Criss

SO glad some people have work-arounds that work for them. Please consider (for example) a professional magazine with a feature article that runs a little long on pages 11-13 and then there's some text continued on page 85. Figuring out where to break the text on each page of a larger document, making sure that it's not awkward or hyphenated when possible, etc. is all part of the job of layout, and it can't be done in Word or Google Docs. Now, a late correction from a fact-check or by-line came in, so everything reflows. How are you looking at page 13 and 85 at the same time to look at how to re-split this article and fit it on the required pages. And the deadline is in under 1 hour to get it to press. Your boss is breathing down your neck. Either you — or the app you're using — are the bottleneck. Are you going to put it back into Word or Google Docs and then bring it back into Publisher, now the story re-flows, you have to apply style sheets again, check the run-around for pull-quotes, add column and page breaks all over, check for hyphenation problems — basically re-do all the work you've already put in all over again (and have it proofed & approved by someone else). Or can you open it up in Story mode, add the needed text, make the corrections, and then check how it's rendered on the 4 pages in question and make tweaks for the final flow so you can get this document out to press… And this is a realistic situation.

Right. I was hunting through Notice and others for symbols. Going cross-eyed. I ended up putting anything I needed to see more closely in a second document at a larger font size and zoomed in but this was unnecessary eyestrain. It's part of ergonomics & accessibility.

I'm 53. "Largest" icons isn't big enough. Can't I just tell it a font size — Some fonts & icons are quite detailed and I want to really see what I'm picking rather than having to put them on the artboard to get a good look at them. Thanks.

footnote, index, TOC are all included in the v2 that was recently released. Now we're waiting on cross-references. Maybe the functionality is in there. Going to have to poke around or find documentation to figure it out but it's not on the features list. But adding foot/end/side notes is a start. Let's hope the cross-references are in there too.

This certainly will never take the place of having a real footnote feature, but for those who are struggling with a huge number of footnotes in documents, consider getting Keyboard Maestro, and putting together a macro to create a text box at the bottom of a document and paste the clipboard into it, then return you to the move tool. You can assign a hot key to the text style for footnotes and have the macro apply it as well. If you're working on one big document, you likely can have KM do all the heavy lifting and create the text box with correct Text Frame settings for runaround, of the right width, adequate height, in the correct position so all you have to do is make sure all the text fits & there's no overflow. I'd take 80 keypresses over doing all those steps 80 times. For those not willing to/able to get KM, consider creating a footnote text box asset with all the frame settings for runaround etc. and then you can drag it from the Asset pallet to the page you need it on. In fact using an Asset might even be the right answer even when using KM to automate placing it and adjusting it. If they could add a feature to Text Wrap that wraps to the text contents rather than the bounding box that would certainly help, you wouldn't have to adjust the box height — you might be able to make the macro double-click the center top resize handle to resize the textbox to fit the content. Apparently that's how Publisher does "fitting" — there's no menu or contextual menu option for it I think.

This also doesn't work. Because then you're replacing all missing fonts with 1 font & font-style, when you may have many missing fonts (say from a PDF document) and thus they're not assigned to text styles, so now you're globally replacing all missing font styles with 1 font style. Disaster. So if I want to replace Minion with Helvetica Neue — but Comic Sans with Impact (I dunno making this up) I can't do it from that dialogue. But I COULD from the Font Manager if they added the option to make that change permanent instead of just temporary. Add 1 more column to the Font Manager with a choice of substitute temporarily or replace permanently. While at it — want to make it SUPER helpful? Give a choice of replacing a font with a text style (paragraph & character) as well. Same drop-down menus could have a horizontal line and list the paragraph & character styles. We're looking at saving significant time on the user end for a couple programmer's time on the back-end. Note there's some features folk would pay a bounty for — if it's cost of implementing features that's a concern. But this could use the current search->replace tech so it's not totally reinventing the wheel. I eventually ended up making a Keyboard Maestro macro to locate Paragraph marks that were still Minion Pro that ought to have been the text style of the heading they were in — so no actual Minion Pro visible characters were used (I get that a paragraph mark is for all intents & purposes still a character; I'm a coder also) — and hit the Paragraph Style reset button so that the end character of the paragraph wasn't in an "off" font. Not sure why it happened but somewhere between InDesign & Affinity Publisher it ended up weird. So a search-replace to reset these heading paragraphs to their base style would have been nice. The work-around is a total kludge telling it where to click on the screen.

In search-replace, the gear menu doesn't allow selecting a missing font. Someone said they have to do a regex. My complaints are on text boxes with [no style] that technically have no font (no text content), but were set to MinionPro by (old InDesign), which (now) doesn't exist. So basically I have hundreds of text boxes to change because those boxes are doing something else right now. Obviously they shouldn't have been text boxes (with no text in them) in the first place, but that's a lot of (unnecessary) work to do that could have been solved by Affinity realizing the box has no actual text in it and thus there's no effect to be alerting a "missing font" over. And even if one should use Search-Replace, could it include a gear or other button to pop up the search-replace with the (missing!) font in it to be found so you can do the global search/replace from there? Because you can't "find" a font that doesn't exist in the document or on the computer.

+1 on cross-references. Both embedded ("see p. 81") with header titles ("see Some Header Elsewhere on page 81") and "continued on p. 81"/"continued from p. 81" type references. (figures, tables, pages…)

This is up there with cross-references for me. I'd rank cross-references first, though — because that's a user-end functionality of the book. It affects a lot more people than the design team. I'm having to refer readers to the index. But I'm grateful there's indexing. This is a designer or design-team end issue, quality control & usability for both writing and editing stories. If you care more about other features, why are you here arguing with people who want this feature? lol When I hit snags and come here looking for a feature I need and it doesn't exist, I am going to add my 2¢ to the topic, not look for people advocating for other features to tell them their concerns aren't good enough. Your input is appreciated. I'll see you over on the advocating for cross-references thread I hope.

I was saying that IF there is not this "reveal codes" style editor — thinking back to WordPerfect <5.0 before there were WYSIWYG editors — then the best idea would be to have an import similar to how you can bring in a file from other Affiinity apps and edit the original source document and have it update in Publisher. That could be a separate request regardless -- yes. Right now there's "flags" on say index entries. But no way to show which text has styles applied to it (cf InDesign's story editor for an example) which resembles the old "Reveal Code" feature of WordPerfect. It has always been absolutely essential to see if say there's a period or even a carriage return that hasn't had a style properly applied to it. Otherwise you have to go through the whole document re-applying paragraph and character styles to everything to make sure it's correct. I've worked with paste-up era folks who could spot under a 1pt misalignment of text breathing over my shoulder. When you're working on the Merrill Lynch Annual Report (or similar) that's what happens. I'm not working on anything that stringent right now, but if doing magazine layouts etc. you really want to be meticulous. This type of feature is what makes this a "home design app" vs a "pro design app".

Another +1. Came here to see if the feature was in a menu or something and I wasn't seeing it. Doing it IN Publisher is the right answer for all the above reasons. But also having Word, .txt, .rtf, and Pages documents as outside-editable resources would be a start for now, so if you edit it in the external file it updates in Publisher. Of course that won't work forever and you'd have to embed it eventually when adding index, cross-references (once they're available), etc. to the text. Any case, the "story editor" feature is what I needed today, and I'm looking forward to its return. It's a big difference for magazine production.