Michael117

When I first got started in IT, my job was to empty the bit bucket out in the computer room. First thing in the morning and last thing at night, schleping out to the computer room and emptying that dang bit bucket.

The Affinity team do read these forums and respond as needed. If this is a repeatable bug, someone may move this over to the Bug forum. You may want to include the version of AF Pub Beta you are using along with the OS Version that you are running on your computer. There is a forum for Windows bugs and one for Mac bugs. And I would second Walt's recommendation that you include a sample document that shows the problem you were having.

Well, actually..........It's HUMP-DAY!!

@Christophe There is a pinned item on the first page of this forum asking for the ability to import docx files. Feature request to import .docx files

I used AF Pub to make my wife's Doctoral research poster. It's a single page 36 inches by 48 inches and it had imported graphics and photos along with a couple of tables. The PDF I generated was used to print the poster on a vinyl sheet and everything worked perfectly. I did mirror everything in Scribus as a backup in case I ran into problems with AF Pub (I don't have ID or Quark). There was only one odd thing that happened in the whole process: at the FedexKinko's where I had the poster printed, the software they use to import the PDF seemed to have an issue displaying the PDF in a thumbnail view. It came up blank but printed perfectly. The template that the University gave her for the poster was set up on a page that was 13.25 inches by 7.5 inches. I'm still scratching my head on those dimensions. I started out on that format but decided to scale it up to the finished 36 by 48. The scaling worked perfectly, resizing the fonts and images. The only downside was that the text styles were still based on the smaller format. I had to go in and reset the styles to the new font sizes and spacing. Fortunately, I only had a few paragraph and character definitions. I can see how this is going to be a really great package of applications once all of the apps are up to the 1.7 baseline. Well done, Affinity team!

I like these ideas. One Use Case I've been thinking about using this application for is to build Wedding and Special Event Photo Albums. There are lots of tools out there to build those books, but with the integration of Photo and Designer, this one would totally crush the competition. Adding in all the images to be used in the album and then using the resource manager to manage that those images have been used would be a great way to manage that project.

I think the name needs to have some pep, some movement, some je ne sais quoi! How about Affinity Enpagerizer. It's 98% faster at enpagerizing than the competition. No enpagerizer is like it on the market. It not only enpagerizes, but it slices and dices and makes mounds and mounds of Julienne fries! Act now and you will receive a free sham-wow towel to go with your purchase. Not sold in stores.

@dmont76 have you looked at the File>Document Setup dialog? You can set up your document to have facing pages. When you print the document, you set the output to be 2-sided and you get your front and back images. Most books, and I'm assuming Comic Books are like this too, are oriented in a portrait format with the first page of the document starting on a right hand page, with an odd page number, like 1. You'll see terminology like Odd Pages and Even Pages. You can then set up the page layouts for the two types of pages. The image below is from the Pages studio in AF Pub. View>Studio>Pages Hope this helps.

I would like to request that a new field be added to capture the Section or Chapter number. When building Figure and Table captions, our standard is to combine the Chapter number with the sequential item number. Examples: Figure 2.1 The Workflow Process Table 4.5 Parts and Function of the Spread Dialog.

@Papatez Thanks for bringing this up. This was driving me crazy the other day. When you have a facing page layout, the spread controls list an inner and outer margin, That makes perfect sense. I have Master page layouts for a First page, Left-hand pages, and Right-hand pages where the inner margin is wider than the outer margin. At first, the pages are laid out correctly. Then I inserted a new Left-Hand page and it kept the Righ-Hand page layout. @GabrielM--The problem I have with that expected behavior is that it doesn't make sense that the application would pick a layout that is not equal to the side of the document the page is being added to. When I added a Right-hand page, the margins were placed where they should be. The spread controls already have the layout for the Left and Right pages, shouldn't it automatically pick the correct one in the Spread? Personally, I think this is a bug and not a new feature.

@PathfinderPro & @fde101 I agree with you both. The "A" shape of the 1.6 icons and the interior design both let you see at a glance what those applications are for. I just don't get what the Publisher icon is trying to represent. I don't see sheets of paper in the icon and with the square design it's a little harder to see the "A". The other thing that bothers me a bit is the color. Both Designer and Photo's icons have colors that pop. I'm not a Marketing person, so I can only speak for my personal perspective but I'm not a fan of the new iconography. instead of straight lines, I think it would look more representative if the lines were curled, like when you are flipping through the pages of a book or magazine.

Someone gave me a way to change the size of the font for the Text Styles. On the hamburger (3 horizontal lines) next to the Text Styles tab, you can turn off the See Samples option and the font on the text styles resets to the base font. And for your cursor comment, it's even harder to see in table cells.

That solved it. Thanks!!

I'm old, so those teeny tiny special characters are hard to see. I also put in a request for making the Text Styles entries larger. For some reason, they end up very small on my monitor and I almost have to use a magnifying glass to see them.

@Petar Petrenko, Is what you are asking for different than the tabs control on the paragraph style dialog? I set the default tab stop to 1 inch, then clicked on the + (plus sign) button under the Apply box to get tabs set at 1-inch increments. I did have to click the plus sign 6 times, but that didn't take that long to do.

Is it possible to enlarge the text on the Paragraph and Text Styles panel for the items there? After creating a new text style, the font on the list is almost impossible (for my old eyes) to see.

+1

yep, they're deep in the sheets with Big Paper. Time to ream them out.

Ah, the good old days. My first experience with FrameMaker was version 3 running on Sun IPCs.

I tried using that patch to allow Mojave to be installed on my older version machine and it took the performance through the floor. I ended up having to reinstall the OS to clean it up. I'm running the afpub beta on my laptop that has High Sierra and I get really good performance from the application.

It looks like you can only use a font to create the bullet symbol, not a custom icon. At least, I don't see any way that you can choose an icon for the bullet. As an alternative, you could layout the menu using a table and position the icon in a cell. Then using the Assets studio panel, have all of your icons as assets and just drag and drop them into the correct cell.

I would like to be able to have templates for the consistency that I would need across documents. We used chapter templates for the books that contained all the text styles and page layouts that we needed for our work. We had templates for the main chapters, plus, templates for Index, Master Table of Contents, Title pages, and Legal page (where the copyright info and legal text was spelled out), Having the ability to create a template that can be used to start a document is a critical feature for professional technical writers. And yes, I know that I can create a blank document to be used as a template, but the problem with that is eventually someone is going to save some changes over the "template" file. The value of having the ability to create a new document using a template is that the template document is unnamed and must be saved and named after making changes. Also, I'm not expecting Affinity to supply that kind of template with the release of the application. I agree with you that having some templates for various kinds of documents really does help people who are just starting out with the application.

But what I was thinking is that If I export the default style list, it would be in the right structure already. I could potentially edit that as a starter kit and copy and paste the basic structure to make as many text styles as I wanted. And your suggestion of a master set of styles would also be a great addition.

I was thinking about XML handling last night while I was working on some text styles. What about using XML to define the Paragraph and Character values in Publisher? You export the text styles catalog as an XML file, then you could edit it in a text editor, then reimport it to update the styles in the document. You'd be able to search and replace values in the XML to make major tweaks to the way the text is laid out. That would also make it easy to keep a master set of text styles separate from a document.

Thanks, Walt! I didn't realize that it was visible in the Navigator panel. I don't usually have that one visible. I knew about the zoom tool, but the moment you use a different tool, the info is gone. Just checked the navigator panel and that's exactly what I wanted.