JGD

Uhh, a default Ctrl+W shortcut for Preview mode, I like it. Is this new on this build, or did I just miss it?
I've always found it supremely stupid how in InDesign such an essential shortcut was modifier-less and thus could never be toggled while editing a text box and, even though having to press a modifier key on every other instance takes a little bit more effort, seeing how your hands are both on the keyboard in that scenario and how it's a shortcut which you can perform with only your left hand anyway, not having to occasionally perform that extra mouse click and leave your editing task is a usability win by my book.
You may find my excitement over such a small detail to be a bit silly but, in all fairness, that's actually the shortcut I use the most in InDesign. Being the perfectionist that I am, I'm very conscious of my grids but also of my final output, so that WYSIWYG toggle is of paramount importance to me. I know you can always customise those, but having sensible defaults is also great for everyone, especially for fostering best practices when it comes to teaching students how to work with certain apps; the less preparatory work on classes and workshops, the better.

Hi Seneca,
You can quickly create a new Text Style by using a new entry on the Character Style and Paragraph Style dropdowns on the Text Tool Context Bar labelled 'New Style...". 

Please Click here to download the latest beta for macOS
Status: Public Beta
Purpose: Stability and General Testing
Requirements: Mac OS 10.9 or above
Hi,
We are pleased to announce that Affinity Publisher build 257 is now available as a manual download from the link above and on auto-update.
As this is a beta it is considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity where you may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents. 
We hope you enjoy the product, and as always, if you've got any problems installing or running up, please don't hesitate to post in this thread.
Any problems actually using this version please make a new topic in this forum and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Please feel free to leave general suggestions and comments in the Discussion Forum. 
Many thanks for your continued feedback.
---
Arrowheads!
We have Arrowheads for Line Styles from Designer. The best place to report any issues is probably the Designer Beta Forum.
Assets
We have removed the placeholder Assets from Publisher. Publisher will release with an empty Asset Panel.
Other Improvements and Fixes
Main Frame UI
No more duplicate empty panels (!)
Option for large thumbnails in Layers Panel. Layer colour tagging added
Column guide default options are now saved
Adding content with linked images to Assets will switch them to be embedded
Reintroduced Rotate View on context menus
Added command entry on Text Styles combos to create a new style
(Mac) Fixed overlay issue when entering font name into Text context toolbar font control
(Mac) Fixed crash using arrow keys in Pages Navigator on High Sierra and earlier
(Mac) Toggle Unicode shortcut is listed only under Text Menu
(Mac) Find and Replace panel icons missing from Panel on El Capitan and earlier
(Mac) Line Break shortcut is <Shift>-<Enter>
Pages / Master Pages
No longer draw guides from hidden masters
Fixed scroll into view in Pages panel
Fixed crash when pasting a Master into itself
Fixed crash moving items in Z-order having done detached edits
Text
Fixed application of Text Wrap borders (!)
Placing text with a frame selected now populates the frame and replaces the current content
Fix for positioning of path text
Formatting a specific text selection no longer updates text defaults. Formatting at the insertion point still does
Text tool selection improvements. <Alt>-<Click> forces select in front / behind
Long / nested style names in the Text Style panel are now displayed with elllipsis if necessary rather than shrinking
Fixed crash reading text attributes near Drop Caps
Fix for Character Variants for some fonts failing to show up in Typography panel
Fix for erroneous spell check warnings when languages switch within text
Paragraph Leading control not using localised decimal separator
OpenType - Accept newer versions of GSUB / GPOS tables. Used by e.g. Bahnschrift
(Mac) Fixed underline position for e.g. Univers Ultracondensed
(Win) Fixed issues with the Paragraph Decoration dashed stroke UI
Tables 
<Ctrl>-A / <Cmd>-A now selects all text in a cell rather than all cells in text context
Fixes for Table Tool when Table is nested inside layers etc
Fixed issue setting Table Cell insets
(Mac) Fixed glitch changing Table Format names
Find and Replace
Replaced character escapes in Find results with 'User Description' glyphs
RegEx fix for Find with trailing '\b', '\>' not highlighting results and Replace not working
RegEx fix for Replace All for empty search ranges 
RegEx fix for lookaround (?=regex) etc
Hyperlinks
File based Hyperlinks now have an option to copy the linked file to the output folder
Insert Anchor fails on text frames promoted from Master Page
Add Interactive > Insert Hyperlink to customisable keyboard shortcuts
Import / Export / Print
PDF Import - Fix for layers not importing
PDF Import - Improved detection of redundant clips
PDF Export - Use document colour space for transparency blending
Export - Fixed issue rendering image nodes with transparent regions with fills applied on raster export
Export - 'Pages' entry box isn't always enabled correctly
(Win) Fix for CMYK Printer Profiles not showing in Print dialog
(Win) Stroke width being printed incorrectly on rotated objects
Index
Sort index entries by page number
---
Earlier Release Notes Beta 249

Hi Oval,
Yes, this was improved. The middle handles don't need to be visible anymore for you to adjust the width or height of the boxes as long as there's enough space between the corners handles for you to place the cursor in the middle (it should then change to reflect you can adjust the width/height). In the current retail you can only adjust the width and height when the middle handles are visible over the bounding box.

This. Good old FreeHand...
 

Am I correct in assuming that we didn't have outer shadow intensity before…? 

AND REGEX! TAKE MY MONEY ALREADY!
For real. I've been using the beta in maybe five production jobs (Oops! I did it again!) and I'd say when InDesign came out… it wasn't half as finished as your product. On the other hand, we didn't have social media then and they dominated the market.

Anyhow, great work again, kids. If you ever feel like hiring a Product Evangelist, let me know  

I will be busy. [big-happy-face emoticon]

Please Click here to download the latest beta for macOS
Status: Public Beta
Purpose: Stability and General Testing
Requirements: Mac OS 10.9 or above
Hi,
We are pleased to announce that Affinity Publisher build 249 is now available as a manual download from the link above and via auto-update.
As this is a beta it is considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity where you may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents. 
We hope you enjoy the product, and as always, if you've got any problems installing or running up, please don't hesitate to post in this thread.
Any problems actually using this version please make a new topic in this forum and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Please feel free to leave general suggestions and comments in the Discussion Forum. 
Many thanks for your continued feedback.
---
Personas
- Renamed Layout Persona -> Publisher Persona and Vector Persona -> Designer Persona
Regular Expressions for Find and Replace
- We have added the facility to Find and Replace using perl type (or ‘ECMAScript with perl extensions’) regular expressions
-- The options to turn the feature on are found on the Find and Replace panel search options drop menu
-- 'Regular Expression' - Find / Replace will be performed using the "C" or "POSIX" locale
-- 'Locale Aware Regular Expression' - Find / Replace will be performed using the locale inferred from the text being searched and locale aware collation is implied
--- Please note that a 'Locale Aware Regular Expression' has to treat each block of text with a different language setting in isolation
Hyperlinks
- Stacks of hyperlink fixes
- Hyperlink anchor placeholder glyphs now look like anchors
Translation
- Stacks of Translation layout fixes. Please note that most strings lacking a translation from English will not have been updated yet.
- If you would like to report translation issues we would be grateful if you could report them in this thread.
Other Fixes and Updates
New Documents / Document / Spread Setup
- Fixed crash dragging Artboard from Designer to Publisher
- Fixed consistency issues with Margins / Bleed entry layout
- Fix to prevent overlapping when bleed area is set large
Tools
- Fixed lag when attempting to <Ctrl> copy objects
- Added buttons to Text Context Bar to update Text Style, plus other tweaks
- Fixed Text Frame vertical alignment context toolbar icon to reflect current frame
Panels
- Secondary page highlight on Pages Panel now reflects current spread rather than visible spread
- Support drag drop afassets / afstyles files to import them as a category
- (Mac) Fields Panel Text Edit is no longer dark on dark
- (Mac) Fixed for Text Frame Panel Insets steppers not always responding
- (Win) Fixed difficulties renaming a layer in Layer Panel
- (Win) Fix issue deleting mask / adjustment in Layer Panel
- (Win) Other Layer Panel updates, Checkerboard background, optional Thumbnail size (Coming soon to Mac)
- (Win) Update opacity and blend mode on adjustments panel properly
Text / Tables
- Fixes for AutoFlow, including failure after document Close / Open
- Fixed crash when trying to insert linked text frames into the text flow rather than at the end
- Fixes for auto-correct typographic quotes / single quotes
- Removed Table Cell Stroke alignment options
- (Mac) Fixed selection of entire words containing special characters
- (Mac) Fixed Leading stepper on Character Panel
- (Mac) Text Style Decorations now display CMYK values as CMYK
Images and Resources
- Fixed possible hang when opening large document with missing resources
Import / Export
- (Win) Significant performance improvements when Saving / Exporting
- Option to Export Layers to PDF disabled when PDF Version doesn't support Layers (PDF 1.4)
---
Earlier Release Notes Beta 238

Regular Expressions!!!, wow!

Hi gafvert,
As explained above this situation is a little exceptional because we are preparing to release the first version of Publisher and we need to ensure its compatibility with the rest of the suite (personas integration, file format compatibility etc). We used to release updates more frequently and as soon as Publisher is out, I do expect updates return to their usual pace.

My initial information above was incorrect, sorry. We have decided not to enable the additional personas in the Affinity Publisher free beta with the customer beta builds of the other desktop applications (ADe & APh), so my earlier post is now misleading. However the (free update) 1.7 release builds of Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo will enable the equivalent Affinity Publisher personas.

Hi @JGD try this blank. I tried with a couple of different text files and they loaded into their respective frames flowing for about 40 pages.
Side note; why do you have a page wide text frame on the Master pages as well as the narrow ones?
Linked test 00.afpub

The readers of this thread would like to try our initial attempt at adding the Master Page text frame and picture frame behaviour and features as discussed in some of the posts in this thread.
Affinity Publisher for Mac: build 1.7.0.221 Affinity Publisher for Windows: build 1.7.0.221 Please create new bugs forum threads for any bugs you find or post in this discussion/suggestions forum for missing features.

Not sure that was relevant to this thread... 
 
First of all, some of that functionality stems from a design decision at the start of the Affinity suite that the applications share a common file format.  Some of the existing functionality in Publisher is "inherited" from the design of Designer and Photo, and the ability to transition the files back and forth among the programs ties directly into the common file format that has already been established.  It probably would have taken them much longer to get Publisher off the ground if they did not already have that base to build on, so I don't think that their priorities are even remotely incorrect on this point.
Sometimes a feature you are begging for is best implemented by making use of code or software infrastructure that needs to be put in place first.  If putting that in place makes it easy to provide a less-requested feature that is still useful without significantly more effort, while the "bigger" feature that people are asking for still requires a lot of extra work, I don't think it makes sense to expect them to not provide the "low hanging fruit" features that are made possible along the way.
Some things take longer than others.  There are complexities involved with any large project like this that people on the outside are not necessarily going to be able to identify looking from the outside in.
There is also the fact that different developers have skills in different areas.  Software development is a big and complex field and not all participants have the same skill sets or interests.  Some of these features they are adding might require the skills of one developer while there could be a different developer, with the relevant skills, working on the more important areas that simply take longer to do.
 
Patience...

I know it will come too, as I know the programmers working on it.

I was one of the original posters pointing out this crazy omission, and I see it is still rumbling on and no sign from Affinity they have heard. Hopefully the design team will have a meeting where they discuss this and see how important it is to the customer and to the future of Affinity. I have been in the computer design game since the early 80's and I am an IT and design consultant, and I can assure you this is a deal breaker. Quite simply, a DTP app that does not have inline Graphics and Tables (something that even the humblest of text editing apps, even the dreadful Word, has) will not be taken seriously. Frankly, a DTP programme without inline graphics is like a car without a steering wheel. When you buy a car you don't expect to have to ask, does it have a steering wheel! You just assume it does.
A newcomer earlier asked what were the benefits of inline graphics. Well imagine this: You have produced a 24 page technical manual with illustrations every 2 or 3 paragraphs. The client asks you to add a new section near the beginning of the document. With inline graphics you just add the paragraphs - done. Without inline graphics you have to go through the whole document dragging the illustrations back into place. Even if you don't make a mistake (unlikely) it will take you hours. This is not a hypothetical example. It just happened to me. But I was using InDesign, so it took a couple of minutes and I knew I was not introducing errors.
So why do I care? Two reasons: 1. I am always glad when something pricks Adobe's bubble and forces them to up their game. InDesign has had no real competition for years and needs a jolt. 2. Now I am semi-retired I do a lot of pro-bono work in our local community. I advise and help set up village magazines, church magazines, charity publications, etc. These outfits cannot afford to take out an Adobe subscription, but something like Affinity Publisher would be affordable. I have already promoted Affinity Designer (and indeed use it myself in preference for Adobe Illustrator) and Affinity have benefited from several sales due to my recommendation. But I cannot at the moment even contemplate recommending AP until it has at least inline graphics and tables.
Affinity, if your publicity about wanting the design community to tell you what they want from Publisher is real, and not marketing hype, then email me and I will help you..

I do get a bit fed up with being told (elsewhere in these forums) that other software, (such as PagePlus, Indesign etc) took 30 (or whatever) years to develop, while Designer is new. I really don't think I can wait 30 years for Designer to catch up and have some of the basic features that other DTP software has now!

Nobody will be forced, but many people have planned to transfer their workflow from PagePlus to AP. When I heard that PP would be withdrawn in favour of AP I put on hold a decision to change publishing programs because I assumed that AP would have the same functionality. I use PP to create a 700+ page book each year and updating it without inline graphics would be a nightmare.
If AP isn't going to have inline graphics, I could have swapped to, and learned, another publishing program at least a year ago. I also bought AP and AD because they would integrate with AP.
I expected that some features might no make the first release - perhaps Indexing or TOCs - but not being able to anchor my illustrations to the text they refer to is a huge ommision.
That's a reason to be dramatic

Stars back and forth. Luminar 3 wants to be a serious alternative for Lightroom. But functionality, speed and reliability of the image management correspond at best to a beta version.
But this is not about Luminar. We shouldn't keep pulling the chain again and again. We should let Serif do his work.

I did not make a bad review, I just wanted an estimate of the release date. stay zen ...

Exactly.
Releasing it now would result in a lot of bad and angry reviews as Publisher gets unstable and unreliable at a certain point.
This would only result in refunds and image loss.
During beta you are told to expect that and you paid nothing. You fill a bug report instead of write a bad review. Total different situation.
 

Or, you know, you could just call them Document Layers and Artboard/Page layers (Artboard for Designer, Page for Publisher). Boom, done.
And now that you mention it, in the current layer implementation in Designer, layers are in fact just glorified groups whose contents you don't have to double-click to select/edit/move separately and which are dependent upon a specific artboard. Serif basically made something that isn't quite as functional as Layers, and not as rigid as groups, thus leaving that functionality in this sort of weird uncanny valley.
And speaking of groups and global stuff, the same goes for groups and objects, as there should be global groups/objects. You *must* be able to have objects outside of artboards, or even spanning multiple artboards (and yes, that should/could also apply for spreads in Publisher, as it's very common to have objects, namely images, spanning both sides of a spread or multiple pages on a multiple-page leaflet, something which isn't possible in Publisher yet but which Serif devs definitely must take into account for future proofing).
I know this will force Serif to rethink the whole document interaction/structure model, or add further complexity in the form of yet another user preference, but it must be done in order to take certain workflows into account. Not being able to have objects temporarily outside of artboards and in the pasteboard while maintaining their relation to the overall layer hierarchy drives me nuts, as does having them auto-crop when they are halfway inside and outside of an artboard.
Maybe some illustrators and even graphic and UX designers like working that way, but to me (and many other people, I'm guessing), that's completely bass-ackwards. Yes, many designers and illustrators are messy, and like (nay, have a need for) being so. As for Publisher, do not even think of making auto-crop the default behaviour; that's what Preview view mode should be there for, and you could add it to Designer retroactively as well (as the current default behaviour, and it could still be the default, except it would be toggleable). Your working documents do not have to be pretty, and DTP apps are not strictly WYSIWYG until you trigger some sort of preview mode. The same goes for spreadsheet apps, word processors, presentation apps, etc.…
Most people (especially prosumers and professionals) are way more capable of handling those abstractions (like global layers) and the concept of hidden/non-printing elements than you seem to give them credit for… as long as you give those features intuitive names and decent discoverability. And yes, for artists, there absolutely must be a totally WYSIWYG working mode (make it a Persona, if you will), but a DTP app is as technical and un-artist-y as it gets. It's a workhorse, and while its documents don't have to be ugly and cluttered, they don't have to be totally pretty in their default view either. In fact, I think the default view on an app aimed at long form typesetting should even include hidden characters, to avoid common mistakes. Yep, there, I said it.

Aha touché! Naming is just what it is; it should be as descriptive, short and unambiguous as possible. Even though in a literal sense that's what they are, “Global” seems to me to be too vague a word; hence my proposal of “Document Layers”, as in “layers belonging to a specific Publisher/Designer file”. And “User” doesn't make any sense, as it has been said here already, so, again, if each app already has established naming conventions, why not use them? In fact, you could have “Document Layers”, “Master Page Layers” and “Page Layers” in Publisher, “Document Layers” and “Artboard Layers” in Designer, and just “Layers”, period, in Photo. Different apps call for somewhat different conventions and UX, and there's nothing wrong in that. As long as they are somewhat consistent across the suite and predictable in their behaviour, users will be fine.
Now this is a bit confusing for me, right now, but as soon as the 29th of this month I'll be sure to check it out…
It's good to know; maybe it's a new feature and I missed it, maybe it's not that easily discoverable, or maybe it's just me who am an idiot.  Anyway, I'll still ask it again: even if you can toggle it, can you still maintain said hierarchy? AFAIK, seeing how there aren't global layers and pages are always layers themselves, an object can never belong to two artboards at the same time, or not belong to any artboard from the moment it touches one.
Maybe there has to be a mode akin to Illustrator where Artboards are just… I dunno, removed from the Layers panel and get a panel of their own, or something. Or just kicked up to a separate level inside of the current Layers panel. Or maybe those newfangled Document Layers could get their own level above the pages and, as long as you were working on those, you could get an experience similar to that in Illustrator. Or maybe you could intermingle global layers and artboard layers, in a more fluid conception (that would probably be the best UX scenario, as you could have global background elements, global foreground elements, and everything in between). Whatever works for big projects (like, say, website or app mockups) where organising stuff by Artboards isn't the end-all, be-all, which would mean you could instead just use them as glorified export slices.

Or, you know, you could just call them Document Layers and Artboard/Page layers (Artboard for Designer, Page for Publisher). Boom, done.
And now that you mention it, in the current layer implementation in Designer, layers are in fact just glorified groups whose contents you don't have to double-click to select/edit/move separately and which are dependent upon a specific artboard. Serif basically made something that isn't quite as functional as Layers, and not as rigid as groups, thus leaving that functionality in this sort of weird uncanny valley.
And speaking of groups and global stuff, the same goes for groups and objects, as there should be global groups/objects. You *must* be able to have objects outside of artboards, or even spanning multiple artboards (and yes, that should/could also apply for spreads in Publisher, as it's very common to have objects, namely images, spanning both sides of a spread or multiple pages on a multiple-page leaflet, something which isn't possible in Publisher yet but which Serif devs definitely must take into account for future proofing).
I know this will force Serif to rethink the whole document interaction/structure model, or add further complexity in the form of yet another user preference, but it must be done in order to take certain workflows into account. Not being able to have objects temporarily outside of artboards and in the pasteboard while maintaining their relation to the overall layer hierarchy drives me nuts, as does having them auto-crop when they are halfway inside and outside of an artboard.
Maybe some illustrators and even graphic and UX designers like working that way, but to me (and many other people, I'm guessing), that's completely bass-ackwards. Yes, many designers and illustrators are messy, and like (nay, have a need for) being so. As for Publisher, do not even think of making auto-crop the default behaviour; that's what Preview view mode should be there for, and you could add it to Designer retroactively as well (as the current default behaviour, and it could still be the default, except it would be toggleable). Your working documents do not have to be pretty, and DTP apps are not strictly WYSIWYG until you trigger some sort of preview mode. The same goes for spreadsheet apps, word processors, presentation apps, etc.…
Most people (especially prosumers and professionals) are way more capable of handling those abstractions (like global layers) and the concept of hidden/non-printing elements than you seem to give them credit for… as long as you give those features intuitive names and decent discoverability. And yes, for artists, there absolutely must be a totally WYSIWYG working mode (make it a Persona, if you will), but a DTP app is as technical and un-artist-y as it gets. It's a workhorse, and while its documents don't have to be ugly and cluttered, they don't have to be totally pretty in their default view either. In fact, I think the default view on an app aimed at long form typesetting should even include hidden characters, to avoid common mistakes. Yep, there, I said it.

We could call them Zebras and Anteaters, but in the end they are what they are.
 
Some layers are groups, but not all.  Shapes, embedded documents, text objects, adjustments, etc. are all layers.  Layers are not automatically created for them, the objects themselves are the layers.  This is a typical behavior of many modern graphics programs (though not so common in page layout software, and most programs use different names for them).  The Affinity Layers studio is roughly the equivalent of Blender's Outliner, for example.
 
This can be done already.  There is a menu option that is on by default and hides them when outside of the page area, but you can turn that off.