sfriedberg

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.

@Patrick ConnorI really regret to say that AffPub 2.0.4 is still giving me problems with the book feature, although the hangs are gone. I tried the previous exercise: Convert v1 document to v2. Chop v2 document into several separate documents and save them independently. Add the several new documents to a new book. When I go to the book hamburger menu and try to Save Book As ..., it simply doesn't save. No discernable error message. I can now close the chapter windows without trouble, but when I go to reopen any of them, I get the recovery file dialog prompt. When I go to the book hamburger menu and try to Close Book, it tells me the book's been modified, do I want to save, say yes, and again it doesn't save. I quit AffPub, started a new book, and immediately tried Save Book As... . That worked. I added my chapter documents to the book and tried Save Book. Quit AffPub, and tried reopening the book. Chapters are there, and I can open them without the recovery file dialog. So there seems to be a problem adding chapters to a not-yet-saved new book. With the successfully constructed book, I tried Close Open Chapters. That removed the document windows but left the entries in the Books panel marked as open for editing. When I then tried Close Book, I was prompted that the book has been modified and would I like to save my changes. If I respond "Yes", the book stays in the Books panel. Another attempt to Close Book just gives the same prompt. Responding "No" also leaves the book in the Books panel. I would have expected that to work. Quit AffPub (I get the unsaved book prompt, and respond "No" and app does close), relaunch AffPub, open the book. Chapter statuses were initially "OK" and then quickly transition to "Out of Date". Before doing anything else, try to Save Book but that command is disabled (greyed out) in the hamburger menu. Opened the out of date chapters, (statuses transition to "Open for edit". Try to Close Open Chapters, document windows close, but chapter statuses remain Open for edit. Reopen chapters. Try to make small edit, but cannot plant text cursor in text frames. Also, the Layers pane is strangely unresponsive (can expand Master row, but not frame text rows, no selection highlighting). Document windows do not have [Read only] tag. At this point, I am pulling my beard hairs out with frustration again. I would be very happy to supply my test V2 chapter and book files, if that would be of any service.

The book feature of AffPub 2 was the biggest draw for me, and I cannot use it. I get lots of lockups. So I am still working primarily in AffPub 1, as I don't get a big benefit from switching my jobs-in-progress over right now.

Another tracing application I didn't see mentioned above is in CorelDRAW. It used to be a standalone application that shipped with CD, but it's been integrated into the vector graphic part of Corel Graphic Suite. It's been a while since I used it (and I assume it's gotten better) but even a decade ago it was pretty capable. You could obviously trace solid outlines. But you could also generate a vector trace of photos or gradient images, with considerable control over how finely the trace program broke things up. Results of tracing "natural" raster images were not as clean as what Vector VonDoom routinely shows off, but you'd get recognizable faces from a portrait photo, etc.

@Joy BoyThe place to start is with your chosen publishing company's requirements for the cover. The precise dimensions will obviously depend on the book size (including page count), so you might get an updated cover requirement after submitting the manuscript. You will also need to know the ICC color profile the publisher expects, and whether you need to provide art for one side or two sides. When you have that information, you can set up a document in Publisher or Designer with the required dimensions, color model and ICC profile. It is simplest if the publisher gives you a one-rectangle layout that encompasses the entire cover. If the cover is actually a dust jacket, that would include the folds over the boards. It is much messier in the Publisher to attempt to work with a front/spine/back or frontfold/front/spine/back/backfold layout, although you can do that fairly easily in Designer using artboards for the three (or five) portions of the layout. So, you are going through the process backward. The place to start is with the publishing companies you're interested in. Do not watch some random Youtube tutorial and then try to figure out which publishers those instructions will apply to. Get specifications/requirements from the publisher, then set up a matching document in Publisher or Designer. Export your document in exactly the format the publisher calls for. If they want a particular PDF revision level, export with that option. If they want all text converted curves, make sure you export it that way. Etc.

Same here. If I explicitly range select a span of characters (by click-and-drag, or by click-shift-click), I seldom or never get the extra space. But if I double click on a word, copy and page, I almost always get an extra space.

Even in applications, such as CorelDRAW, which have an explicit curve roughening tool, you seldom get what you want. I think I would employ Affinity Photo in the subtle roughening of those shapes. Bring the Designer vectors into Photo and convert them to raster. Then add/subtract some noise of appropriate size/frequencies with appropriate masks, then threshold or make a levels adjustment on the result. The result will be raster rather than vector, but you can quickly process an arbitrary amount of curve this way. If you insist on a vector result, you will need lots and lots of nodes, and if you don't want to put them in by hand, you probably need an automated trace program, which the Affinity suite currently does not have. CorelDRAW does have a trace tool. IIRC it used to be a standalone application, but some years ago it was integrated into the main app of the Corel Graphics suite.

That ... makes sense, as footnotes are placed in frames. I am both surprised and pleased that AffPub will auto-create another footnote frame in these case.

@Kdiver25The answer to your question is "Use the contour tool in Designer". You can generate contour lines inside, outside, or both inside and outside your original curve.

Speaking from experience with scripting CorelDRAW, this is likely to come back and bite us at some point in the future, namely when scripting is added. Reasoning: It's not uncommon to script operations on groups selected by name or by Z-position in the layer stack. If you can't create a group with exactly one object, then you can't apply the same script that you would normally apply to a group. In some cases, the user could set things up with a layer instead of a group (there is no requirement to have more than one object in a layer), but this is not always possible, especially when scripting a serious of operations that may move and/or create objects between layers.

I believe I am having the same or a closely related problem. Upgraded to 2.0.3, created a new book, made copies of a V1 document, cut them into disjoint pieces and saved them as book chapters, added them to the book. That all looked OK. Trying to close a chapter (from File menu) did not make the chapter window go away. Subsequently trying to close the chapter (from book context menus) also did not work. Forcibly closing the window appeared to work, but then reopening the chapter document got a "Recovery file exists, do you want to use it?" prompt. Selecting "no" opened the chapter document in read-only mode. In the Book panel, the chapters were all marked as still "Open for editing". When I got to that point, I tried exiting AppPub2 and it's been stalled for minutes now, with the rotating progress indicator. Windows 10 Pro, AffPub 2.0.3.

@HZhenCan you give some examples (perhaps a small sample Affinity file) with the kind of "geometries" you want to fill? I have never had a moment's trouble filling shapes in Designer, using Designer's tools without jumping into Photo, so you are trying to do something I don't understand. Can you show how/why the stroke/fill colors on curves (via the Swatches panel) or the Fill Tool (via the swatch/color/gradient patch on the context toolbar) are not behaving the way you want?

That's a good suggestion. I've had similar trouble trying to distinguish variant swashed glyphs in some fonts. If you want a real reading challenge, put a "math" font (try Cambria Math) in the glyph browser. Flyspecks! This issue with "math" fonts is a reported, known issue.

@_Th He's talking about cross references, not footnotes, indexes or tables of contents. As in "See Figure 42 on page 14." where "42" and "14" are field values of a reference object inserted at the point of interest. There is a meagre hack one can do with linked text frames in AffPub to get the page number, but it is really painful, does not scale well, and has absolutely none of the the management panels one would get with a supported feature. The entry in the Publisher help for "Cross References" is the basis for that meagre hack.

@deedsIf you aren't deliberately trolling, you certainly come across that way. You do this in a lot of different threads, with a lot of different people. Maybe you should make an effort to focus your forum comments to be more technically oriented and on-topic.

OK. I have a hierarchy of character styles rooted at Math, whose properties are Font: Cambria; Font Weight: Normal; Italic: On; Font width: Normal. My Base font size is 12pt. One of the child styles of Math is Math Subscript, whose properties are Math + Font Size: 10pt; Baseline advance: -2pt. Math Superscript is very similar: Math + Font Size: 10pt; Baseline advance: 3pt. As you can see, I am doing the font resizing and baseline shifting myself rather than relying on the math font's subscript and superscript features. The hierarchy can be extended. Two children of Math Subscript are Math Subsubscript and Math Subsuperscript, with properties Math Subscript + Font size: 8pt; Baseline advance: -4pt, and Math Subscript + Font Size: 8pt; Baseline advance: 1pt. It gets pretty tedious changing character styles on a character-by-character basis, but it does make it straightforward to set stuff like: That 2nd example has a couple of uses of Math Subsubscript. What you can't do in Publisher is set subscripts and superscripts directly above one another. This is a super common thing to do in math typesetting, and you can do it with CSS (witness MathJAX's HTML-CSS output processor). But you can't get at the needed functionality using text styles. (Essentially, after you render a subscript string, you have to "go back to" the original position to start rendering the superscript string.) As I've mentioned in another thread, if the font has them, you can use IPA combining diacriticals to put some useful things directly above or below a character. This is limited by the IPA character set and specific font support for it, but has been a big help in one document I am preparing. Other Unicode sets of combining diacriticals could also be used, too, if your font supports them. It seems very unlikely that the Affinity team will take on mathematical typesetting anytime soon. And I would argue that they should not invest resource in that, when they could be investing resources in a plugin architecture where character sequences could be directed out of the Affinity document, through an external program and then fed back into the Affinity document layout, with at least the positioning capabilities offered by CSS. Then somebody else could integrate LaTex, MathJax, or some existing math typesetter into AffPub as a plugin. A text-diversion plugin architecture would support lots and lots of things beyond math typesetting. For example, bibliographic databases and reference preparation. We had text diversion facilities like this back in the 1980's when roff, nroff, and troff were the DTP tools of the scientific and technical communities. We need to catch up to 40 years ago! But this would mean that Affinity have to define and support an API and expose a great many features of that all-in-one file format they favor so highly.

Seriously? Go watch an old movie with office or factory scenes, set in the 1940s or 1950s, and ideally filmed before the 1970s. Look at the acres of office workers sitting in grids of desks, processing stacks of paperwork. Then realize that the largest such office that could be operated cannot handle more than a tiny fraction of the work that a commercial software suite can handle. And that "human attention" was absolutely the last thing that those masses of humans were intended to supply. You ever work in a good-sized library? Ask a librarian about mis-shelving books on the stacks. Or a warehouse worker about mis-placing goods on the racks. Ask about quarterly or annual inventory checks, and how long those took before computers stored and indexed the data. Ask about the impact of barcodes and RFID tags. I could go on and on. The short answer is "with massive mind-numbing and soul-crushing human labor, endless seas of paperwork, frequent losses and inaccuracies, and yet at a vastly smaller scale, and with a much slower response time".

Well informed opinion, rather. It's much more than that. In fact, I would classify most software creation (which is what I have been doing for a living for 40 years, starting in the early 1980's and full-time in industry since 1992) as software engineering, guided by CS but by no means encompassing CS. A great deal of software creation is also guided by non-CS disciplines, such as art/design, human factors engineering, and various business or artistic disciplines (the "why we are writing a program in the first place" motivation). I certainly will not argue that purposeful software development needs more than CS. But just as there is a difference between a do-it-yourself craft project and a professional artwork or construction, there is a difference between DIY hacking around and professionally developed software. And a large part of that difference comes from knowing the professional techniques. And here I am not talking about this year's trendy libraries or languages, but core CS material. One thing I find non-engineers do not understand very well, if at all, is that engineering (of any specialty, but specifically software engineering in this discussion) is a highly creative process. If technical technique is "craft", then the creative aspect is "art". (Of course, one can say the same thing about mathematics.) Hahahahah. A fine piece of rhetoric, but a literal piece of nonsense. Do you realize how many 100's of millions of people would be without electricity, running water or fuel if all the non-gaming computers in the world just stopped working? How many companies would collapse without a means to manage logistics, schedule activities, even inventory the contents of their warehouses? How many people would thereby be thrown out of work and impoverished? How many people would starve or freeze to death? There are many, many more computers in the world than the familiar midtower in the spare bedroom or the laptop or tablet in your bag, and many of them perform essential services, even life-critical services. Oh dear God, no. Numbers have almost nothing to do with software at all! That wasn't even true back in heyday of FORTRAN which is a relentlessly numerical language to write software in. The crucial art in software development is "art with structure" or "art with algorithms". The actual creation of most software is 75% boilerplate and package integration, with a lot of struggle around integration. And in "art with structure", you can read that as either "data structure" or "program structure" and be correct either way. ------------------------- Okay, this discussion has gotten way off course, and I have "helped". Let me help direct it back to the original topic. Yes, fewer lessons from human factors engineering regarding legibility and ease-of-access seem to have been applied to the V2 UI than the V1. And apparently this was deliberate.