Paul Martin

Bit like an older man's "comb-over", Alfred? 😁

I produce a regular magazine for a group interested in housing which is normally 8 x A4 pages long. I'm planning to convert to using Publisher and am identifying options not possible or easy in my current software. One such feature might be a "double-page spread" or centrefold. I think this would be particularly helpful for composite articles with, say, "for and against" content with a headline across both pages and no gutter. I think this logically means that it can only be printed on A3 paper or produced commercially, although most readers wil just receive a PDF of the whole issue. I would welcome any advice on the practicalities - or even feasiblity - of this project. I'm not really confident about how spreads relate to pages but I imagine that it's important to get the initial set-up correct.

I've used the tracing feature built into DrawPlus for many years. It is often sufficient to work on , say, a logo. I have now found Vector Magic which you can test online, subscribe to monthly or buy outright for $250. It's astonishing! There will be sources it can't handle, but it does an incredible job with most subjects, including photos. But do use the web version to see if it meets your needs. My guess is that few Designer users will want to buy the full desktop product at that sort of price, but it might suit a group of users who only need it occasionally.

I agree about text editors being a personal choice, but I would guess that the largest market is for coders. I'm from the rather smaller one of editors. I commission, edit, provide DTP layout including artwork for two voluntary organisations' journals. My irritation about not having a built-in text editor is because I frequently receive content that a) needs more editing b) arrives late c) is altered futher by the "editorial board" d) has errors subsequently revised by the original contributor! As for most editors, there is a deadline set by others. (This was the market that Serif PagePlus had come to dominate over decades.) Being able to dive into the layout you've set previously to change two words or rewrite several paragraphs is an everyday occurrence. Rough Draft is aimed at writers including journalists, novelists, playwrights etc with some neat features. It seems to have been last updated in 2005, which either make it "old-fashioned", like me, or "classic" (ditto, naturally).

Thanks, Walt. I might use LibreOffice, though loading a complex Office suite for this purpose seems a bit over the top. Rough Draft also has some good features like making it easy to have a subset of files e.g. "current issue stories" in a window of their own. It does all the usual text characteristics, which you wouldn't get in more basic text editors. It is fundamentally a writers' tool, which is what I need. Still not as handy as a built-in text editor and that's why I was checking to see how you could get text back out of Publisher to re-edit in RD.

I've moaned before about Publisher lacking a built-in text editor, but as I am going to try to use this programme for real in 2021, I'm looking for solutions. I Googled to find simple, preferably free or cheap, text editors and have come up with Rough Draft. What has impressed me so far about it is that, although it looks a bit old-fashioned, it does seem to have the features an Editor might want and not be just a poor-man's Word. It also works natively in RTF file format, which is a match. Does anyone else have experience of this programme or alternatives? Also, if there are any tips on exporting OUT of Publisher back to RTF, I would be obliged. Hope you are all getting by OK or better in 2020.

Thanks, Alfred. Yes, I've wiggled the stylus about a bit but generally found it much less handy than a mouse! The plus side is that I find I rather like Designers pencil which we feels "smoother" than anything that I have used before. (I usually draw with the pen tool and go back to add the curviness.)

I'm grateful to EJ Wright for this. It is another example of how the original help-file, while correct as far as it goes, is insufficient advice. The key point here is that the element pasted inside may be displaced out of sight and needs to be found and dragged to where it is needed. It would take a single sentence to make the official guidance effective.

Looks like moving Designer files to Publisher and using that as a container for multiple pages is a good option. I haven't delved into what the differences may be between "Deisgner inside Publisher" in terms of control. I have put quite a bit of lockdown-time into using Designer which has been generally very positive. As a paid-up DrawPlus fan, I still find it a pain discovering what is "missing" in Affinity Designer, notably no scaling (hopeless for producing plans of real-world layouts) and autotrace (never all that good but sometimes handy). What I do get a buzz from is the sheer speed, smoothness and enormous magnification Designer provides. Publisher remains enigmatic for me because I am an Editor as well as layout artist, so I am still struggling with a "workflow" that has no in-programme text editor. Footnote I recently asked if there was a guide to using graphics tablets (a new XP-PEN Star G640S in my case). I got kind replies about installing drivers, but I meant in very broad terms "how do you use this pencil/paintbrush/chalk. What's it good for? When would try a different approach? Why would you bother?" I realise this is something modern teenagers absorb with their mother's milk, but we sexagenarians have make a conscious effort.

As I have the full set - Designer, Photo and Publisher, is one way to use multiple pages simply to open the Designer file in Publisher and go from there?

Thanks, but I really meant "how to use a graphics tablet to produce artwork etc".

I recently bought an XP-PEN Star G640S graphics tablet to use primarily with Affinity Designer. I'm almost certainly the age of many users' grandparents, but I have found it difficult to find any guides to using this equipment. There are plenty of promotional videos but not a lot for someone who isn't surrounded by young budding artists. Can anyone suggest what used to be called a "primer" which doesn't assume a) you don't already know the answer b) you are using a Mac or Android tablet?

I thought there was a way to create two or more frames and flow overflow text from one into the other. Right now, I just can't see how that feature might be accessed.

I have created a map of a large city with districts forming about 70 individual object outlines. Above this I have created a layer onto which I have added numbers to match an index. However, while I can click on individual objects (i.e.district outlines) in the layers panel and then manipulate them, clicking on directly on a district of the main map simply highlights the whole map. I have never encountered this behaviour before and I can't tell whether it is, say, Affinity Designer unable to handle the demand on memory and causing a "bug" ot that there is some setting that I have accidentally set wrongly. It may be worth adding that the map is imported from another source rather than created fresh by me.

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.

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