Bhikkhu Pesala

No problem here, also on the latest Windows. If Guides are disable on the View menu, dragging a new guide automatically re-enables them, which makes sense. Do you see the double-headed arrow cursor? Are you using Windows scaling?

As the months go by, and we get to the stage of release candidates, the risks will diminish. However, judging from the slow rate of progress it may be several months yet before that stable stage is reached. The guess of by Christmas by Grafkom may be rather pessimistic, but I think you will have to wait for several months at least, not just several weeks.

I would not recommend relying on any pre-release product for a major project. Your latest project might be a good test of Affinity Publisher to see if you can work around any missing InDesign features, but I would suggest doing the project in both products — it would not be twice as much work.

Only just above your thread there is a six page sticky thread discussion of docx import.

Ligatures in pasted text may be Alphabetic Presentation Forms ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl, and not the decomposed text string ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl. If they are, find and replace is the way to fix the problem as there is no OpenType feature enabled to turn off. Ligatures are enabled by default, but can be turned off from the Show Typography pane (Ctrl+Shift+T).

Rewards just for making suggestions is unreasonable. Those who find and report a significant number of bugs deserve a free license.

These all look like CJK fonts, which are probably monospaced or use monospaced glyphs for Latin text. This would account for the excessive spacing around apostrophes or single quote marks.

I looked at how Affinity Publisher does it, and it is the same as PagePlus. Autocorrected superscripts are not emboldened, as I had thought they might be. In general, it may not be a good idea, although it works well enough for Calibri (illustrated below). The aim is to compensate for the lighter weight of the scaled down superscripts. The Ordinals in Calibri are not correctly designed, as they are not context-sensitive. The ordinals in my own font Mandala are superscripted only after figures. Arial has no ordinals feature.

Not a bug, in my opinion, but an imperfect feature. PagePlus suffers from the same issue. Enabling superscripts for ordinals in Autocorrect formats the ordinals as superscripts. Most fonts do no have superscripted glyphs for a-z, though many may have at least ¹²³ if not a full set of superscripts for figures. Software can only compensate for the missing glyphs by formatting the regular letters with superscript (and bold). If a font has a well designed Ordinals (ordn) feature it is better to use that, and disable the Autocorrect feature.

If the studio is hidden, Ctrl+F seems to do nothing. The same, if selecting from the menu. I discovered that this is due to the Studio being hidden. I think, in this case, Ctrl+F should show the Find Panel if it is currently hidden.

I finally discovered why Ctrl+F was not doing anything. I had to unhide the studio. Not very user-friendly. If the Find Panel is in the studio, then Ctrl+F should show the studio, or at least show the Find Panel. On my 1200x1600 Portrait monitor, the studio takes up almost 2/3 of the Window. I only need the left panel to do the find and replace. The left/right pointing cursor will let me make the panels wider, but will not let me collapse them or reduce their width. The list of search results showing the context is very helpful. It is not obvious what \n\r means. Presumably, it is something to do with New Line and/or new Paragraph. It would be helpful to update the search results automatically when selecting options like “match case” or changing the formatting.

InDesign’s GREP Builder looks remarkably similar to the Find and Replace dialogue in PagePlus. Maybe another submenu could be added where users could store their most frequently used Regular Expressions. The drop list remembers about 20, but the one that I need often disappears from the bottom of the list. I spend some time finding the one that I want in my text file. It is all too easy to make an error and replace every occurrence of the letter e from your publication, or worse, replace something and not notice until it is too late to undo your mistake. Ordinary users who do pick up the software once a month to publish their club Newsletter, are not likely to get far up the learning curve, and like me, will find it quicker to do things manually than to figure out what alchemy is required to automate the process.

I was unfamiliar with the term GREP, but cased that it was somehow related to RegEx. I tried Ctrl+F in the latest build 249, but got nowhere. Probably time to read the help file again, but I fear this amount of coding will be beyond me. For PagePlus, I keep a handful of RegEx like that below in a text file for cutting and pasting to the search dialogue: I hope that Serif can come up with a user-friendly way to select some common GREP expressions without users having to learn to code.

Almost, but not quite. Endnotes are placed at the end of the story, while footnotes are placed at the bottom of the text frame. PagePlus has both. The option to place footnotes immediately after the end of the text before a page break, or at the end of the story has been a feature request for many years.

I think you have not added a hyperlink in Affinity Publisher, but have simply typed the URL as text, which Adobe Reader does not convert to a URL correctly, but PDF-XChange Editor does. If I select the text in your Imported PDF in Affinity Publisher, and apply the URL to hyperlink, it turns blue. The link in the exported PDF then points to the right target. Kopie.pdf

This PDF is Opened from PDF-XChange Editor: http://www.worldevangelicals.org/pdf/TN-47-1-Jan-2018.pdf If I use Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, however, the site is blocked, and if I allow it, the link opens at the home page. The tooltip for the link in Adobe Reader, shows the page to which it leads. I suspect that the line-wrapping in the URL is the problem.

I think the topic is about whether the ability to place images inline is a basic requirement. I don't think it is a viable product without this. At least Serif realised that contents and indexes (with hyperlinks) were a basic requirement, so I am taking a second look. It seems that I was mistaken about the stage of development. This is more like an Alpha than a Beta product. I was under the impression that since the start of the Beta test had been delayed for some time, that it would be close to release within a few months, not by Christmas or sometime next year.

I pasted the main story of a long book published in PagePlus = 332Kbytes with all images linked. The Affinity Publisher file is 13.8 Mbytes. There are no images — just text, and less text than in the original. No index or contents, no master page text, no footnotes. The story was pasted from the clipboard as RTF after stripping all inline graphics, footnotes, and index marks. Compression with 7-Zip to 7z LZMA2 format, which offers better compression than plain Zip used by PagePlus, reduces the file size to 12.0 Mbytes. What is the reason for this?

I was actually referring to the well known acronym RTFM when some newbie asks a simple question like “How do you flow text through text frames?” or “How do you create a table.” The first of these I discovered in the free manual which said to click on the link icon while holding down the Alt key modifier, but it does not seem to autoflow and create new text frames to accommodate all of the story — just manually adding one frame at a time, which is not much fun with a 256 page book. Edit: Hold Shift while clicking the icon to autoflow the entire story. The second did not seem to work in earlier builds, but it seems OK now. No formulae, just plain text is good enough for starters.

I agree that footnotes are essential for a professional DTP application Endnotes are not essential if there is an option, like in PagePlus, to place footnotes at the end of the story or at the bottom of a page, or column. Ideally, one would have both, but footnotes per story would be a good start. For publications with lots of short footnote references, columns for footnotes would be the icing on the cake. I wrote a tutorial on how to do this in PagePlus, but it is a workaround at best.

To Read the Free Manual, press F1, or go to the Help menu. I hope, for the sake of Serif's business, that it does not take that long. If users who buy the first official release version (later this year?) are disappointed with the lack of basic functionality, they may look elsewhere unless more features come fairly soon.

No change in build 249.

No improvement in the latest build.

I have been testing Beta software for 16 years. I have maintained the Softerviews.org website with WebPlus for years. There is not much that I do not know about PagePlus as I have used it to publish over 100 books, and many tutorials on using PagePlus. Tony B said on August 6th 2014 I replied then that I would therefore not bother testing the beta. Things have improved since then, so I looked at the last two beta versions of Affinity Publisher to test its OpenType feature support. I reported a few bugs, but I recently uninstalled it because it is not worth my time. I also got no response to my bug report on Broken Extended Keyboard Input, which is discouraging. For me, with so many years of using PagePlus (since PP9), it has a steep learning curve. Some things are easy and familiar, but other basic tasks like creating tables or flowing text would require me to Read the Free Manual. I reckon it needs another year of development before it has sufficient features to make it a viable product. I currently see no reason to recommend it over PagePlus X9, which is only £20 and far more powerful. It may be five years before it becomes a serious DTP product.

Me too. I would not regard placing a table inline, or placing a graphic in a table cell as essential, but I would expect to place an image inline with a standard text frame. This is basic stuff for DTP software.