PatrickOfLondon

Update 2019-06-24: Please note this post reflects my earlier misunderstanding of how the fields work. It's been left here to serve as an archival record, but I have subsequently annotated it, in mauve. See my subsequent post for a hopefully more accurate understanding and explanation. Thanks to all for offering thoughts. I played with Thomas's sample document and, to develop his comments a little bit further, field: Document Sections, Page Number # means absolute (no, it's relative to the section-originated page numbering sequence) page number within the publication; (no, it's within its section-originated page numbering sequence) obeys the number-format for the section field: Document Sections, Last Page <Last Page In Section> means absolute (no, it's relative to the section) page number (within the publication) (no, it's within the section-originated page numbering sequence) of the page at the end of this section; obeys the number-format for the section field: Document Sections, Run Last Page <Last Page In Run> means absolute (no, it's relative to the section-originated page numbering sequence) page number (within the publication) (no, it's within the page-numbering sequence) of the last page in the print-run, = document page-count; (no, it's the last page number assigned by the corresponding page-numbering sequence) obeys the number-format for the section field: Document Statistics, Total Pages means document page-count; does not obey the number-format for the section and cannot be formatted as Roman numbers, alphabetic, etc. There is apparently no field for reporting a section's page-count. (but if a section has its own unique page-numbering sequence, that can be used for this purpose).

Hi, Although I can format the Page Number field as i, ii, iii, iv, etc using the Section Manager from the Pages studio, there doesn't seem to be any way of setting a matching format for the Total Pages field (page-count). Please see the attached picture. Have I overlooked something? Thanks in anticipation, for any solutions suggested.

I can certainly appreciate the frustration, from people who need footnotes and endnotes, about their non-availability in Affinity Publisher at present. I'd really like to see these features too. However, I feel confident that they will appear, in the not-too-distant future, in an incremental version along the way. And there are alternative products I can use, if I absolutely must have endnotes and footnotes right now. I'd like to add my thanks to all at Affinity / Serif for offering the marketplace this choice of products, at their price-point, alongside currently perhaps more feature-rich, but certainly much more expensive products from other companies. Given that AfPub is currently on sale for a one-off price of 3.9 months' worth of a single-app Adobe subscription, I'm personally very happy with the value I'm getting at present, and hope to see enhancements in the future of the kind we've seen in the other Affinity products' evolution since launch.

I apologise if I'm overlooking something, but although Affinity Publisher Help mentions a Pencil tool, it seems to be absent, as illustrated in the accompanying image.

Thank you Alfred, for unearthing the not-quite-so-missing Affinity Cat. In which case, I think there's a correction required to the Help entry for Cat, which says the Alt key is used.... but it's the Shift key that's required, instead. Hoping a separator tool-tip will make it into the release version (for which things are now looking very good), or an early update to that.

Aiming for perfection: missing tool-tip (and missing cat...) -- please see attached image.

Hi, apologies for reporting such a minuscule error, but speaking as a perfectionist.... in Help > Appendix > Preferences > ... Filler Text • Instead of placeholder 'latin' text you can add our own custom text content (any language) to act as filler text. ..."our" should be "your". You could also helpfully add "in" before "any", and capitalise "latin", so the corrected help entry would become: Filler Text • Instead of placeholder 'Latin' text you can add your own custom text content (in any language) to act as filler text. At least it's something that's easy to fix!

Thanks to all for comments and contributions, and to MickRose for a solution. If this could possibly, in a future release, become a one-click "feather" operation, that would be nice.....

Hi Jenny, "I just want a simple white to nothing even fade-out as a background for some script boxes to lighten the master background - and without a hard edge. The feather in PPX [PagePlus Xn] is all I really need." I wanted to mimic PagePlus's "feather effect" too, and found a way to more or less replicate it in Affinity Publisher. I wonder whether my post, here, might help?

I have found one way to do this -- or at least, to achieve something visually similar -- directly from within Affinity Publisher Beta (1.7.0.384). Referring to the attached illustration, 1 -- select the image you want to "feather" 2 -- right-click on the image, then choose Layer Effects 3 -- choose Inner Glow 4 -- experiment with the options, like Radius, Intensity, and Colour (here: white) Note that the Radius value, by using the slider, can only be taken to 100 px. But if you hover over the value-box beside the slider, and roll the mouse-wheel, you can change the value to anything between 0 px and 1024 px. Rolling the mouse wheel changes the value in increments of 1 px. Holding Shift, while rolling, steps in increments of 10 px; holding Ctrl while rolling steps in increments of 0.1 px.

Hi, Apologies if this question is answered elsewhere, I haven't found it though. In Serif PagePlus X9 there is a "feather" effect that can be applied to pictures. I can't see any way to do the same thing in Affinity Publisher Beta. Is there any way of doing it? A picture is worth a thousand words, so hopefully the one attached will show what I mean.

Experimenting with frame text in Affinity Publisher Beta, it does not seem possible to select a portion of text, and then drag and drop that selection from one place to another within a story. Of course, one can always cut, move the cursor, and then paste; but it would be useful to simply select -- say -- an entire paragraph, or a sentence, and drag-and-drop it to a new location.

Thank you Helge for that suggestion. I would like to ask for another facility in Spelling: to have a "Change All" option when checking spelling, so that if the same misspelling occurs multiple times in a document, you can change that misspelling throughout the whole document, wherever it occurs, with one single click.

Yes please, I would like to add my vote for footnotes and endnotes facilities. Thank you for all your good work so far on Affinity Publisher Beta.

Thanks to everyone for the interesting thoughts. Given that somewhere on the evolutionary path of PagePlus X9, someone at Serif thought the row-and-column-oriented, multipage view was a useful option and made it available, I hope a similar feature will make its way into the final release of Affinity Publisher, too. I just think it's convenient to be able to choose between viewing modes -- including options to view pages arranged either sideways-then-down, or vertically-down-only -- as you can in most other page-viewing environments, as in Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Word. Fully aware that this is a beta -- but I suppose that's what beta versions are for: to flush out ideas, provoke discussion, and generate improvements for the eventual release. Serif/Affinity: you are doing a fantastic job with this; thank you, well done, and keep going! Best wishes to all.

Hi everyone, In PagePlus X9 I could have a multipage view, whereby in the main work window (View > Multipage), the pages would stack themselves side-by-side along rows, and then continue on the next row, varying with the zoom factor applied: effectively, a grid layout. I can't find any way to do the same thing in Affinity Publisher. Can it be done at all, in the main work window? The pages inside it seem to be viewable only in a continuous vertical columnar layout. The attached screenshots will, I hope, illustrate the point. Thanks in anticipation, and happy 2019 to all.

There do seem to be some oddities around this (in addition to the observations by Chrisw5), which I would suggest need sorting out by the developers. For example, if I start with a blank document and add a text frame and some paragraphs, ...then click in the Paragraph leading control (Paragraph panel, Spacing section, left hand side, second item down), and scroll the mouse wheel, the units shown in the control seem to change randomly from points (e.g. 12.4 pt) to some strange decimal number... ...and that number does not correspond with the number and units shown in the Character panel, Leading Override control (Positioning and Transform section, left hand side, fourth item down). I attach a (marked-up) screenshot illustrating this. A few further notes: it does seem strange to have the Paragraph Leading control, and the Leading Override control, in different panels. But for more advanced users there might be a good reason for this, which currently escapes me if the Leading Override control's setting is anything other than Auto, could the background colour of the Paragraph Leading control automatically change, maybe to yellow, to indicate that what you set there is not what you are going to get? Similarly, in these circumstances, could the background colour of the Leading Override control also be changed, maybe to yellow, to match the "alert" background colour in the Paragraph Leading control?

Hi Walt, Thank you for that. It's easy when someone like you shows you.... For the developers to consider: I wonder whether it might be an improvement to the user interface if the two "defaults" buttons (synchronise, and revert) could have a safety-trap on them, e.g. clicking on either of them gives a message "This will [do whatever it does].... do you want to proceed? Yes/No" I know one can always undo, but in certain circumstances, nothing obvious happens when you click one of these buttons, even though it has changed things behind the scenes. Just a thought.

Hi everyone, I have a simple test document to experiment with text, character, and paragraph formatting. In this document I made a text frame with some characters in it and then applied a drop cap, using the Paragraph panel's dropdown styles list. I then tried to remove the drop cap, but despite setting everything in sight back to "[No Style]", and using the "Reset Format" button in the Text Styles panel, the drop cap refuses to go away. I have noticed this with some other character/text/paragraph attributes. Once set, they seem to persist even when you try to get rid of them. Why is this, and is there any one-click or other simple facility in Affinity Publisher Beta to thoroughly remove all applied text/character/paragraph attributes from text and set it back to "no added attributes", leaving only the raw text in place? If so I have not yet found it. I'm attaching the test document and a screenshot of settings. If I'm missing something I'd be glad to understand what that is. At present I'm thinking this is a bug. Thanks in anticipation... drop cap - character format persistence bug in AfPub.afpub

Hi Scadwe, I was mystified by this too, until by trial and error I found the following: (a) have both the Paragraph panel and the Character panel in view. (b) in the Character panel, find the Leading Override control (Positioning and Transform section, left hand side, fourth item down)..... and use its drop-down arrow to set it to Auto. I had somehow set it to some other value, which caused the effect you noticed (i.e. adjusting paragraph leading had no effect). (c) in the Paragraph panel, find the Paragraph Leading control (Spacing section, left hand side, second item down), click in it, and use the mouse scroll wheel to adjust. Does this work for you?

Cautiously optimistic that this bug has been resolved in Affinity Publisher Beta version 1.7.0.162. I have not so far been able to make this version crash, using the test document and the steps described above, which made earlier versions crash. Can anyone else confirm that it seems to have been resolved? Thanks to all concerned.

Hi JFisher, Many thanks and please tell the developers that they, like you, are doing a great job in working to develop and refine this nascent product.

Hi, Using Affinity Publisher Beta version 1.7.0.145 on PC Windows 10... File > New has these tabs: Layout / Colour / Margins / Bleed .. but File > Document Setup has Colour / Layout / Bleed ... (reversing the order of Layout and Colour, and omitting Margins) Thanks for all the progress made thus far, it's coming along really well.

Just to note that this bug is still present in Affinity Publisher Beta 1.7.0.145. See

Here's the error message I get from afpub for this bug: Unhandled Exception An Unhandled Exception has occurred and the application cannot continue. The Crash Reporter will be displayed after the application exits. Reference: a2c3181 e-2e16-4e0f-97b3-46ab41f da954