Paul Martin
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Posts posted by Paul Martin
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On 1/1/2019 at 11:21 PM, walt.farrell said:
Have you somehow missed the 1.7 customer beta for Designer?
I will investigate. I don't recall receiving any notification, though I have all three.
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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that the customer-focused, friendly company whose every product I cheerfully tried in multiple versions seems to have been replaced by people who don't listen to the previous customer base's concerns.
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On 11/9/2018 at 4:53 PM, walt.farrell said:
The Help files for Publisher have not been completed, and are not ready for review, and the Serif team is well aware of that (and have said so on multiple occasions).
It's not going to say much when it is released, as thinbgs go.
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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
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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?
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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.
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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?
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What do you mean by "just open your .afpub file?" Isn't that what I do every time I start AP?
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Just as well this isn't a marketing brainstorm. Thanks, though.
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I'd be pleasantly surprised if AF Publisher exported text to any useful format. It's as if the developers don't get the significance of text content unless it's the no more than the length of an advertising slogan.
Lords help anyone working on text at the 11th hour when the lawyers demand an urgent change repeated in 20 places on a dozen pages. There you are with no internal text editor and no way to get the text into a competent wordprocessor. Bleah!
Anyone got an answer?
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Hi Bad_Wolf. I also have found DTP engaging - a mixture of fun and exasperation. I always loved the fact that printing had hundreds of years of ingenuity and subtlety behind it that DTP tried to absorb and reproduce in about a decade. Good luck with your printers. I'm probably going to try a PDF output from Affinity Publisher on my printer sometime soon. Of course, it will work without any problems, won't it?
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Perhaps we should just agree that we put different interpretations on the phrase "text editor". As it happens, I get my of my content supplied in Word and I edit it there first for word count, spelling and grammar, but if you have to make substantial late changes, you don't really want to have to export as a text file, delete the original text and then re-import the revised text.
As Powderizedbookworm suggests, it's a lot more critical when there' 50,000 words involved...
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On 9/24/2018 at 12:07 AM, walt.farrell said:
OK, so you don't consider Word, or LibreOffice, to be (or include) text editors either. Only simple things like Notepad or NotePad++, etc.
Thanks.
No, Walt.farrell, the context was text editors within the programme such as Serif PagePlus has always had. Besides, Publisher can't handle *.docx files, so the not-unreasonable option of using Word is made clumsy by having to save text as *.rtf.
I've said elsewhere that this is a key difference in approach - is it a "graphic artist's layout pad" or a "book editor's word processor" and the split goes all the way back to the 1980s and Aldus PageMaker or (Corel) Ventura.
I rather suspect the "Mac side", i.e.dyslexic graphic artists, is winning here.
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On 8/30/2018 at 3:56 PM, garrettm30 said:
I’m so totally stoked about this beta. I have spent a couple hours poking around, and I can say that this beta is further along than I expected. I have high hopes that this will in time replace Indesign for us (a small publisher), and it looks well on track.
Among several features that wowed right away and other "missing features" that I can work around, the one thing that stood out for me is the lack of GREP searches. In Indesign, I have a small series of GREP searches that I have saved over the past years, and I run nearly everything through them. A couple minutes on a typical file, and I have made several hundred changes. When I work on a book, the changes are in the thousands. (Note: I publish in French, and French typography relies heavily on non-breaking spaces; these GREP searches help me rapidly put them where they ought to go.)
While you're there: being able to save the searches as presets would be ideal. And as not everyone is familiar with GREP, a few pre-saved searches would help provide them immediate use: remove multiple spaces, remove trailing space, etc.
This is a variant on the text-handling query, isn't it? Seems to me ther are quite a few of us concerned about just that - checking, amending, updating reasonably large quanitities of text.
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1 minute ago, powderizedbookworm said:
I've enjoyed reading the discussions, and I'm learning stuff, but there is one basic thing that is eluding me...
How is one supposed to process text in this program?
Basically, my basic page of a document is going to be a standard sized box of text (frame text) which is the continuation of the page before it, and which will continue into the page after it. This default page might get broken up by an image, or a table, or another text box. I might even opt to have a page dedicated solely to but by and large my text is going to flow through.
I'm not sure how much of this is my idiocy, and how much is buggy beta software, but making a master page with a text box seems like the way that I would make this "default page," but doing so only allows me to put text into this box in the master page (which puts it on all pages). If I put a few pages of lipsum in the master page, and try to Autoflow the master page, it throws the text off the pages entirely, and does weirder things if I try to autoflow in the pages.
It seems patently absurd to me that I should make text boxes by hand in each and every page I plan on using...so what am I doing wrong?
I've been playing with the program for the last little bit, and have figured out how to use the table of contents, and I like the independent/parallel counters (hierarchical for chapters/sections/subsections with different counters for tables and figures). I have some quibbles (notably, it seems impossible to add a figure caption which will show up in the TOC, as well as explanation body text without a line break), and the current lack of cross-referencing is a deal breaker for scientific work. I also think there needs to be some standardized commands - insert a placeholder image along with a text box a set distance below with pre-formatted text (including TOC entry/caption, and counter) for making a figure, for instance, but those kinds of things can be solved with macros and templates.
For now though, I have no idea how I put large amounts of text onto consecutive, templated, pages...which seems like the most important thing I'd use this tool for.
Yep, that would be pretty much my concern, too. As I say elsewhere, this seems to be going down the "PageMaker" route which is pretty hopeless for those of us who want the "Ventura" approach.
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Nowadays, I rarely do more than produce 4-page newsletters, but it is fascinating to see how the old polarity continues between the two types of DeskTop Publisher , with Pagemaker's "artwork" at one end of a continuum and and Ventura's "book/long document" at the other.
Serif's PagePlus offered a very clever compromise; I'm not sure where Affinity Publisher is going yet, but it feels rather PageMaker-ish. The lack of a text-editor implies this, I think.
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So I have a logo in afdesign format, I drag it into Publisher and, since I like to keep my design eleements tidy, I try to add it to an assets subcategory. I already know I can do this with the PNG version of the same logo, but it seems you can't do so with a Designer file. What's going on here?
I've already complained about how opaque the processes seem to be to maintain libraries, stores or whatever you want to call them. Would someoen like to explain Serif Affinity's rationale here?
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If I were a bookmaker I'd start taking bets on this at 1000:1 against it happening any time soon.
My guess is that the target user is using InDesign.
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So, Affinity Publisher contains no text editor. That wouldn't be too bad if you could easily exprt to an external text editor, edit text, check word count etc and import it back into AP.
Can you export text from AP? I haven't found that feature yet.
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Thank you Wosven. That handily reminded me that I never understood SVG files.
I didn't appreciate it was one of those "container" formats, i.e. not really a "vector format" as such.
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I found that I had to create a text frame before the option to import a text file was un-greyed. That's logical enough, but why did Designer then creat another, new frame when I tried to import the file?
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I found this a right palaver. The options are all there, of course, but the way to use them is non-obvious. Topic for a tutorial, perhaps?
And, once again, surely anyone who does work for organisations has to bring in "house styles" - so that would be fonts, of course, simple graphics etc. You really do want to be up and running quickly with stuff like that once past the beta stage.
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Comparing AD with DrawPlus
in Pre-V2 Archive of Affinity on Desktop Questions (macOS and Windows)
Posted
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.