Fairportfan

Publisher looked so good. I bought it as soon as it was available. I'm still using PPX9

Didn't figure you DID, but on the off-chance...

Do you actually need a PagePlus manual? If that's what you need, here it is: http://dl.serif.com/pdfs/pageplusx9.pdf

I had a friend who's a professional tech writer. She worked for Ashton-Tate - editing manuals and support documents, and she was so important to them that when she emigrated, they established a small office in her new home country so that she could continue to work for them. Until they downsized her department. You should hear her talk - at length and with heat - about the relative costs of providing and maintaining good manuals and of providing technical support through other means. It's not pretty, though it is rather amusing if you don't have a dog in the fight.

Irrelevant to the question of "Why no actual manual?" I have observed that some software distributed only by download includes PDF manuals that are at least as good as the hard-copy ones were, and easier to search {if properly designed}

I have tried to use the "Help" {scare quotes intended}. Like the "Help" in PPX9 {note that i didn't mention the "Help" in PPX9 in that post}, it is essentially useless unless you pretty much know what you want to do and are just looking for last-minute detailed advice. As for tutorials - they really don't seem to work out for me; again, i can use a tutorial to touch up my knowledge of things i already pretty much know, but they are time-consuming poorly-paced annoyances that take longer and cover stuff i neither want nor need to know in addition to what i MIGHT want to know. I guess i was spoilt by being a Navy electronics tech and then working as a tech at several companies using test and assembly equipment whose makers supplied detailed and easily-used manuals for it. I am used to having either hard-copy or PDF support documents that i can sit down with, refer to the index or ToC, find the actual specific knowledge i need without having to wade through extraneous clutter, and synthesise a solution. If Serif is no longer willing to provide simple, clearly-written documentation that its users can search at their own pace and in their own manner, then i guess it's time - after twenty-plus years - for Serif and myself to part ways. {I have been observing a tendency in the electronics and computer industry - at least in the general-public-facing parts - to provide less and less detail on use and maintenance of equipment. I built this computer from parts, as i have several others over the years ... and if i HADN'T been building my own computers for years, the "documentation" supplied with the motherboard and semi-modular power supply MIGHT have been sufficient - but i found myself having to fill in things that had been glossed over in the "documentation" that came with things.}

This is what i'm talking about - you got it as part of the PPX9 download. Would it kill Serif to provide similar for Affinity?

How about a PDF "manual"? Wouldn't cost anything beyond the original cost of preparing it and the negligible cost of keeping it available for download, and could be easily and quickly updated as program features change.

I bought Affinity Publisher when it was made available - i paid less than i had for my PPX9 upgrade - but i have yet to actually USE it, because it's pretty non-intuitive and it's hard to figure out how to do anything with anywhere the ease i can do them in PPX9. I really assumed that there'd be some way to migrate my PPX9 files to AffPub, and that it'd be as easy as PP to figure out; i never had to actually read the manual as i moved from one version of PP to another, starting, as i said, with about PP5 {huh - looking back just now at the version-release dates on Wikipedia, i must have started with PP3 or so}; it was intuitive in the extreme. Granted, i had to use "Help" or the manual occasionally to suss out some little trick, but that was pretty seldom. AffPub? Not so much. So it's on the computer, and so long as it's getting updated for free, i'll keep it current ... and someday i may be bored enough to sit down and really work at figuring out how to use it to, pretty much, do what i already know how to do in PPX9. Or until Serif actually publishes a genuine usable comprehensive manual. And i shan't be buying any more Affinity products until they do. As ellaryk said {more or less}, i see no reason to spend money buying a product that almost seems to be deliberately obscure that doesn't seem as if it will really do more for me than the product i already have and thoroughly understand.

Yeah - it was the DTP i used before PP {on an Apple IIgs} - i think my first PagePlus version was about ver 5 - and i had a senior moment there while i was typing. Oddly enough - before i bought PP5, i had another DTP that i got from a cut-rate software publisher for $5 ... and it was identical to Page Plus.

Ah and also hah. I did use a different e-mail for some obscure reason. Oops.

OOps. Nevermind. The e-mail i found was for a different order.

Oh, yeah - it was a program for Apple II, back in the days before Apple turned into the Evil Empire and Jobs oversaw the murder of the IIgs, which was vampirising the sales of his then-money-losing baby, the Mac. It's still available in a PC version; i don't THINK the hyphen was part of the name WayBackWhen...

Pretty sure i bought it from Serif online; i don't use the MS Store

Well, i suppose that i can just use PagePlus if i want to create HTML pages, i guess. {Arrgh! i just realised that i referred to PagePlus as PublishIt, the DTP i used before it, in another post.}