Bryce

Thanks for the document provided - quite honestly there is a wide mix of colours being used in this document, as well as multiple colour profiles.
Your Affinity Publisher document is set to CMYK using the ISO Coated v2 300% (ECI) profile, which is the same profile being used for the Embedded logo in the top right corner of the document.
However, if you open this embedded document, you can see the colour values being used are 96,76,0,0 (CMYK) for this logo - this has not been converted by Affinity as far as I can tell and these values were imported into Affinity as such.
The 'Picture Frame' with a Fill applied below this icon has the correct colour fill applied, but as mentioned this does not match the logo above, nor the icons below.
The 4 blue icons below this box are using a different colour profile, (U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2), and also have the incorrect colour values, the same as the logo, before being exported. This will be caused by the colour profile for the document not matching the images placed, so the colours are converted to match the document.
I recommend making sure all of your images used, both embedded documents and placed images are using the same ICC profile, and you also need to check which profile is in use in Adobe, to ensure the same profile is selected in Affinity or the colours will not match. 

Ahh the one bit images. There are some years of experience poking through there. 

@schmidt9 As far as I see there is no "opinion of the Affinity team", just a very polite statement of facts.
Considering how long it took Adobe to bring this to InDesign and that Publisher is currently at version 1.9.3, I find the fact that such big changes are not planned for version 1 anymore reasonable.
My guess is that "spread options" is somewhere on the list of future features, but that things simply have to be prioritised.
Be patient and use other software -- no one is forcing you to use Publisher ifnit doesn't meet your needs. I myself have two regular jobs that I still do in InDesign because no other software can do it the way I need it.
Sending a feature request and giving reasons is fine, complaining is not necessary in my opinion. People from Serif read this forum and I'm sure every feature request is considered and noted down somewhere (except for proper support of 1-bit images). They'll do it when there's time for it.

That's a big miss for me - I often design exhibition panels where I need to put maybe 7 or 8 panels side by side; I need to save the whole thing as a spread for client to visualise it, but then save pdfs as separate panels to send to print. Indesign currently copes fine with this. I realise I can use Designer for that with Artboards, but the image placement controls, Resource Manager and text controls already make Publisher a more attractive prospect for this sort of work - but not if limited to 2-page spreads.

@dominik I tried to use the "half-circle-T" icon but couldn't get it to do anything. I tried clicking it when I had the text frame selected, nothing. I tried clicking it with the caret in a paragraph and no text selected, nothing. I tried clicking it with a paragraph selected, nothing. See attached GIF. Am I doing something wrong?
@Fixx I tried Alt-clicking the style - with frame selected, then with caret in text, then with paragraph selected - and I got nothing. That doesn't seem to be working for me either.
I've attached the afpub file in case it helps with diagnosis.

persistent style menus.afpub

I don't get the impression that's what @Bryce is describing here:
I interpret "spell check window" to refer to this:

At first, I thought it was not working for me either, but I was selecting the wrong command. I went to Text→Spelling→Check Spelling. It just selects the next misspelled word, but no window comes up. To get the window above that resembles the old traditional spell checkers from a couple decades ago, you instead need to select Text→Spelling→Spelling Options….
To me, it just seems the two commands are imprecisely named. I would have had that window come with "Check Spelling" and the other to be simply "Next Misspelled Word." The latter command seems to me to only be useful if it is used as a key command, because otherwise I think it would be near painful to drill down to that menu item to step through every misspelled word. Funny that by default there is no key command with it.
 

Subtract the top red curve from the white S-shaped one & then with the while curve still selected in the Layers menu change the Fill Mode to Alternate (Even-Odd).
If you want to keep the lower red shape visible, move it above the while curve layer. Sample File Fill mode fix.afdesign includes the history so you can step back & see how this works.

I.m.o Publisher is the one program that almost always has to export so an export persona seems obvious.
In addition to the aforementioned requests maybe an easy/simple functional Impostion feature.

The export persona as it exists in Photo and Designer have a number of quite useful features which are not available in the export dialog: the ability to export cropped portions of a document without actually cropping the document, continuous exporting, etc.
There may be a few corner cases where some of that would be useful for Publisher, but very little of it would be relevant often enough to make it worthwhile in its current form, in my opinion.
Much more useful would be a few other related features that don't currently exist in any of the Affinity products, but which would lend themselves to an export/output-focused persona, and most if not all of these have been discussed in other threads on the forum - in particular:
Preflight checks (color space usage, ink coverage checking, font types and availability, overflowing text frames, etc.) Color separations Preview with the simulated color space of a known output device (what will it look like when printed on printer X...) - this one is currently possible using an adjustment layer but having it in a dedicated export persona would be a helpful alternative The ability to maintain multiple export presets for a given document. Each should allow the selection of pages and/or sections to be exported together as a unit.  Similar to slices in the export persona of the other apps, but instead of cropping a section of a page, you would be able to specify that specific sections of a document should be included in a particular pre-defined export so that multiple partial documents could be produced out of one master document. These could also have independent settings for things like bleed, color separations, output format (PDF / quality settings /etc.), imposition type and options, and so on.  This would allow setting up an export for print, another for a PDF to be distributed over the web, etc... There should also be an ability to do a batch export by selecting more than one preset in a list and clicking one button to export all of them in one step. For settings which are designed for print, it should also be possible to print directly from one of these presets.

Would be great to have the export persona options available to Publisher! 

Here's my first Instrument Panel done mainly in Designer. There are a few imported Photoshop elements from previous panel illustrations. These are used as training aids for student pilots.
The individual instruments an be configured to represent a particular flight attitude, too.
I am staring to get used to the 'thinking different' that Designer takes, compared to my lived-in-for-thirty-plus-years Photoshop.
Enjoy!

File > Edit in Photo add your live filters File > Edit in Designer – and you're back with everything intact Assign identical keyboard shortcuts in all three apps.
I've opted for:
File > Edit in Publisher = ctrl-option-cmd-1 File > Edit in Designer = ctrl-option-cmd-2 File > Edit in Photo = ctrl-option-cmd-3 Either that, or open your document directly in Publisher – doesn't matter whichever suffix it has – and switch between Publisher's personas.
For consistency, I'm using similar custom shortcuts there: option-cmd-1 = Publisher, option-cmd-2 = Designer, option-cmd-3 = Photo persona
In other words, regardless the document suffix, the Affinity document format is "app agnostic". It can be edited in any of the three. There are only a few things that are exclusive, for example a layout document can be either spreads or artboards, but not both.

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Here is the PDF - page 11. WBNews14-21.pdf
Here is the AFPUB file: 
Alfred - I would not expect that to happen, as it doesn't in other programs. I have been dealing with embedded fonts for nearly 20 years with Indesign. Subsetting is common and the correct way when fonts won't allow the full embedding. All characters that are used are embedded and nothing else. I believe this to be a bug if it doesn't put in the ligature.
thanks for you help!
14-21.afpub

No, it has not been improved yet.

that would be more appropriate. Thanks for the update.

I guess I could use Designer to make the initial document but the guide manager doesn't work with all the artboards right, does it?
I did successfully do our first newspaper edition this week using Publisher instead of Indesign. It actually worked without too many problems. No showstoppers and the separations looked okay for the most part. Some of the ads that gray was specified ended up separating as RGB converted to CMYK and I'm not sure why. If you made sure ahead of time that the color in the ads were 0 0 0 100 then the colors translated to the correct plate.

Is there anything wrong with:
option-click to sharp node ctrl-click to smooth node ?
affinity.help/designer/English.lproj/pages/CurvesShapes/edit_linesAndShapes.html

on the mac it seems to do nothing. 
from the responses I found online it looks that windows versions are crashing.

Thanks Walt! that was it!
 
You are full of knowledge!

It probably means that you do not have the Edit All Layers option enabled.

Did you happen to watch the very good tutorial video that they have for this? It shows using to different data sources simultaneously. for the most part, much more powerful than Indesign. The only feature I miss is the blank cell feature to remove the line.

Kudos! Amazing job for the new Datamerge features.

Some little enhancements requests for an updated 1.1 version of it:

1. Add a «Text Overset Detection» report
2. Add a «missing or wrong images path» report, of better before executing the merge
3. Add the ability to use relative path for image base on the location of the sources db file. It’s actually a pain to have to edit the full path each time the a folder is moved.
4. Add a «remove blink fields» option. A must for mailing address datamerge.

... and for a 2.0 version:
1. Add various if/then condition possibilities

InDesign CS4 option: 

I do wonder about the energy/environmental impact.
Once the book is made it's done with any negative impacts.
On the other hand the digital file may not cost much upfront - not counting the cost of constant upgrades of electronics, required to read the file, and will easily outlive the many devices you will have, but it must continue to use energy every time the file is opened. Even 100 years from now, if it's even able to be found/opened/formats changed will require electricity. The book, however, will still sit nicely on the shelf and will be retained - possibly for hundreds of years, without ever using any more electricity to be read.
When it's time to discard the book permanently, it will gently go back to the dirt - clay coatings and all, while the device(s) must be recycled and cost much more. Most are not as we know but thrown in landfills, heavy metals, lithium batteries, lead, and more.
Which was more environmentally friendly?