Paul Martin

I have just tried this, haakoo, and I don't think this would be much use for managing a 2,000 word article. I watched the tutorial for how the linked/embedded item worked for pictures and was initially hopeful, but they simply haven't done the equivalent for text. Which is a pity, as I would be perfectly happy to do the text editing in Word and simply let the updated version appear automatically in Publisher.

I'm afraid you'll just have to suffer with the rest of us Thomaso. I don't mind new implementations, though quite why it has to be a kind of treasure-hunt for the existing user base, I don't know. I wouldn't make these criticisms of Designer, but a desktop publishing application is not just a layout tool for graphic artists and there is a long history of why that should be. PS The reason people are repeating topics may be because they are a) new to this forum and b) it isn't that well indexed/sectioned. PPS I hope this wasn't too long for you, but there's no word count here, either.

That's really interesting, haakoo. Are you saying that the text in a PDF file that is linked to Publisher is recognised AS TEXT, rather than as an image?

Remember the old joke? Customer: "Do you sell x here?" Shop assistant: "No, you're the tenth customer today to ask. There's just no call for it."

Well, we've had a couple of "what would you want a word count for?" responses which I thought simply betrayed ignorance of how many users work and, indeed, how PagePlus made possible the entire Serif (now Affinity) project by giving customers what they wanted. Some have suggested that such tasks are done outside Publisher in a word processor. At least, unlike the Betas, Publisher can now directly import Word docx, so we are in the bronze, rather than stone age. If text files - like picture files - could be "linked" so that they could be automatically updated by changing the external file, I would think this a halfway helpful answer, but as far as I can see that option doesn't exist. Anybody got any other suggestions as to how the user who has to be his or her own staff-writer and editor as well as layout artist might best tackle the classic task of rewriting on the fly when the customer decides at the last minute that the text has to change?

You clearly have no idea how many users are not merely "layout artists" but writers, editors and proof-readers of their own work. And I hate to harp on about Serif PagePlus, an older but more usable programme, but it does this with ease. Why go backwards and snub 20 years of faithful customers?

Where's the word count facility?

Nope. Some of us have been badgering for this feature for many months. It's vital to anyone who has to be their own editor as well as layout artist, we have been ignored/fobbed off every time. For reasons I cannot understand, in terms of Serif's existing customer base, they don't want to do it. I'm waiting for someone to provide a tutorial for poor sods who, having prepared their layout, get told that one or more articles must be rewritten. I hope this issue has moved on since I - and others - first raised it, but there's nothing I have found in the tutorials to suggest it.

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.