Dee

Just commenting to add my support to this request - being able to draft in markdown would open up a lot of workflow possibilities for me and the teams I manage. Baseline features to make this useful to me:
Heading paragraph styles (#, ##, ###, etc. - as well as ---- and ==== markup for h1 and h2) Bold and Italic character styles Block quote paragraph style Tables would be great but I know they're not standard across all Markdown flavors, and Affinity Publisher handles tables a little differently such that they would need special consideration.
I know there's other things that would need to be considered, but if I had those things my workflow would be improved dramatically.

I do layout work for TTRPG (tabletop roleplaying game) designers, and this week I decided to give Affinity Publisher an honest go of it. I took two commissions, and put both of them into Publisher. I'm pleased to say that it mostly went smoothly, but I have a few things that would have made the experience even better. A lot of us in the TTRPG industry are looking at Affinity Publisher as a more manageable alternative to Adobe's subscription model, and we bring with us some very specific needs that would be great to accommodate.
I put a thread up on Twitter talking about them, which I'll link at the bottom of this post, but here's the bullet list of things we'd like to see:
Impovements to the Place tool when used with text--specifically, we need the styles to map consistently every time a given file is placed--or, more preferably, a menu to appear prompting us to map the styles in the source file to the styles in the Publisher file, with additional options to keep or discard any style changes from the source file. Place tool support for Markdown (.md) files--right now we have to use Pandoc to generate a docx file in order for it to work with Publisher, which adds a layer of complexity that can cause problems. Let us skip that step. Export/Persona for HTML output--this is a big one for me, but web designers could get a lot of mileage out of this application if it could generate HTML code. I've been wanting to create interactive character sheets for games, with trackers and toggles and text fields and menus. Being able to do all of that within Publisher would be awesome, but being able to add those things to the HTML output would be a nice first step. Export/Persona for ePub output--this would be good for generating multiple versions of a document without having to maintain multiple source files. Those are the big-ticket items for me as a TTRPG designer and layout artist for the industry. I know there are others who would also benefit from these things.

No, I disagree with that statement.
When someone has a need, that need is important to that person and should be considered.
It depends on the various needs. 
William
 

spoil marketing's surprise 

I do layout work for TTRPG (tabletop roleplaying game) designers, and this week I decided to give Affinity Publisher an honest go of it. I took two commissions, and put both of them into Publisher. I'm pleased to say that it mostly went smoothly, but I have a few things that would have made the experience even better. A lot of us in the TTRPG industry are looking at Affinity Publisher as a more manageable alternative to Adobe's subscription model, and we bring with us some very specific needs that would be great to accommodate.
I put a thread up on Twitter talking about them, which I'll link at the bottom of this post, but here's the bullet list of things we'd like to see:
Impovements to the Place tool when used with text--specifically, we need the styles to map consistently every time a given file is placed--or, more preferably, a menu to appear prompting us to map the styles in the source file to the styles in the Publisher file, with additional options to keep or discard any style changes from the source file. Place tool support for Markdown (.md) files--right now we have to use Pandoc to generate a docx file in order for it to work with Publisher, which adds a layer of complexity that can cause problems. Let us skip that step. Export/Persona for HTML output--this is a big one for me, but web designers could get a lot of mileage out of this application if it could generate HTML code. I've been wanting to create interactive character sheets for games, with trackers and toggles and text fields and menus. Being able to do all of that within Publisher would be awesome, but being able to add those things to the HTML output would be a nice first step. Export/Persona for ePub output--this would be good for generating multiple versions of a document without having to maintain multiple source files. Those are the big-ticket items for me as a TTRPG designer and layout artist for the industry. I know there are others who would also benefit from these things.