spamjim

It is doubtful this is something in line with the audience and market for Publisher. As you've noted with specific outputs, much of the "interactivity" options you see in other applications serve a company's larger portfolio of publishing services or intellectual property. For example, you can make interactive PDFs in Adobe software because PDF is developed by Adobe. A first step to getting interactivity output options is to be able to tag content and export XML. That's what these other add-on developers work with to generate their "interactive" output.

There's no need to carelessly classify another as an "apologist" to diminish their credibility and recognition of the reality. Nobody can expect to effectively import ID design data if you don't have the Affinity features ready yet to support features coming from ID. If you're old enough, look back to the advent of ID. It had a very crude PM and QXD importer. ID users most often had to recreate their legacy documents. ID has never had a QXD importer beyond version QuarkXPress 4 and the PM imports (from Adobe's own software) have always been garbage. Adobe had huge resources to develop importers with ID1 (and all subsequent releases) but still did not live up to our current expectations of Affinity. As you know, each page layout developer intentionally limits the interchange of their documents. We recognize this as "vendor lock in". Instead of blaming developers for not being able to read/import, we can blame ourselves for choosing a proprietary format.

Publisher moved from spot inks and CMYK, as of the 2013 release. It is limited to RGB garbage. GIGO! Even if a conversion to Affinity Publisher was offered, you'd need to correct all the linked/embedded assets and color. If you have legacy MS Publisher documents, it is best to maintain a pre-2013 installation or start from scratch with a program like Affinity Publisher.

When using a text frame as a guide to draw page columns, you can adjust the gutter (gap between columns) under View -> Studio ->Text Frame.

Agreed. A workaround for now is to create a multi-column text frame on a master page. Drag guides from the rulers to align with the text frame's columns. Delete the text frame.

While this is contrary to the concept of a master page, it is a feature in another page layout app, and designers like to break templates all the time... It would be helpful to be able to selectively unlock/override a master page element from an individual page.

This is a weird omission and I'm wondering if I'm just not seeing where the function actually exists. For those uncertain of what page grids look like... The workaround, for now, appears to be creating a text frame with columns on a master page. Then drag guides from the rulers to align with the text frame columns. Delete the text frame.

Importing INDD requires that Publisher has the stable features to replicate what ID does. This is why you're not going to see INDD/IDML/INX import immediately.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in

InDesign cannot open Affinity Publisher files. Can InDesign still open PMD and QXD files? InDesign is MAJORLY flawed.