Xpresso

Although in Preferences both versions of English are shown, in the Language window of the Characters panel the only option is English, main no distinction between any of the many variations of English. And as I mentioned before, when I run a spell check my usual English spellings of words such as colour are wrongly flagged up. An important issue for those of us who work in the UK, and probably on Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa etc, who generally follow British spelling norms and not those favoured by the US. This forum is this same, constantly changing my English spellings for the US equivalent.

I am UK/Europe based and my first choice language is English, not US English. My language choice is set correctly in the Preferences and yet when I run a spell check I am offered Americanised spelling corrections. I'm talking about simple words like colour, harbour etc. For a UK-based company this is a serious oversight and needs correcting asap.

Given all the idiosyncrasies built in to MS Word, I would always want to 'clean up' any docx file before importing it into a typesetting environment.

A one-size-fits-all approach is wholly wrong in my view. We're talking about a tool for those who work in publishing and as such it should reflect the terminology users are familiar with and not use terms that might be alien to them. Functionality is the important thing.

Thanks Michael, that solves the issue. Bizarre default, though, because I would imagine most users would want to use art boards in exactly this way. No mention either that I could find in any of the documentation. I've been a Quark user since the late 1980s, mostly for producing newspapers, books, magazines and newsletters. The beauty of Quark used to be its simplicity, but in recent times it's become bloated. Additional features have meant that some formatting options, previously achieved with simple keystroke combinations, have become more long-winded, not helpful in an industry working to tight deadlines, where speed is of the essence. Two other areas where I feel Publisher needs attention is in colour handling and typographical default settings. I would like to see the Swatches palette developed to allow for the naming of colours so that they can be identified more readily. At the moment if you have similar shades in the same swatch it's difficult to distinguish one from another because of the tiny square of colours. I would also like to see the option of a default setting for leading, for instance, instead of having to set in every single Text Style. Keyboard shortcuts are always important to smooth and efficient working and in my view Publisher doesn't at the moment strike the right balance with its shortcuts. Too many apply to little used options and not enough to ones users like me need.

As a long-time QuarkXpress user I am impressed with what I've seen of Publisher so far. You have indicated on another thread that importing InDesign documents will probably be added to a future version, so I can ask if the same will apply to Quark files? I no longer use Quark as much as I used to and I'm still running its 2015 incarnation. For my now more limited use, upgrading is not a cost-effective option. I already use Photo and Designer, so Publisher would fit neatly into my workflow as an alternative to Quark. Publisher still has quite a few rough edges, particularly with how it handles images and the bizarre implementation of the art-board, where normally I like to write text, try out different things and run text overflows during the editing process. I find the default implementation of black backgrounds equally bizarre in an application aimed at those who work in print. Who in their right mind would print on black paper? You will be on to a winner if Publisher becomes an app that looks like it was intended for print, rather than one simply ported over from the web environment.