Paul Martin

Well, there is no answer, is there CosineCuber?

I've had my say, here and elsewhere, about the bizarre lack of an internal wordprocessor, importing Word files etc. Currently, I'm trying to find ways of working with what we have. So here's a for-instance. I have a 2000 word article that I need to include in my newsletter and a contributor supplies it, late as usual, in Word format. I'm a cheapskate who hates Gates and uses LibreOffice Writer. It's pretty good, so I can load up the Word file and save it as RTF. I check it for the idiot contributor's usual mistakes, mis-spellings and inaccuracies and use Publisher's Place function to put the text into my standard newsletter template. I pipe the content through a few text frames and wait for some other key contributions to arrive. At the last minute, the resident legal eagle says on no account must unflattering references to a certain celebrity be published while she-who-must-be-obeyed says the article must be cut by 15% and an explainer added. Now, if AP could export the (already revised) text back into LibreOffice so that I could edit the content as a piece of English, rather than pretty fonts on a nice background, I might not have the oft-threatened heart attack. But can I do that quickly and easily? Maybe twice to get it right? Answers on a digital postcard, please.

AD 1.7 is for Mac only?

There is a text to a path feature - I used it today. Of course, it works rather differently to what we Deepers are used to, but it is there. I'm rather coming to the conclusion that the only way to work is forget everyting you knew and work through all the Designer training videos, learn a new language and hope it proves worth the effort.

Tsk, tsk - you young folk have no patience. Now when I was a nipper... I wonder how much of the problem is that features aren't where you would expect to find them - because the arhitecture is so different - and the help index doesn't much. For instance, I just wanted to create a dotted line. You might think "dotted line" would call up something? Nope. Eventually, I found that a similar question had been answered for another baffled user. The answer was, needless to say, "logical" but not "intuitive", in part because the Stroke unction - it shows a little dotted line! - doesn't do anything until you have applied the parameters that follow. Personally, I'd have made the default "dotted lines" a simple one like dot-dot-dot dash-dash or whatever.

I will investigate. I don't recall receiving any notification, though I have all three.

I, too, have a a lot of investment in maps that I drew with Drawplus over the life of that excellent programme and the lack of any import facility per se put me right off Affinity Designer. What I can see is that AFD handles much greater magnification very well and, bluntly, may survive longer. So I set about transfering my "legacy" drawings to AFD via the PDF format. I was pleasantly surpised to find that, providing you are willing to expoert from the *.dpp file to PDF a single layer at a time, the layers can be successfully imported into AFD and built one by one into a new AFD file. Tedious? Certainly. Always effective? Not with some shapes which translate as images rather than vectors. The jury is still out on whether this is a viable option - I will know in a few weeks time. What really grieves me is that the customer-focused, friendly company whose every product I cheerfully tried in multiple versions seems to have been replaced by people who don't listen to the previous customer base's concerns.

I get the error message that Designer cannot save embedded graphics as Assets. Is this to be expected and, if so, what is the alternative way to save a vector graphic from another programme other than Designer?

It's not going to say much when it is released, as thinbgs go.

So, the truth of it is that none of the development team (or its fans) understand that a DTP programme is not just another "graphics package" in which the text might all as well be Lorem ipsit dixit. Or that the parent company's most successful programme bar none, PagePlus, had a pretty sophisticated built-in wordprocessor WHICH WAS USED! I imagine somebody envisages lots of cool young feelance designers working with words that somebody else has laboured over, so somebody else will be responsible for musprunts. This, of course, means that the branch secretaries, vicars and small businesspersons who have to do the whole job themselves, including writing the copy, will despair of Affinity Publisher and abandon it. I just checked the latest "Help" file for "Edit text" And it says, I quote "??????." Sweet dreams

Thanks both for your kind help. I can't say this is exactly obvious or intuitive design. In fact, I couldn't get it to work as described in a controlled fashion. Do you know if there is any reference to this in the Help system?

I think we may be at cross purposes. I am used to using a DTP programme - the first Serif ever produced - which has an integral "word processor" that allows you to view and edit a given text "story" across all the frames in which it may be displayed as a single document. It seems that the authors have decided this is inappropriate for Affinity Publisher and so they have omitted such a feature. This may seem satisfactory to the layout artists who don't originate and/or edit their content, but I am quite certain it will be a disaster for most other users. This combined with the inability even to import Word.docx files seems actively perverse. I have no idea what advantage is meant to be conveyed by leaving out this facility, so I wait with baited breath for some rationale.

I've just produced the simple 4-page newsletter that I do for a voluntary organisation using Serif PagePlus. As an exercise, I decided to duplicate it in Publisher. Now, I don't expect a brand new, beata version to compare directly for ease of use with a programme I have known man-and-boy. However, the experiment has borne out all my concerns about text-handling / text management (to mention but two prhrases unrecognised by the Help fundtion). And there isn't a "fit to frame" function, is there?

What do you mean by "just open your .afpub file?" Isn't that what I do every time I start AP?

Just as well this isn't a marketing brainstorm. Thanks, though.