affinity Designer acquired some of that capability over time. I suspect we are in agreement on the point.

In the past I have said glowing things about the "skeletal stroke" vector brush functionality of Expression by Creature House (early 2000's, before Microsoft purchased the product and buried it). It would be wonderful if Affinity Designer gradually acquired that functionality.

If you are willing to work "delicately", you can get much of the desired effect. Convert all the objects you want to manipulated to curves. (I.e., circles and rectangles won't do. Convert them to circular curves and rectangular curves.) Select all the objects you want to be affected by a particular move. Choose the Node tool. Select all the nodes you want to move. Put the Node tool over one of the selected nodes and drag. Nodes from different objects which were in the same location will remain stacked on top of one another when dragged. Unselected nodes (and unselected objects) will remain in their original locations. Objects with some selected nodes and some unselected nodes will be distorted when you drag the selected nodes. If you select all the nodes on an object and drag nodes, the shape of that object will remain unchanged. This is absolutely not as nice as an animation poser, nor as powerful as an animation rig. But it might suffice if you have a relatively simple skeleton of body parts to manipulate. Biggest limitation is that you can drag selected nodes as a (implicit) group, but you cannot rotate the group of nodes. For rotation, you will have to work at the level of whole objects, rather than curve nodes.

Is there a reason no one suggested simply drawing two straight lines between the existing curved sidewall endpoints then combining the curves?

Text styles are absolutely fundamental to stepping up to a layout/publishing program instead of hacking around in a word processor. They do not need to be a complicated scary thing at all. For starters, define a body paragraph style, probably a heading paragraph style, and an emphasis character style. Make a habit of never clicking the I for italic, always apply the emphasis style instead. And so on. You should eventually try to use defined styles for everything. Paragraph properties, text character span properties, table cell properties, table layouts, etc. But you can work up to it. Start with every paragraph having a style and every character override having a style.

I have an ODG file (vector) created with LibreOffice Draw with lots of groups and layers. What's my best option for bringing this into Affinity Designer and retaining the structure for editing in Designer? I do have continued access to LibreOffice Draw, so could resave or export in an alternative format. One of the Windows Metafile formats? EPS? PDF?

Because I have about 50 3"x3" artboards in the Designer document? Because I also need the SVGs for alternate (web) presentations of the content? Because it's a workflow I am comfortable with?

Similar experience. I usually make illustrations in Designer, export them in SVG, and place them in Publisher. When I use layer masks for cropping in Designer, the results often do not pass through Publisher correctly. I was able to work around this by using EPS instead of SVG for the relatively few affected illustrations. I have also noticed where printing directly from Publisher is not as clean as exporting to PDF from Publisher and printing the PDF. SVG (vector) images (without transparency, masking or other problematic features) made in Designer and placed in Publisher come out on (the same) printer noticeably coarser and with inferior text rasterization than exporting to PDF first then printing.

I have to say I was very much hoping the footnote/endnote feature would create and populate text frames which could be manipulated like standard textframes. I can't speak for monocultured, but I have found it handy on a few occasions to "cheat" the location of a footnote frame to avoid unsightly interactions with floating or inline illustrations.

I have had this (or something very similar) happen just once. IIRC, I was trying to cut and paste some spans of formatted text when it started. I did end up closing AffPub and relaunching it, since I didn't know what I would get if I saved the file in that state.

Well, I must correct myself. Publisher evidently does have those features. The "dynamic transformations" are implemented by setting or clearing OpenType properties, letting the font choose the glyphs (at least if the font supports small caps). I don't know if AffPub does fake small caps for fonts that don't directly support them. The "persistent transformations" are things AffPub does to permanently change your keystrokes. In the V1/V2 Windows AffPub help, there is a reference near the top of that help page to the Text > Capitalization menu, and the features are indeed found there. No idea what the iPad interface looks like.

The features you mention in the first quoted sentence are "word processor" rather than "layout" features. It is pretty common for layout programs not to support them (at all). With OpenType, small capitals support is implemented by the font itself, not by the host application. So in a layout application, that's the primary place you will find any options for modifiying the choice of glyphs, including context sensitive capitalization. So that's why that panel was mentioned. Toggle case, title case, and sentence case are not something usually implemented in an OpenType font, so you won't find those features in that panel (or anywhere else in Publisher).

Sun2Son, OldBruce is correct, we can only guess unless we have the document to examine. My guess is that you inadvertently rescaled one of several linked text frames using the handle at the far bottom right corner, in an attempt to resize it. Rescaling a text frame causes all its contents, including text, to be rescaled (after all the character and paragraph style properties are applied.) AFAIK there is no way to exactly reset the scaling on a text frame, but it is simple enough to delete the accidently rescaled text frame, create a new one with the proper size (leaving the rescale handle strictly untouched) and link it into the other frames so the text reflows through all the frames.

Give me a dropbox link and I will be happy to supply my four chapter .afpubs and the .afbook.