Kevin Scally
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Posts posted by Kevin Scally
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On 10/22/2021 at 9:42 AM, Finrach said:
I'm all but done with Adobe now (just the free Bridge and Acrobat left)
I managed to get rid of Acrobat Pro as well. Readle PDFExpert is doing what I need - at a sane price
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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.
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On 12/16/2020 at 7:51 PM, JaviAl said:
Not exactly. Who decided to build a new program from scratch was Aldus, not Adobe, code name Shuksan, the future Indesign, in order to be able to compete with Quark. When Adobe bought Aldus, Indesign are in working process from Aldus and Shuksan programmers in Aldus move to Adobe to continue de development of Indesign.
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. .
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On 9/23/2019 at 3:20 PM, garrettm30 said:
I like to use Typeface ($20, for Mac only) for my font management needs. I think it is a fair upgrade for the price as compared to FontBook.
But I think we are getting away from the point of this feature request. The fact is that sometimes we need to leave fonts activated for compatibility purposes that we do not actually want to use or want to have our font menus cluttered with. I gave the 100+ protected system fonts as one example of such a case, as you cannot deactivate them or remove them even if you wish you could. In my opinion the OS falls short in this regard, and that is out of Serif's hands.
So what can Publisher do? I think it is already doing a good job with the ability to filter fonts by favorites, used, and recent fonts. Can it or should it do more? I think that is the question that is being raised.
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.
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10 minutes ago, MJWHM said:
Sorry, but this is simply not true.
Serif has axed PagePlus, in which the algorithms work well. I would have thought there might be some lessons to be learned from the programming behind them, but I am not a programmer. I am a researcher, writer and publisher among other things. It was ill-advised to axe one program before its replacement was anywhere near as versatile. I do not use AffPub, because it is much less user-friendly than the predecessor, has a less-inviting appearance, and singularly fails to provide the range of tools I require and find in PagePlus.
So your premise that it is 'a pleasure to use, and that it is being used' is flawed. I also take issue with the statement that AffPub has 'most of the features I need.' Even you are acknowledging that it is lacking. I wonder whether PagePlus included the other features? If so, what benefit is AffPub?
I don't like AffPub at present. It is not fit for my purpose, and I seriously doubt if it is fit for the purpose it claims, but put that to one side. I DO like Serif. I am therefore not turning my back on a company I have supportes for decades probably, just because they are a little lost. It does not mean I am using the Affinity programs though. Page Plus is better for publishing, I use several imaging programs which are generall more user-friendly as well.Sadly, I live in hope....
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.
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On 12/3/2020 at 1:26 PM, Patrick Connor said:
I do not have a roadmap to publish but I hope I can say this here.
The Footnotes/Endnotes feature is not currently ready and so we cannot be fairly accused holding it back on purpose. I see why it may appear that way, but I try to be as honest as possible in all my dealings here on these forums, but without breaking company confidences, and I can honestly say this feature is not being held back, it is simply not ready yet.
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.
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On 5/30/2020 at 7:17 PM, Patrick Connor said:
@garrettm30 is correct. This is pinned to make it easier to find as we know it is important and really do not want 100 independent threads all asking for the same feature.
Serif are currently in the process of implementing this. It needs to be done carefully, not just thrown in, and we do always have the issue of programming resources. Thank you all for your patience, it will be rewarded.
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.
Can you remove junk fonts from Publisher?
in Feedback for Affinity Publisher V1 on Desktop
Posted
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.