MikeW

Seriously?
Serious users are here. Non serious users leave when it doesn't suit their needs. Other non serious users never come here because they use it instead of discussing it. Non users don't come here.

The real question is though;
Why are there so many people posting nonessential topics and keep on discussing these topics to fill their days.
And by doing so, making it for the (new) user,seeking answers, so difficult.

And boy are there some bone scrapers here. But yes a general chat forum that could be ignored/blocked from the streams by the members, could be the solution.
 

You could start a thread in this forum with a title such as the following.
A thread for serious customers who use the software for serious purposes
You could write the first post in the thread explaining how serious customers and serious purposes are defined for the purposes of the thread.
William

Only if/when Serif adds scripting and/or logic the APub's merge capabilities.
I do something akin to what the OP is looking to do via merge logic, character styles and different master pages in a different application. The working sample code is:
«fields bizcolor,biz,name,title,addy,csz,blurb «if bizcolor = "blue"»«set master of this page to "B-blue"» «word 1 to 3 of blurb» «word 4 to 40 of blurb» «biz» «name», «title» «addy», «csz»«endif» «if bizcolor = "yellow"»«set master of this page to "D-yellow"» «word 1 to 3 of blurb» «word 4 to 40 of blurb» «biz» «name», «title» «addy», «csz»«endif» «if bizcolor = "green"»«set master of this page to "C-green"» «word 1 to 3 of blurb» «word 4 to 40 of blurb» «biz» «name», «title» «addy», «csz»«endif» The screen shot below is a compilation of the tab-delimited merge file (which has a field for color), the result after the merge (separate pages), the imposed result and the above merge code.

Grunge Brush Vector Inlay Experiment

For Coelacanth you need to choose both Stylistic Alternates/1 and the Lining figure style.

I also set Figure Widths to Tabular here, so that the figures would line up vertically.

Wasn't it someone from Serif who once stated another "never"? "Ain't nobody acquiring us."
So I'll take @Ash's statements with a grain of salt. May well be assurances "to the best of his knowledge," but situations can, and do, change.
I am personally more towards ambivalent about whether the Affinity applications ever become subscription. Maybe because I'm now mostly retired with few corporate clients to be concerned with. Coupled with the fact I have never had a corporate client request I use Serif's Affinity applications--nor Canva for that matter. If they do go subscription, and I get requests for their use, I'll simply do what I do with Adobe (when I need to use the latest versions): I'll rent them for the job. It's not a big deal.

I think my Affinity app is snappier since Canva took over!

No worries, @Ash. Even if that had been a sanctioned tweet (which there was time to "correct"), business models can, and do, change. This will be evident if/when Canva goes public or sold to different VCs. The pressure for ever-growing returns puts an extreme amount of pressure on the board of directors. And crap always rolls downhill.
Like I wrote, I'm not worried about it (even if I wasn't semi-retired).
And, as long as the Affinity applications are not subscription, I'll still do what little I do to make them better.

No worries, @Ash. Even if that had been a sanctioned tweet (which there was time to "correct"), business models can, and do, change. This will be evident if/when Canva goes public or sold to different VCs. The pressure for ever-growing returns puts an extreme amount of pressure on the board of directors. And crap always rolls downhill.
Like I wrote, I'm not worried about it (even if I wasn't semi-retired).
And, as long as the Affinity applications are not subscription, I'll still do what little I do to make them better.

No worries, @Ash. Even if that had been a sanctioned tweet (which there was time to "correct"), business models can, and do, change. This will be evident if/when Canva goes public or sold to different VCs. The pressure for ever-growing returns puts an extreme amount of pressure on the board of directors. And crap always rolls downhill.
Like I wrote, I'm not worried about it (even if I wasn't semi-retired).
And, as long as the Affinity applications are not subscription, I'll still do what little I do to make them better.

It took hackers a couple days to break Adobe's online activation/verification crap when CC first came out. New versions take the same or less time.
If someone wants into your house, locks ain't gonna do it. Locks only keep honest people honest.

You can select non-contiguous paragraphs in Publisher. Select the first one, then press Ctrl (Windows; presumably Cmd on macOS) while selecting the others.

CorelDraw was (is?) great in this feature. We published a newspaper in the late 90s and started a new one in 2019. Used Corel products before. Moved to Affinity and Adobe and it is still shocking to me some of the features we took for granted then are still not implemented in these other programs today. One of the killer features of Corel Ventura page layout program (RIP) was the paragraph tool which allowed for choosing non-contiguous paragraphs, like article subheads, and clicking on one style to change them all at once. In AP and Indesign, you have to format each paragraph on the same page/spread individually. What a pain. Also, since I'm on a roll, the late-90s ACT CRM was perfect for small business. Didn't try to do too much, but still networked and integrated with Outlook and Word for email and letters. In 1998. Today, EVERY CRM is too heavy and tries to do too much. The learning curves are worse than coding. SMH.

Hah! The rumors of Quark's demise have always been exaggerated.
I've been using it from the late 1980s until the current version. As well as ID. And other layout applications. I have diverse clientele which use a variety of software that I need to return my work in their preferred format(s). I have my preferences about which applications I use when it doesn't matter to the client or recommend to them for particular jobs where one is better than another.
For myself and the companies I have owned, the above has always been what I've had to, needed to, do. I'm glad I am not "stuck" using a single application or suite of applications.

Pretty much, modern Latin fonts (OTF or TTF) do not make use of the only references in those links that affect justification--the JSTF (the justification table) and the OT feature, jalt. But even so, the jstf doesn't necessarily affect what you are considering as justification. jalt also isn't involved in most all Latin fonts.
The jstf is used to substitute glyphs depending upon the surface layout parameters (width of frame space in conjunction with the layout engine's attempts at justification).
A better link to understand what the jstf is doing with glyph substitution, try this thread on TD:
https://typedrawers.com/discussion/3465/making-jstf-better

I was going to say that I am fairly new to the Affinity Suite but thinking back, I guess that I started in 2019. I have used all three extensively since I found them. I am another one who moved away from Adobe after many years, which I started when it was creative suite 3 and I upgraded and subscribed all the way along.
I use Affinity just for fun now, since I have retired, but I still find much joy in being creative. I typically use Affinity to create images and whatnot for use in my 3D projects, as image wraps, and the like. I'll share two projects that share some assets.
The first is my sardine can. I created this after I spent time drawing a clip art fish as a challenge to myself. I did borrow two assets from Pixaby - the tomatoes and the sailing ship.
The second is my three fishes pub sign, also created in Affinity Designer.
I sure am glad that I happened across the Affinity products.
BTW, I am just posting to share my work and sort of introduce myself. I am not looking for critiques.

Add the section name in the sections dialog + the <section field> on the master page. (menu Text > Insert > Fields > Section Name)

Believe me, good plan (layout, text styles, master pages), knowledge, using the correct techniques from the beginning will pay off hundred times later when change or edits will be required.

Walt's advice to use two text styles is a good idea. In my books I often have a style named Body and another one named Body Indent. I define Body with first line indent set to 0 and Body Indent with first line indent set to a positive value. I use Body only for the first paragraph after a heading and Body Indent for the rest of the body text. To automate this, I set the Next field for heading text styles to Body, the Next field for Body to Body Indent, and the Next field for Body Indent to Body Indent. This approach works very well.
Cheers

Great advice guys, all done and put in place, working much cleaner and more efficiently now!

So, lots of pressure here on Affinity to do this. I just want to comment a bit on something. And please note, this is from the perspective that I personally love variable fonts, have made a bunch of them, and can’t imagine personally paying to license any general design tool today that does not support them decently.
Variable font support is NOT trivial
It isn’t just a matter of enabling something. And no, switching out their back-end font engine for Harfbuzz would not be trivial, and even if it were, that would not solve the problem! Don’t get me wrong, either supporting Harfbuzz or supporting variable fonts in their own engine is a huge amount of work. So many assumptions need to be thrown away, in either case. APIs reworked... agh.
But the other huge deal is: user interface aspects of variable fonts are a huge hassle. The names and contents of axes are completely arbitrary and not known in advance by app developers. What is the most axes a font can have? 64K. Maybe the app has some arbitrary limit lower than that. How fine should the stops be on an axis? How many predefined instances should they support per axis? How do they expose predefined instances for variable fonts and how do they make those interact with user-defined instances? Do they just use sliders for everything? Do they support decimals in axis positions or only whole numbers? Manual input of position coordinates, or only the sliders? And on and on.
Without going into the same detail, impacts on layout are similarly huge.
 
Writing this as former fonts product manager at Adobe (until December 2008), later product management for font management and web fonts at Extensis, and CEO of FontLab
Anyway, I am eager to see this support in Serif’s Affinity products, but please understand it is a heck of a lot of work!
(Is that enough italics and boldface for one post, or should I throw in some more gratuitously here?)

You haven’t heard the story before, because it is absolutely untrue.
First, Adobe stopped making new fonts in Type 1 format very early in their switch to OpenType. Before they even shipped their first retail OpenType fonts in the year 2000. That included Type 1 MM fonts.
Originally Adobe intended to have and ship OpenType Multiple Master fonts among their first OpenType fonts. The format was fully spec’d and fonts were being developed. Dan Mills at Adobe decided to drop the MM part for two reasons:
1) Microsoft had zero interest in MM OpenType at the time, and was proving a reluctant partner on that part of things. But that was not the same as pressure, and there was no quid pro quo that I ever heard at the time.
2) OpenType layout features and the rest of it was a hard enough sell without the MM part at the same time. Dan was concerned OpenType might not succeed if MM was bundled in there from the beginning.
Some of us at Adobe were pretty unhappy when Dan told us (the type team) of his decision (in 1999 IIRC?). David Lemon and I talked about it at great length. But as much as we loved MM (and love variable fonts now) we were not convinced he was wrong. I believe I recall saying exactly that to David, and him agreeing, before we even left the room. I remember David Lemon and I talking about how maybe some day we could bring back MM in OpenType. It took 17 years, but it happened at ATypI in Warsaw in 2016. And that time around, Adobe (David), Microsoft (Greg), Apple (Ned) and Google (Behdad) all did it as a joint announcement—although Apple was coy about committing to support for the new stuff, as it was based fairly directly on the GX Variations tech, it seemed pretty clear they were down for it.

Best way, in my opinion: create another Text Style, that you use on that first paragraph, based on the one you already created, and set the indent to 0. Then assign that to the first paragraph of the chapter. You can even set that one to have a "next text style" that specifies the indented one.
Alternative, not as good: With the cursor in that paragraph, set the indent to 0 in the Paragraph panel.
 

Just a note...
There are plenty of templates available for free to paid-for on the web in .idml format if one really wants templates. As APub can open .idml (with some caveats at times), these templates are usable.
Here's one for medical services opened in APub.