RussC

Any updates on when cross-references is likely to happen? I get that there's lots going on in the background, but x-ref (and footnotes - hellooo footnotes!!) are an absolute must. I've just spent 3 days setting my book up in Affinity Publisher, copying and pasting in, and now I come to go through and tidy up, I find all my table and image captions and cross-references are not supported. Utterly gobsmacked, in all honesty; especially given this thread's been asking for this fundamental for well over a year.

"I'm not totally sure FrameMaker can be considered a wordprocessor. " Meh, potato-potatoe... Labelling it however you deem fit doesn't detract from where we are now... can publisher do what we want? No. Do I care whether FM19, ID<whatever>, or Notepad++ can do it? No, not at all. Word can do most of what I want to (and had been more than capable for many years), but oftentimes I want something better... Can Publisher do it? Yes/no. If no, is it on the cards? Yes/no. No offense, but I don't give a monkey's about Framemaker, InDesign, Quark, or the rest of them - can Publisher do what I want? If the answer's yes, then great; if not, then it's a balance...

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.

As a techie copywriter of some 24-years (and a Microsoft Office Specialist Word Expert with 27-years' exp.) I don't see how this can't be a must have. I use Word, I use Scrivener, and I want to use Publisher (this one, not the MS version), but the whole point is you make your users' lives easier. I get that I'm likely not going to use Publisher for academic work, but I guess there's an almost expectation that if you claim to be fit for purpose for books, etc.--and also as a serious challenger for another piece of software that does encompass this--then that type of functionality should be a given. +1 for the roadmap, wherever that may be. Edited: I saw a previous post where this is being addressed by Serif, so that's good news.

Thanks for these. I look forward to learning from your work.