Jim Slade
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Posts posted by Jim Slade
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Let me amplify then:
QuoteFormats paragraphs well (again, that ain't Word). That means having some kind of paragraph composer that can be switched on and off (for editing).
Justified Word documents are instantly identifiable by their horrible word spacing. By well, I mean a professional looking job of justification. In this day and age, that should be done by paragraph (yet only Adobe seems to do at as an interactive produce).
QuoteDoes hyphenation correctly (again, that ain't Word). Plus has the ability to specify non-breaking text.
By correctly, I mean by the generally accepted standards. For example, in hyphenation, the rule is keep two and break three letter. Word ignores that.
Here's one of my favorites. Wold will break "Matter of H—S—S—'s" as
Matter of H—S—S—
's
Word's hyphenation and line breaking is totally and completely FUBAR.
QuoteDoes footnotes/end notes/Index/Table of Contents
Should be self explanatory.
QuoteHandles placement of figures.
Should be self explanatory.
QuoteA product that can number paragraphs independently of numbered paragraphs. By that, I mean be able to have all paragraphs of specific styles numbered (typically in the margin) so that numbered paragraphs get a second number. This is critical for citation. Go to Document X and look at Paragraph N.
QuoteQuoteCan do a table of authorities (ie, one that actually works, unlike that of Word).
Word has a table of authorities "feature" whose sole purpose is to say it exists. It has been totally broken since introduced in the 1990's and has never been upgraded.
Word dominates the market and serves as its baseline. However, with the exception of Opentype features introduced 15 years ago, I cannot thing of any of anything that has been done to Word to improve the look of documents since around 1990. In fact, Word still has not caught up to Samna Pro from the mid-1990's.
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With the self-publishing market exploding, people are finding that Word does not cut the mustard. There is a critical need for something that:
Does styles well (that ain't Word). People need to be able to share stylesheets with the maybe 10 styles they need and not wade through the 50,000 word pre-defined styles that cannot be deleted. One should be able to set up styles separately from a document. I.e., Not have to format a document, and define styles from that which is already formatted (as Word does, and Word Pro did, but not like Pages)
Formats paragraphs well (again, that ain't Word). That means having some kind of paragraph composer that can be switched on and off (for editing).
Does hyphenation correctly (again, that ain't Word). Plus has the ability to specify non-breaking text.
Does footnotes/end notes/Index/Table of Contents
Handles placement of figures.
I'll stop at that list but I have a number of similar requirements that would exclude other products on the market,
Basically, the is a need that is growing for something more than Word but less than InDesign/Quark.
For the legal market there is a need for:
A product that can number paragraphs independently of numbered paragraphs. By that, I mean be able to have all paragraphs of specific styles numbered (typically in the margin) so that numbered paragraphs get a second number. This is critical for citation. Go to Document X and look at Paragraph N.
Can do a table of authorities (ie, one that actually works, unlike that of Word).
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Affinity Store.
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Yes, once this happens, I cannot read any files.
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I am saving them in Documents on my local disk.
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On Mojave 10.14.6, Affinity 1.10.0
If I open and JPEG file, create an adjustment layer, change gamma, merge, and save, repeatedly for different files, I eventually start getting this error whenever I try to open a file:
"The file could not be opened because permission was denied."
At that point I have to restart Affinity.
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I have an image for the front of a book cover. I would like to "extend" the image over the spine and back cover such that the there is general color alignment with the cover.
I was wondering if that might be easily doable.
As an aside, for all my tasks on this project I have gotten much better results with Affinity than that other product that you have to pay monthly.
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I should have added I am on 1.9.3 MAC.
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I have attached three files (595, 596, 597). If I try to make a panorama using all three, 595 gets twisted.
I can make a panorama using 595 + 597. And I can make a panorama using 596+597.
I can even combined the two to get the complete panorama.
Thus (595+597) + (596 + 597) works while (595+596 + 597) does not work.
I submit as an example for refinement of the panorama process.
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As a technical note, Apple's Core Text framework is their "low level" text manipulation interface. It does line-by-line formatting. I might be possible to override the typesetter class but I have never seen that done.
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18 minutes ago, Petar Petrenko said:
1. I don't know any word processor that has "paragraph composer" feature.
2. Hyphenation engine should auto detect the language of the word to be hyphenated so we don't need to select specific language for that.
3. There is already "no break" feature as character attribute.
4-5. Yes, I would love separate style panels because I use lots of paragraph and character styles. BTW, I deleted predefined Affinity styles and created mine not based on "group" style and without "No Change" anywhere in paragraph styles.
6. What is more easier than right click on any style and choose "delete"?
7. Yes, it would be nice.
8. Call the idiot and ask him what he has done or just use "Find/Replace" to change manual formating with character style formating. BTW it would be nice if applying paragraph local or style formating do not reset local character formatings.
9. Do you mean support for color fonts or something else?
10. You can already format bullets/numbers by assigning a character style in "bullets and numbers" in paragraph panel and you can format the text by using paragraph style.
1) That's the point. After decades, of @$#@$# formatting, you'd think someone would have done it. On the other had, Quark still hasn't done it. On the other hand, Quark as a company is totally FUed.
2) Yes. In English, the basic rule is keep 2 and take no more than 3. Yet word will hyphenate ABCD as AB-CD. And Word will split already hyphenated word at hyphens. "F-4F" will be "F-" + "4F". Microsoft has probably gotten complaints about this ever day for the last 25 years and not don'e a thing.
😎 Most people do not use styles because they are so difficult to work with in Word.
9) I am talking about open type and similar phone features. Lining vs. old style figures for example.
10). This was an attack on other word processors. Word does this. Pages, for example, does not allow full editing of a list.
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1 hour ago, RussC said:
Ha, ha, yep, that's exactly it, @Jim Slade. I've been using Word since 1997, helping organizations with it since 1999, and I'm using the very same core today that I was 22-years ago. Sadly, I'm still fixing the very same problems and issues today that I was back then, too. Moreover, I've actually been hired by to improve their Word templates, yet when I <ahem> politely advised where they're going wrong and what they really should be doing about it (because, after all, it's their software and they should be the leading light) was less-than-politely-100%-ignored. Ah well, we live and we learn.
The default Word Templates are a total joke. I get the impression the do things just because they can be done. Who uses superscript ordinals besides "for sale" signs in used car lots? Blue headings?
I who was the idiot who came up with themes that are just half-assed template.
I switched to Word from what by then was Ami Pro and it was a major step downward (a book publisher demanded that). I had used Word for Windoze since WIndoze 3 in the early 1990's for work. There is been little improvement in Word since I first used it.
Word has needed for 30 years:
1. Templates with the 10 styles actually needed in to the document; not ever one of the 2.987 million default styles.
2. Reasonable justification. You can tell if any justified document has come from Word because of the rivers.
3. Hyphenation that follow basic hyphenation rules.
4. Better support for alignment (vertical and horizontal) without having to mess with Word settings.
5. Distinction between character and paragraph styles. If you click on text you should be able to see both in use.
As the evil empire gets more people to subscribe word improvements are less likely. Just as improvements in Adobe products have come to an effective halt now that they use subscriptions. (And Quark has been totally FUed as a company.)
For my own copies, I don't upgrade word until it no longer functions on my OS. That is usually ten years. My last word upgrade (11 year ago) brought me open type features and nothing else. If I "upgrade" now I but I'd just get a change in UI.
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56 minutes ago, MikeW said:
"Do you use in-line graphics in ID? "
Rarely
56 minutes ago, MikeW said:"Do you use contextual features in ID?"
Never
56 minutes ago, MikeW said:"Do you use rag-right?"
Never in InDesign. Frequently with Word
I should have mentioned that there is an option in M$ Word to do justification like WordPerfect. That option causes Word to shrink spaces and bring text up from the next line. That is a multi-line composer. Justification in Word always looks terrible. I have not used WP in a long time as they did not support Mac.
Sadly, bad formatting is now becoming increasingly common in printed books as well. People get used to the #$@$ the see in Word and think it's OK in a book as well.
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2 hours ago, garrettm30 said:
@Jim Slade Most of those features are things I normally would not expect to find in a typical word processor but rather in a quality layout app, which is of course what Publisher is aiming to be.
The reason I made this what-might-be-considered-off-topic-list is to illustrate that something a step up from a word processor would meet the publishing needs of 99%. All of the features that I listed (except for paragraph composition) have appeared in various word processors. In ye olde days we had Samna Pro that was in every way superior to Word. I had a usable style system (and frames with rounded corners). Unfortunately, M$ was able to use its market power to drive them out (with their 2nd rate product). When it got bought out, it was over
For a quick survey, we have the text in a text box word processors that do little formatting above what the text box does. This includes various RTF editors and Open Office and Libre Office.
It appears to me that Apple deliberately hamstrings Pages so Word will stay on Mac. You cannot even format all the elements of a list. Like a number of other text programs, Pages uses the ridiculous system of of styles where you have to format the text then use existing text to create a style.
There appears to be market need to drive the word processor up as there is a big gap in appear between what you get in Word and InDesign for plain text.
I note that in just searching for a references to do this post I ran into a quite a number of posts from people in the same boat as I that want to put an end to the Adobe scam, are sick of the lack of improvement in Adobe (and Word), noting the poor performance on the Mac, looking at Quark and Affinity, yet cannot find product to do professional plain text.
A technical note from 14 years ago:
https://creativepro.com/the-importance-of-paragraph-composition/
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Hopefully, this is not getting off topic but another critical need is a decent word processor.
"What do you mean by decent?"
Glad you asked. Some of the features of a decent word processors would include:
- decent text justification that operates by paragraph, rather than by line and does not leave gaping spaces.
- hyphenation that follows the rules of hyphenation (and maybe even was configurable) and does not automatically break a hyphens. (e.g., "4-F" should not not break even with a hyphen and "A–Z" should not break with an en dash).
- Be able to define ranges of characters with no break (character style setting)
- Be style based and have styles easy to use. Not having 57.358 million pre-defined system styles that cannot be deleted so that you have to sort through a monster list to find the 10 styles you need for your template; be able to define style hierarchies in session and not have to go through the total BS of formatting text you want then define styles from already formatted text.
- Have character and paragraph styles independent. No BS hybrid styles that are a mixtures of the two. Have the both the paragraph and character style displayed when you select text.
- Have an easy method of removing character styles.
- Allow rounded corners on text frames.
- Be able to easily identify text that has been manually formatted by the idiot coworker who refuses to learn how to use styles.
- Full font feature support
- Be able to format all the elements of a numbered or bulleted list.
In other words, a full featured work processor without the bloatware.
Now that the "leading" Word processor (the one that has seen virtually no functional improvements in 25 years and where each "upgrade" is little more than a change in user interface) is pushing the subscription scam, the market there should be opening up.
Monopoly and subscription models are two biggest poxes on software progress.
The "leading" Word processor has had for decades a Table of Authorities feature that has never been usable. It was probably added as a check the box feature for a government contract. The vendor has never made any effort to make that feature work.
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5 hours ago, Patrick Connor said:
You do understand that a marketing team are going to concentrate on what the software we sell is already good at right? Why would you write about academic publications with a product that cannot do them well ?
I seem to have lit a fire here. I presume that there are a large number of people (like me) who refuse to bend to Adobe's subscription scam where they can collect money endlessly at inflated rates and not improve their product; and who are on aging 32-bit versions that will soon not be able to run on the Mac (and cannot run on the latest version); who are looking to migrate.
How big is that market?
I've dumped Photoshop in favor of Photo. So there is an instinctive drive to move to you folks for the other pieces.
But it is increasingly looking like the only alternative is Quark (which there are other objections to). The lack of footnotes was an issue in the first version of InDesign. It was implemented in the second.
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Having refused to join Adobe's subscription scam, I have been trying to replace my aging creative suite. I was successful with Affinity Photo (thank you very much).
My documents tend to have a lot of footnotes/end notes. Last I checked, Publisher did not support this (beyond what ancient Adobe did). I thought I would check in and see if footnotes have been implemented yet so I can cross another Adobe product off my list.
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I humbly request the ability to drag the export file selection dialog box.
I seem to be able to drag every other file selection dialog box.
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FWIW, I have found that affinity does a MUCH better job at this than Photoshop.
One of the issues with Photoshop is that it will not merge blueprints that are inverted. Affinity has no problem with that.
The reason I am not going to get in on Adobe's subscription scam is that it gives them zero incentive to improve the product.
The same goes for M$ Word but at least they have a buy option. Word has the same problems it has had for 30 years (e.g. poor style management, poor justification) yet M$ just changes the UI without substantial improvements. It would be even worse under a subscription model.
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1. When they are in one window, the tabs are very hard to read.
2. That is the way the product from the company in California does it that people are used to.
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I request that the the open windows show up in the WINDOW menu. On the currently selected window shows up now.
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Thanks for the help. I ordered the product to try to make it work myself.
The Great Open Need
in Feedback for Affinity Publisher V1 on Desktop
Posted
I give up. If no one gives a wet fart around here about how Publisher could fill the needs of the market, it never it going to (e.g. footnotes). The publishing community needs to look to someone else then