Amontillado

I hope there's a hidden message in all this from Canva. Despite the extreme negativity, this forum continues public visibility. I hope that means Canva is willing to give customer complaints due attention. If Canva hasn't gotten the word about how subscriptions would impact their market, they are completely hopeless.

Many thanks. It's odd that so many posts can be found saying imposition is impossible from Pages when it seems to be possible from anything in general. On a related topic, the recent pledges from Canva/Affinity are reassuring. I'm still on the window ledge, railing at fate and ready to jump, but I'm starting to suspect it's just a first floor window. My remaining worries are for Affinity staff.

Canva can kick me around a little, I guess, but if I hear Affinity staff is getting a raw deal I don't care how good or how cheap the software is, I won't be part of hurting good people's lives. Please honor these pledges and please respect the people that got Serif this far.

Many blog posts say Apple Pages can't imposition pages (with a small p). Yet when I print from Pages, booklet mode is there and it impositions. Anyone know if that booklet mode in the print dialog is from Affinity?

I'm steamed. The correct term is encraperation, which I personally invented in about 2012. Doctorow is endeficating my accomplishments, the dirty rat!

I've stuck with Affinity despite some quirks. If the Affinity staff who won my loyalty remain in place and if there is no burdensome subscription, I'll stick with them. If not, my needs include page imposition for booklet printing and modest layout capability. I use Affinity for high polish documentation for work and tinfoil-hat-level political screed, mostly dweebery about hideous property appraisal hijinks. Yeah. I know. I should make better decisions. On the other hand, I believe I helped push some positive changes. Just me, high noon, a property appraiser, and a low-slung copy of Publisher flashing fatefully out of the leather. I'm going to start looking for alternatives against a dark future without Affinity.

I'm working through a similar situation. The solution I'm using is save the file I want to print. Create a new file and use Document->Add pages from file to grab a range of pages for the signature I want to print next. Make sure to grab an even multiple of four pages. Use the section manager to set the starting page correctly, otherwise page numbers will restart at 1. Ignore preflight warnings to fix tables of contents (hopefully that was done before saving the main file). Print the signature. Repeat for each signature. Imposition is correct. If you use or reference page numbers, it's critical to use the section manager to set the starting page number of each signature as you print it.

Thanks, @thomaso, I should have given more details. I appreciate the tips. I have 200 pages of PDF that I want to add additional commentary to along with a table of contents. The 200 pages of PDF are in a half dozen separate files. I want to concatenate the files and intersperse narrative. In the process I'd like to shrink the PDF content for the purpose of expanding the page margins. That would allow adding my own footers with page numbers. This will be printed on 11x17 paper, folded and center stapled like a tabloid. A center gap is another reason why I would like larger margins. If 50 sheets of 20 pound proves too much to fold I'll break it into two volumes. Scaling PDFs is more of a trick that it appears, I think. My guess, that's because PDFs can contain both images and rendered text. Thanks again!

I believe I have self-rescued on this one, although it would be great if there's a more elegant approach. The PDF was 8.5x11. I used Document->Add pages from file to load my PDF into Affinity. After selecting all the pages, I modified the spread settings to 20% larger, 10.2x13.2. The "scale to fit" option in the print settings scaled it back to 8.5x11.

I'm sure this must be in the documentation or discussed here, but I can't find a solution. I would like to scale the content on every page to create larger margins. It would also be awesome if I could set the margins so there is a larger gap between facing pages. Is that possible? I have a 200 page PDF to print in tabloid format and would appreciate the consistency of doing it via layout features. Many thanks in advance. Affinity Publisher is a dream to use!

Thank you, sir! After control-launching and reinstalling didn't straighten things out, I created new templates by loading old documents. I'm back in the game with Publisher. I look forward to Affinity's continued evolution and polishing. Publisher, Photo, and Designer are critical tools. Affinity Publisher makes my work documentation come alive. It's one of several products I consider secret weapons. My coworkers produce PDFs with Word. My documents have je ne sais quoi beyond what mere Word can match. It's like the difference between Frank Lloyd Wright architecture and mud huts, not that I have Wright's talent or want to disparage mud huts. It's just that Adobe huts are such relics of the past. 🤪

I'm running Affinity Publisher 2 2.2.1 on a late 2015 iMac, MacOS 12.7.1. Affinity Publisher has been a great tool. Today, it's going a little crazy. For instance: Launch Affinity Publisher The new document window shows Print and Press Ready versions of a number of sizes. The sizes are the same in both sets. E.g., Letter is 8.5x11 for both versions of Letter. Choose either Letter and click Create. Click the Add master button in the side panel under Master Pages. The Page preset is set to Letter. Change it to the other Letter in the dropdown box. The dimensions change to 22 in x 34 in. Change back to the other letter. The dimensions change to 8.268 in x 11.693. Click OK Right click the new master and change from "custom", which it will be on, to "Letter". The dimensions revert to 8.5x11. I have a template with a number of page layouts that may be corrupted. If I duplicate an existing page in that template and change the spread properties to a new size, Affinity Publisher terminates. In a fresh document, no such terminations, so I may just manually salvage what I can from the old template. I've used the control key on launch and reset everything. I've also moved Affinity Publish from the Applications directory to the trash (that hurt, I really like Affinity!) and re-installed. Any thoughts? Many thanks in advance. Affinity Publisher is an extremely necessary weapon in my arsenal.

Thanks, Walt - very creative ideas and I appreciate them. I shall give that a shot. Affinity Publisher has become increasingly important to me. By the time a letter needs a photo with a caption, I start thinking of BBEdit plus Affinity Publisher and a letter template as a word processor. I also deliver some documentation as PDF files, which I always create in AP. Sometimes I have to deliver Word files, but, eww. You would think in these enlightened times friends wouldn't ask friends to use Word. Have a great day!

Is there a way to store a file of interest in the Resource Manager or otherwise bundle an external file with an Affinity Publisher document? For instance, I use BBEdit's notebook feature as a copy editor. It works sort of like Scrivener for plain text. I transfer copy to AP by telling BBEdit to remove blank lines which makes paragraph breaks just one newline, then select all, copy, and undo to restore my double-newline paragraph breaks. In AP, Paste without format gets my text loaded and I can use consistent AP text styles. It would be nice to be able to archive the original copy in the AP document. Is it possible to place or otherwise embed additional files in AP, files that do not appear in the AP output?

This has not been fixed, but there is a reasonably easy workaround. Open your csv file in a spreadsheet app. Replace every occurrence of newline with something recognizable. I like ¶. Merge the data into Affinity. In Affinity, replace every occurrence of ¶ with newline. Note that in the Affinity replace field, newlines appear as ¶ characters. No biggie, it works. For more of a one-click-fix for the csv file, use BBEdit on Mac with a saved text factory (like a macro) to make the change. On either Windows or Mac, the extremely wonderful Easy Data Transform can save transformations. Load a csv file, apply the pilcrow transform, and save it. I don't have anything to do with Easy Data Transform. If you do much with merge data you may find it a good companion for other reasons. For instance, say you've got customer data including name and address in an Excel file, a csv export from your accounting system showing a log of individual sales, and a JSON dump from a tracking system that relates customers to industrial categorizations. EDT can do joins across different source formats. You could extract the customers from the Excel file with sales totals in the csv file beyond some threshold that appear in targeted industries in the JSON dump, writing your distilled data to csv (or any of several formats). Good luck with your merges!

The situation is this - you're grumpy and truly love your word processor, the incomparable Mellel. Unfortunately, it doesn't support mail merge. You're grumpy. It's not like you're going to start using Word. Affinity to the rescue, but there's a problem. If you create a spreadsheet with multiline cells for addresses, Affinity will change the intra-cell newlines into spaces. For a year I railed against fate and hand edited merged envelopes and documents. This morning an obvious solution came to mind. In Numbers (or Excel, or whatever) do a global search and replace. Change every instance of "\n" to "¶\n" in the spreadsheet, merge in Affinity, and in Affinity replace every instance of "¶ " (pilcrow followed by space) to "\n". Bingo, presto, Bob's your uncle, or whatever you say, multiline merge done without really much delay. An added benefit is if you use the ¶ character you might be able to be that one guy on the writing team who still knows what a pilcrow is. That's worth a lot.

Ditto what Karl said. I had persistent crashes when clicking "templates" in the File->New window on my aging Mac. Turning off hardware acceleration seems to have done the trick.

Does the data merge function in AP 3 support line breaks in the merge data? I hope I haven't missed that in earlier posts. I use Affinity Publisher for several different things. One use is to create envelopes. The CSV file is a single column. Each row has a multiline address. Affinity Publisher 2 will merge the data as one line per record. The newline gets translated to two spaces. If newlines in merge data became paragraph breaks that would be great.

I haven't been able to find an answer for this. In version 1, I could create a CSV file with line breaks to print envelopes with Affinity Publisher (fly, meet sledgehammer). In version 2, or maybe with an option flipped, the merge data follows word wrapping. Instead of three lines in the address, I get one, word-wrapped inside the text box as if the merge data didn't include line breaks. Is there an option to change how line breaks are processed in merge data? Many thanks in advance.

Actually, I just realized something. If a frame doesn't have a customized footnote position, you can set document wide or per-frame footnote positions while the frame is selected. It's only if the frame has a different footnote position from document wide that you have to move the focus off the frame to set document-wide footnote positioning. I can see the logic in that. If you have a frame with footnote positioning you like, changing the document-wide default shouldn't blow away the frame's options.

It's not that bad in Affinity 2. Footnotes are created where you want them to appear, with the style you want them to have. So far, I haven't been forced to use a layout I didn't like. My use for footnotes and endnotes is limited, so there are edges of the envelope I'm sure I haven't seen. Regarding the Macy's versus Gimbel's debate over importing footnotes from Adobe, I can see that would be nice. It also makes m want to ask if Adobe imports Affinity footnotes transparently. If not importing Adobe footnotes without fussing is a shortcoming of Affinity, seems like we should criticize Adobe if it doesn't transparently import Affinity footnotes. What the heck, let's criticize Adobe on general principles. 🙂 At least while we can. Affinity and evolution may have select Adobe for the fossil record.

What is the "import content" function in Publisher and Photo do? It brings up a file browser, but I can't find any valid files to choose. I suspect this may be kind of a newbie question. I've gotten enormous good from Photo and Publisher, but I can tell I'm just nibbling at the edges so far.

I may have figured this out - if you are focussed on a text frame, you can't set the document-wide options. If you are not focussed on a text frame, you can. I think...

The notes panel allows for customizing the setting for a particular footnote, and also has document-wide settings. I can't find a way to change the document-wide settings. Anybody know how to do that?

Curious - what is paragraph composition? I see there is a new style picker that will apply a style to words or paragraphs.