StewartTower

Yes to both; Walt. I've attached a PDF cheat sheet from my former career. It has explanations of the use of each grep search plus screen shots of the find/change dialog (I often preached this stuff to other staff). My career was with a provincial government, working with long Word files from departments. Very few people understand long document text flow so I used these particular greps daily. grep affinity.pdf

As I've spent more time with these products I've come to better understanding of the methodology behind the layering. With Design, I've come to appreciate the functionality of its layering. It's very different from my experiences with Adobe but it also works very well once you've adjusted to it. I'll admit I don't spend much time in Publisher since my long document days are behind me so the impacts there are less. Affinity is a different country from Adobe so the ways will also be different. Different is not bad, just different. Overall I'm very happy with my Affinity experience and pitch the software where ever I can. That aside; there are two other areas that Publisher could explore. One is enhancing the GREP find/change. I used this feature a lot with long documents since it's a massive time saver and a great design tool. The other is variable glyph scaling. Publisher already offers variable word and letter spacing. Adding variable glyph scaling in addition would be a bonus. Thanks.

You're right; worked like a charm. Pages opened my doc file, exported to docx, and kept all the tables intact. Lovin' this forum. Thanks.

LibreOffice is new to me but I'll definitely check it out. Thanks.

I'm new to Affinity so I have only seen Affinity 2. I'm experimenting with placing Word documents in Publisher. In particular, I'm exploring tables since much of my work involves building forms using tables. Docx files are supported while doc files are not. Was this the case with Affinity 1? It seems odd that legacy doc file placement is not an option. My work around is to open the doc files in OpenOffice and then save as RTF. The down side is that table structures are lost and replaced with tabs and returns but I expect I'll still be able to work with these. I'm just trying to get a better handle on my new work flows and understand the inner workings of Affinity. My career/office environment is Adobe and Microsoft but I'm trying to translate this to my home environment; free of Adobe and Microsoft while supporting open source and other options. Thanks.

Beautiful. I knew there must be a way. Still getting used to how Affinity does things. I suspect I'll be tripping on the learning curve for a while. Thank you.

I have a text frame in Publisher and have placed a vector graphic from Designer. The graphic is smaller than the artboard in Designer. I've used Publisher's Vector Crop tool to reduce the size of the box the graphic is in. In Publisher, when I apply a text wrap to the placed graphic, the text wrap is applied to the artboard from Designer, not the size of the art box in Publisher. The enclosed screen shots show the issue. Can a text wrap not apply to the cropped box instead of the artboard? Thanks.

I'll give a similar nod on this feature. My workflow in InDesign was to build documents with layers for specific types of content. One global layer for text, another for photos and another for vector art. For example; this would allow me to lock or hide the text layer while I scanned through a long document for an overall view and edit of the other content. I'm fine with the expanded layer view for content, page by page, but this seems better suited to Designer (Illustrator) which would be more prone to many separate vector elements such as a busy graphic. Being new to Affinity products I'm more than happy to date. I'm being careful not to make a direct comparison to my Adobe background since I'm in a new country now with new ways. One last point; when Adobe first released InDesign, it did not have a TOC generator. This floored me since Adobe had PageMaker at the time which could generate a TOC. The point is that a feature like global layering can still find its way into the program without giving up on Affinity. I'm happy and hopeful.

Good points. I've upgraded to Big Sur for now and purchased the Affinity suite. Haven't had much time to experiment yet but I'm liking what I see so far. Thanks for the input.

I'm thinking Catalina would be the best bet since I see numerous issues with Monterey and Ventura in the forums. As a rule, I'm leery of the latest updates until all the bugs get worked out.

I'm a graphic designer of 29 years and am washing my hands of Adobe. My home computer is a 2017 iMac running Mojave. I've recently had to restore from Apple's servers and now my Adobe Creative Suite barely works. (CS4 and CS6). I refuse to pay Adobe's lease fees for their Cloud version since the pre-cloud Creative Suites are still perfectly good. Affintiy 2 will not run on Mojave so I'm looking for feedback on which Mac OSs are better or worse. Cheers...