Jump to content
You must now use your email address to sign in [click for more info] ×

Kevin Scally

Members
  • Posts

    8
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Kevin Scally

  1. Agree with that. Using ‘Favourites’ to hide junk or never-used fonts is a makeshift solution. I’m surprised it seems to be such an afterthought to make intelligent controls for handling in-app font lists. Affinity Publisher is far from alone in this.
  2. I managed to get rid of Acrobat Pro as well. Readle PDFExpert is doing what I need - at a sane price
  3. There are different markets and segments. Footnotes are essential for academic publishing. A few academic publishing houses prefer endnotes—depending on the discipline—partly because editing a book with extensive footnotes is time consuming, particularly if there are a lot of subheadings which get shifted around. This is something a bit beyond the automatic capability of software, since it requires design and judgment, and often means cutting or adding in text (or cheating leading) to avoid having orphans and widows, or to get the layout looking just so. It's hardcore editing. Outside academia, the more popular non fiction publishing also has a requirement for footnotes or endnotes, though endnotes increasingly seem to be preferred as offering a smoother editing task. Fiction book publishers do not, as a rule, require footnotes; and those cases where one or two are deemed necessary can be dealt with manually. On the other hand, with such basic layout and typographic requirements, one has to wonder whether MS Word or Pages, or some open source software, would be adequate for the job. Finally there is the market for general publishing, magazine work, brochures, or any graphic intensive layout. Here the full Affinity suite scores, since it integrates image editing and vector drawing. The three packages hold up very well against Adobe's Creative Suite, and at a fraction of the cost.
  4. Aldus had all sort of projects and skunkworks on the go in1993/4; many never saw the light of day. Undoubtedly some developers were trying out PageMaker/Xpress alternatives in Aldus and Adobe both. Aldus wouldn't make that decision to switch at a high level as Brainerd was unlikely to ditch his baby, PageMaker. The massive amount of code in PageMaker made it almost impossible to mess with so the (business) decision was ultimately made by Adobe management. My main point was that PageMaker began life with a narrow publishing (newspaper) paradigm and couldn't adjust to the magazine and general graphics industry requirements, which Quark succeeded in doing. Quark development also took some wrong turns and, of course, the pricing model was utterly brutal. .
  5. That gets to the essence of the problem. The System apparently needs 100+ fonts that the User does not (generally) want. I accept that they cannot be deleted, but is it essential to display them in every application's font menu? Is it possible for a developer to ignore them; by which I mean NOT load them in any way, not even in background. Is there a memory hit in loading 100+ extra System fonts into an application's memory at launch time? If there isn't, then keep them in, but there should be a way of filtering 'All' fonts, 'System' fonts and 'User' fonts into different lists and making one's chosen list a fixed UI display preference. Keep the 'Favourites' tag, and deal with 'Recent' by moving them to the top of the current list as many apps do.
  6. My experience of using flakey apps is that nobody cares what features they have, or makes demands of the programmers; they just get quietly abandoned. This makes it a reasonable assumption that—for whatever purposes they need it—some users find its current feature set and price acceptable. How could you possibly take issue with another person's assertion that a program has most of the features they need? You are entitled to say that Affinity Publisher is not fit for your purposes because it doesn't include footnotes; though I discovered the absence of that feature during the free trial, before I paid any money. As a counter example, while MS Word has footnotes and endnotes, it is an application that I avoid like the plague. I prefer to use a combination of Scrivener and Pages to write. When I need accurate page layout Affinity Publisher is doing enough. Regarding PagePlus, the code for every program is independent. Each new version of a program is an opportunity to build in new bugs. Some features delve into the guts of a program and can affect thousands of lines of code. Quark, with Xpress, had the advantage of seeing what Aldus got wrong with PageMaker (no text frames) but, as XPress grew, adding features became more complex and more difficult. Sometimes the only solution is to rewrite a program from the ground up, but of course that introduces a whole cohort of new bugs. Consider that Adobe bought Aldus and with it owned PageMaker but they decided to build InDesign from scratch. They also had the benefit of seeing Quark's mistakes on Xpress. Now they too have a behemoth of a program where every major feature takes weeks or months to QA. I too live in hope that a robust footnote feature will appear soon, but I have observed that management harassment of coders has never produced a better software product.
  7. Having worked in software development I can only say that I'd vastly prefer to use a robust product with limited features than one that claims to have features but is buggy and crashes. Even the demand for footnotes here confirms that the rest of the program's feature make it a pleasure to use, and that it is being used. A previous contributor to this thread referred to the first limited versions of InDesign, and I would agree. I was also happy to work with a very early version of MS Word (on the Mac before the PC version appeared) and that was lacking most of the features. The same was true of early versions of Quark Express. It takes time to build a robust product with a full array of features. Numbered footnote capability is a tricky feature since edits can affect the text flow and layout right through a long document. While it seems that endnotes would be easier to achieve than footnotes, there is a relationship between them, and coding one feature independently of the other is laying the ground for future problems and QA headaches. Affinity Publisher is a robust product with most of the features I need. I have avoided projects with footnotes and—where a choice was available—opted for endnotes and bit of elbow grease. It's fine until they get the feature working 100 per cent.
  8. I'd like at least endnote capability, which in in coding terms must be a small bit easier than footnotes, since it means creating just one flexible block at the end of each chapter rather than juggling the flow of every single page. However, I'd fully support Serif in not releasing a complex feature like this without ensuring that it has been stress tested to death, and is fully robust. The Publisher app is reassuringly smooth as it stands, and I am currently able to manage endnotes by the old fashioned manual method, by generating them in Scrivener with minimal editing in Publisher. Coding Q&A is like proofreading in design: there never seems to be time to fix the errors before something's printed, but there's always time to reprint it when the errors are found later. Don't do it that way.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Guidelines | We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.