Gnits

The web gallery is supplied as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud solution set. I have given up making requests to Adobe. Affinity Publisher is a relatively new product and its Data Merge Tool is the best I have found so far. I have made requests to Affinity / Serif in relation to the Data Merge tool, which were well received. I was hoping that the product was in an early enough phase of its development that these tweaks might be catered for. I do accept your point re natural sequence of numbers in filenames. I did notice and was surprised that Windows sorted the files in a natural order. That is why I did not notice the issue until I uploaded the images to the Web Galley. I will watch for an opportunity to make the suggestion to Adobe… but “I will not hold my breath”.

Response appreciated. Thanks for the bat file. In my case I can manually enter the zero for the 1-9 sequence. Mostly, I will have less than 100 pages. If I had larger volumes I could use Python, MatLab or VB , depending on needs. I suspect most cases may have less than 100 pages, but documents greater than 100 are not rare….. so it will be a persistent problem. My main worry are the many photographers I deal with who would not know how to solve such a problem. I will not hold my breath…. I mainly wish to flag the issue. I am familiar with large scale enterprise level system building… so I appreciate the effort to cater for even the smallest tweak. Regards.

"And also ask Microsoft and Apple and all other interested parties to recognise trailing numbers in a filename." I do not think that is feasible. I have made my point. I will leave it to Affinity to decide if my post has any value. Either way.... I am not going to promote Adobe Publisher to photographers until they can get a list of images from an Affinity document in the same sequence as the document contents.

My initial thought would be at the point of export.... but I can see value of keeping it also at the Export Preset or even at general parameter level ... Yes... this will need more coding... and I know and understand this will need consideration of the detail at perhaps the Product Manager level. Also, this may be applicable across multiple products, so I can see how this might grow legs. But a short term fix might be to use a single line of code to insert the number segment with leading zeros.... Any I will also accept.... it may not be as simple as that... Now that I am aware of the problem ... I have the skills to work around this.... but I am trying to encourage photographers to improve the quality of the presentation of their images, using the Data Merge option to add well formed metadata such as Titles, Location, Date, Copyright , etc... see sample attached.... Such an audience will get lost trying to re-sequence such files.

Thanks for the prompt reply. It takes one or two lines of code to cater for leading zeros when formatting a string which contains a numeric segment. Affinity knows this number of pages in the document and or the number of pages been exported. It is also possible for Affinity to provide the end user a choice, but I searched and failed to find this option. I would be delighted to discover if such an option exists. Also, I doubt if very many people will have gone to the effort to sequence pages in a document and then export the pages as jpgs with the sequence altered. I do not mind how this item is classified (bug, enhancement, feature) ... but the current behaviour needs to be corrected.

Serious Bug. Exporting Pages as Jpgs. Publisher Ver 2.4.2. While exporting pages as jpgs, to post a sequence of jpgs on a web gallery..... Affinity Publisher allocates the name per page as the FileName plus sequence number..... but... a very basic error.... the sequence number needs to have leading zeros. Otherwise, the images will have the wrong sequence... eg, 8,9, 10 will appear in the sequence 10,8,9..... The sequence should be 08,09,10 or 098,099,100 .... depending on the number of numerical digits. See the attached example. I did not notice this at first.... as Windows seems to recognise the sequence in which the files were created... and Adobe Lr sorts the images automatically in date of capture, but the Adobe Web Gallery sorts in strictly Alpha sequence... leaving a mess in the gallery.... as the images lose their very valuable sequence. So, Affinity Publisher is processing the pages in the correct sequence... creating the jpgs in the correct sequence, allocating the correct sequence number.... but is not filling in leading zeros for the sequence number.

Thanks for all the responses. I will explore.

Please delete this ... posted in the wrong thread.

I have done a prelim test of the data merge. I can honestly say that the functionality exceeds my expectations. ☺️ ☺️ I would like to congratulate all involved. I can see some refinements I need to make with the document I am using as the template for my initial test data merge, but suspect these are specific formatting tricks I need to learn within the basic Publisher App. I did not try Publisher until I knew data merge was a feature. I will post a separate query if I cannot find the answer myself, so as not to confuse this thread with a separate query. I have written my own JavaScript which allows me do sophisticated data merges with InDesign and Photoshop documents. However, the Adobe mail Merge Tools are clunky and difficult to use (and have built in gottchas) and I hate maintaining this functionality myself. The functionality I have tested in Affinity Publisher allows me to achieve 90% of what my custom JavaScript does. I am hoping I will figure out how to do the remaining 10% and will post here if I do. Very clever to be able to have multiple source data docs. Very clever to be able to place the data merge into different places. The architects of this knew what they were doing and did an exceedingly good job. I am seriously impressed. My best regards.

Thanks for the prompt response. Yes.... I had found the 'preview' option. Very useful. Such a pity there is no default answer which can be applied at start-up. Such a pity I cannot use Affinity as a default Acrobat reader as well as a Publishing tool. Can anyone recommend a good Acrobat Reader (I wish to avoid the Adobe Acrobat reader as it keeps opening the tools panel and keeps pushing ads to purchase Adobe products). (Still delighted to see the data merge option and will explore its features as soon as I can.) Regards.

Now that DataMerge is part of Publisher I can consider using this app seriously (I really appreciated the new feature and was waiting for it before abandoning InDesign). To replace Acrobat I wonder if the following behaviour is possible. I would like to tell Windows to use Publisher as my default app when opening Acrobat files. Most occasions I only wish to read the Acrobat files. Can Publisher be configured to open all pages in the document automatically and default to preview mode. In this way I can eliminate Acrobat from my system. Regards.

I am seriously pleased to see Data Merge appear. Also, it looks comprehensive. I also like the fact that a tutorial is available via the Help Manual. Super well done.

I am fed up waiting. I have developed my own solution using Lr data to populate a Powerpoint template. Powerpoint then saved as pdf.

Microsoft makes it very difficult and non intuitive to dynamically merge text and images. Adobe has its own clunky and error prone process for merging text and images. The benefit over Microsoft is that merging images dynamically is more reliable. Whatever solution is adopted, make sure that tabbed delimited files and or native excel files can be used to store the text and url of the images to be inserted. A workflow based on csv is a disaster, as normal text punctuation gets mixed up with commas, or other delimiters, resulting in corrupted merged documents.

I am delighted to see this response and understand completely where you are coming from. I cannot wait and have created a Python Script, which allows me specify the fields from a tab delimited file, define the x,y coordinates on a page, plus font name and font size. I can select a Word or PowerPoint document as output (and am sure could extend to other doc types). The script runs extremely quickly and I end up with an extremely professionally formatted document. A big advantage of using PowerPoint is that I can create a Powerpoint template, with text and image elements predefined. My script can select from a list of my frequently used templates. The PowerPoint is saved as a Powerpoint File and a PDF file. I can then always customise the PowerPoint file created. This is so efficient for me that maybe I will find it difficult to use your products later. Both Microsoft Mail Merge and Adobe InDesign/ Photoshop make it way way way to difficult to handle basic mail merge of data to a templated document. If and when you do release this product with this feature set, I may not use it myself now, but will be delighted to show others who need this functionality but do not have the skills to work with existing Microsoft and Adobe product sets. I can place text or images. For images I use the url of the image file on disk (plus width / height required of image on the page. Regards.