fde101

Publisher has a built-in booklet feature.
The one you are looking at in those screenshots appears to be a feature of your printer driver, it is not the one built-in to Publisher.
If they both got turned on at the same time they could be confusing each other.

I know this, @fde101!
But I was sure, that this wasn‘t, what @L7uki wants to achieve.

I believe you mean by a character, or possibly by a glyph.  A symbol has a specific meaning in the Affinity applications which is unrelated to this topic.

Yeah, something is kind of strange here.
The way Publisher handles these master page "group" layers seems to be rather problematic in how permissive it is.  In particular, why can you duplicate that layer within the same page, why can you group it with other layers...   this just seems like a recipe for disaster.
If this is in fact a layer that was dragged out of the master page group layer, and if that action is to be permitted, I would suggest that it should only work in "Edit Detached" mode and that doing so should fully detach the layer from the master, as well as being limited in effect to that one page.

The curse of nomenclature. For "Defaults" I read "Preferences".
Say you usually want filled rectangles to be red with no stroke so you can see them clearly. You may change the colour and or shape, etc. later. 
Draw a red rectangle with no stroke. Select it. Edit > Defaults > Save will save that "default" globally for all future rectangles in the current publication and in all future publications (not just the one you are working in). You don't mind this because most of the time you want your starting rectangles to be red.  That's just the way you are.  But, if you want your rectangles to be another colour in this pub, you can change the default for this publication only by changing the colour of one rectangle, selecting it and clicking the LH Lotus, i.e. "Synchronise defaults to current selection". Subsequent rectangles in this publication only will be the new colour.  
To revert back to your global default (preference) for rectangles, click the RH Lotus, i.e. "Revert synchronised defaults back to saved defaults".
Each new publication will always open with your saved default, in this case, red. It is a GLOBAL or persistent default unless you change it and save it, or revert back to factory settings under Edit > Defaults.

Yes, and that it should be possible to toggle this on and off as with "Show Anchors".
An additional option that might be helpful would be to right-click somewhere in the link and choose "Select Hyperlink" from the context menu (hypothetical option, not actually there right now) then the entire link becomes highlighted.

This is not a common behavior on a Mac (neither is having the empty window upon startup for that matter) so it should probably be recognized that users will not be expecting this.  It violates the principle of least surprise.
Consider that web browsers such as Safari and Chrome support tabbed interfaces to allow multiple "documents" (web pages) to share a window.  The window does not remain open and tabless when you close the last tab - when there are no tabs, there is no window.
It is perfectly valid on the Mac to have a running application with no open windows.  This is an expected and normal behavior, but to have a document window with no documents is not.
Having said that, I have seen plenty of other "professional" applications that are guilty of this same design error.

Will it be possible to combine them with the (old) expressions for field input? For (that bad) example if we want to find all “numbers”, that would follow Abs(x)=5 or is it already possible?

So, since the first beta came out I keep testing and hoping that the colour palettes finally work "right". Now with release .238 (mac) this bug is still not fixed.
Obviously whats happening is, Designer scans all the colours using "RGB-view" and includes shadow effects and placed images,
which produces:
A) way too many color swatches (if you have an image placed or a text with simple shadow effect)
B) the wrong colour values if (it should be clear, we are talking about a dtp-app) the colours are mostly CMYK.
C) the colours are not global AND are not used by (or applied to) the objects (in which the function found it to begin with)
 
Especially in desktop publishing, you have to have a clean view over used assets, links, colour-swatches, fonts used in the document. Unlike in a photograph, you cannot use a "slightly brighter" red or a "subtle darker" grey in different places of your pages, just so that the overall "feeling" is the same. These must be, by default, "global colours" and you have to rely on the accuracy!
 
I understand there is "some" complexity as all three apps re-use the same engine. Most users probably don't need this behaviour in Photo and some more need it in Designer, but in Publisher it is essential to have consistent values across multiple related documents.

Publisher still has some growing to do in this area, but this is at least possible without *too* much extra work:
 
Create two master pages: one for the chapter title and one for the rest of the chapter.
Start with the chapter title page and add the text there.  Add one page after the chapter title and make sure it has the master set for the rest of the chapter.
From the first page of the chapter, select the overflowing text box and click once on the red arrow along the lower-right of the text box.  With the pointer still indicating that flowing is being set up, switch to the second page and click once on the text box intended to contain the next page of text.  This will link the chapter title page text into the next page.
Assuming that page is also overflowing, shift-click on the red arrow on the second page to create the remaining pages.

Hi sdrum,
There's no package functionality at this point but this is something that's planned for later.

tl;dr: Every macOS app “knows” to move cursor by word w/ Alt modifier. Publisher (Actually, any Affinity app) requires Cmd modifier, which is inconsistent. Actually, this problem applies to every of Affinity apps, but I won't spawn multiple topics. :)
Long version of the problem: Whenever I edit texts in text areas in Publisher, I get stuck with inconsistent modifiers. Publisher requires me to NOT use system hotkeys which work literally everywhere. Even worse, sometimes system modifiers work, and sometimes they do not.
E. g., in every app except Affinity apps including Publisher: 
Arrows ←→ move cursor by a symbol, Delete removes a symbol, Alt+arrows move cursor by a word, Alt+Delete removes a word, Cmd+arrows move cursor to the line beginning or end, Cmd+Delete removes anything up to line's beginning or end. This pattern is simple, elegant, memorizable and works everywhere.
In Publisher and any other Affinity app:
Alt+arrows alter a symbol's kerning, Alt+Delete deletes a word, Cmd+arrows move cursor by word, Cmd+Delete deletes a line. This inconsistency matters a lot to me, because I work with text in many different apps, and I can't adapt to Publisher's hotkeys at all. I believe it's the single most annoying issue for me. I understand that you won't change the default behavior because it copies (flawed) Adobe's hotkeys.
However, since many hotkeys in Publisher are now customizable, I ask for an option to assign my own hotkeys for kerning and support system-wide text navigation modifiers.

Create the shape you want to crop to, then drag its layer in the layers palette over the thumbnail of the layer you want to use it to crop.  A highlight line should show up to the right of the thumbnail of the layer you are cropping while you are holding the mouse over it.  This will turn the shape you are dragging the layer entry of into a mask.
With the layer being masked expanded to show the mask layer, select the mask layer and add an appropriate gradient to it using the fill tool.  Reduce the opacity of some point on the gradient to reduce the opacity of the edges of the final result.

This has been discussed in other threads; a more proper implementation of this functionality is expected to be added in some unknown future version.

Currently you can create a "template" as a normal document then duplicate it to create a new document based on it.
A more "formal" template feature has been discussed and it looks like it is not outside the realm of possibility that this may show up one day, but personally I would not expect it in the first release of the program.

Take a look at other options in this price range then come back and tell us about basic functionality...
For example, there is a company that makes a program called Printworks for the Mac ($30 US) - it has trifold spreads, "proper" layers, calendars, bar codes, templates, etc...   but basic text formatting features like vertical alignment are nowhere to be found, nevermind stylistic alternatives...

Well, that’s not entirely true, of course. You can always use a transparent rectangle beneath your image that serves as a spacing element. Set Distance to Text to zero in order to ensure upwards compatibility. You certainly don’t want your document get messed up when this bug is fixed in the future … 
Alex 

Some say this, others say that

Mostly just using the shape tools that are available in Publisher.  For some of them I used the "Add" or "Intersect" buttons (I have them on my toolbar) to combine multiple shapes.
 
The general process I used:
Create the (vector) shape using any of the available tools (shape tools, pen tool, boolean operators, etc.) Apply a gaussian blur to the shape using the layer effects options (select the shape, click "fx" in the Layers panel, make sure the Gaussian Blur tab is selected along the left, turn up the radius to taste) Drag out a picture frame (using the rectangular picture frame tool) that is slightly larger than the shape (leave some space above, to the left, to the right, and below the shape) In the Layers palette, drag the shape to the right side of the thumbnail for the picture frame to make it a mask for the frame Deselect all, then select the picture frame Use the Color tab to assign a color to the frame to make it visible in the Assets palette (otherwise it is transparent) Add the shape to the Assets palette (on the Mac you can drag it in, on both platforms you can choose Add from Selection in the hamburger menu of the subcategory)  
Relevant tutorials:
 
 
 
 

You can adjust these settings globally (for the entire user account on the Mac) from System Preferences:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202319

Thanks - that video is very clear and for some reason I wasn't seeing that.
Then inspiration struck! 
My text boxes are defined on the 'master' pages. That is why it is greyed out in the text popup and doesn't appear in the context toolbar. When I go and edit the master pages I can see the other things in the context toolbar including the columns chooser.
So problem is solved. Well, nearly solved. I've turned the LH master page into two columns, but every time I attempt to turn the RH master into two columns it crashes the application hard! But that must be a different bug.
 
Thanks for your help in getting to the bottom of my problem here. 

You can't re-create them until you can create them.
Until Publisher implements those features it obviously won't be importing them.  That is one of the reasons that was recently cited by Serif for not having Word document import support yet:
 

People who have contributed to this thread may be interested in our first beta release (#249) to include Regular expressions in find and replace, and help us test this improvement to the feature.
Affinity Publisher 1.7.0.249 for Mac
Affinity Publisher 1.7.0.249 for Windows
 

ok, that was not clear from your description.
I jumped to that conclusion because after setting the first object to 50% the next one would have been created that way and you never indicated that you had changed it after creating the shape.
 
Another possibility is if you were using CMYK colors or similar, as the eyedropper would likely be reading it as an RGB color and it might not match up 100% when applied, but I don't get the impression that is what is happening in this case either.