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The initial test for responsiveness when manipulating pages showed terrific improvements. Yay!

I don't get any of this in my tests, either. I tested with a new document.

I noticed that too. Clearly bugged. You have to click the padlock icon to unlock proportional resizing to use the function. If you re-lock, it seems to work until you open the dialog again.

Finally things seem to be improving. I installed beta 1.8.2.603 and imported my 100,000 word novel from Word moments ago. Responsiveness (text flow time) when importing and adding/deleting paragraphs to the start of the text was snappy, i.e. I noticed no delays at all. Edit: Initial auto flow took 1 minute, which seems reasonable. Adding and/or deleting pages at the start of this document incurred 3.5 minutes of frozen UI, but the improvement is significant. I'm holding my breath for this trend to continue in the near future. I had decided to use Serif PagePlus X9 for my new novel, but pending reports on general stability I'm now hoping to use Publisher instead.

The sequence of actions affect the result. See this thread for details:

I'm going to report this as a bug

So, rotate first, move second? I tested this and it works. However, for what I wanted to do I HAD to move first and then rotate second. It sounds as if it's not fully working as intended, as Bruce alludes to.

If I just move a duplicated object, the next duplication is translated relatively in the x/y space, as expected. However, if the duplicated object is rotated after being moved, the next duplicate action leaves the new object at the original object's position. I expected both translation and rotation to be applied. Am I missing something?

FYI, this is still present in 1.8.0.584

I made a simple 3 page document, double spread, to play around with Sections. I inserted the text "Chapter x" (x=1,2,3) at the top of each page to keep track of them. I then created a section for each 'chapter', i.e. the first started on physical page 1, the next on page 2, etc I then inserted two new pages before page 2. The sections automatically updated and the section for "Chapter 2" now referred to physical page 4. All well and good. Next I deleted the two new pages, i.e. physical page 2 and 3 This time around Section 2 (correctly) pointed to physical page two, but Section 3 vanished. As a result, my Chapter 2 and 3 were incorporated into Section 2. I can only imagine how this would play havoc with a lengthy document with many chapters and sections. Is this how it's intended to work or a bug?

I've only used Sections to separate front / back matter from the main text, so far. I shall have to look into other uses for that functionality.

I tried with a smaller text now, and you're absolutely correct. I can only speculate that the (very) long text I tested with earlier made APu so sluggish, it appeared not to work. Thanks.

Thanks again. Still hoping they will implement something similar to PagePlus' Edit Story in the future, though.

Patrick, I tested beta .556 with my standard plain ASCII test-file (TheBible.txt) and unfortunately this version doesn't seem to offer much in the way of performance improvements. 1) Affinity Pub beta .556 2) Set page format 6"x9" 3) Define text frames in double spread master 4) Place TheBible.text in text frame on page 1 5) Click to Autoflow text 6) Wait 5+ minutes while APu uses 97% CPU to autoflow 7) Go to last page and right click on it, and select Delete. Wait 2-3 minutes with the UI frozen. Admittedly, at 6"x9" this text results in 3400+ pages, so it's at the extreme end of things, but still ... Strangely, forcing a re-flow of text by deleting a bunch of text on the first page is very snappy. However, minimising the program to the taskbar is also sluggish.

Thanks, Walt. That method becomes somewhat tedious if you have to scroll through several hundred pages, though. Perhaps there are more ways to do this?

I guess there's an obvious answer to this, but I'm used to Serif PagePlus' Edit Story-mode for such things. How do I easily select parts of the text, for example chapter 3-9 out of 12 chapters to delete it? (I tried placing the cursor at the start of the text and then moving to a later page to shift-click at some point there, but this doesn't work.)

I'd forgotten when I posted, but this happened in my case as well.

Not sure what caused this but it looks like a bug to me: I had been playing around with styles for a while and the last thing I did was go the the applied master and change the spread margins. At one point I believe I re-applied said master to some of the pages in the middle of the document. (This is a small 18 page document with a few simple images below the chapter title pages.) At one point I could no longer use the page thumbnails to navigate. Or rather, whatever thumbnail I double-clicked, I ended up on one of the first three pages in the main view. I saved the document hoping the problem could be reproduced, but when I restarted Publisher and loaded the document, the problem was no longer evident.

Thanks, Jon

Ok, give me a minute and I'll ZIP and upload both the Word and the Publisher file

Hi Jon. I'm a little leery about sharing the document as it represents 15 months of work. It's my first novel and as such has little chance of generating much in the way of income, but still I worry about sharing it 😉 I just re-checked the computer I'm running the .556 test on, and it accepts commands. However, it failed to delete the first page as ordered. Right clicking the page and selecting Delete once more still results in nothing much happening.

I've touched upon this in earlier (v1.7) posts, but the issue persists. I have a 100 000 word manuscript in a Word docx file. No images, just text with Word styles applied. I can import this into PagePlus X9 and get very good performance while doing standard layout work. If the same document is placed into a new Affinity Publisher document, the program is so slow when doing certain operations, it's unusable. For example, I deleted the first (blank) page 20 minutes ago, and I'm still waiting for the operation to complete. Importing the text was also slow compared to PP, but not unbearably so. I have the same issue on my ultrabook (4-core i7, 16GB RAM) and my desktop PC (6-core i7, 64GB RAM) Yes, I know PP is a mature product, but I keep hoping AP will be able to handle a standard 6"x9", 430 page novel sometime soon.

Besides footnotes, this is what I miss the most. Pretty please

What is quite strange is the wild variation in time reported. Some report a few minutes consistently, others sometimes get a few minutes and at other times well over an hour. Me, I always get over 1,5 hours for this test. Although 3-4 years old now, my system is in no way low end. 64GB RAM, a fast SSD for the OS and decent mechanical drives for data. And a decent 6-core i7 CPU (I forget the model)

v1.7.3.481 seems just as slow when auto-flowing a long text. Yes, it proved to be a massive 1800 pages, but 1-2 hours for it to complete is not satisfactory. (I forgot to time it)