Medical Officer Bones

In more general terms, I think this would be (FXL) EPUB 3 export? I whole-heartedly support this.
Apple's *.ibook format should NOT be explicitely supported, because it breaks the epub v3 standard, and is Apple's proprietary undocumented version of epub.
Whether epub export will be supported by the Publisher devs is very doubtful, since they already stated they do not intend to support html export (and since epub is based on the html and css standard...).
But if Publisher WOULD support both fixed layout (FXL) and flowing epub export, and integrate video, sound, links, state objects, and animation options, then I think they would hit the road running. But I doubt Publisher will have this export option - perhaps in 5 or 6 years?

It doesn't work like that: saving a bitmap as a EPS will not auto-magically convert it to a vector file. Instead, you must use a bitmap to vector conversion tool to do this first, and then save as an eps, svg (or any other vector compatible file format).
Unfortunately, none of the Affinity products currently have this functionality built-in (as of yet). The good news is that a copy of the open source Inkscape does offer this feature, and is easy to use. Here's a quick tutorial: https://goinkscape.com/how-to-vectorize-in-inkscape/
After "vectorizing" an image, save as SVG, and import in Designer for further editing.

Yes. Free, open source, and the latest version (2.8) has real-time quality rendering. On par with commercial 3d apps. Ahead of the curve compare to some in most respects (such as Lightwave). And 2.8's GUI has seen remarkable progress, and is now arguably 'easier' than even some of the commercial offerings.
In short, no need to spend any money if you want to add a bit of 3d spice in your work! (But please do consider sponsoring the Blender Foundation for their hard work :-)

@Fixx I agree: InDesign is very quick to work with.
@NauticalMile I must have misunderstood you in some way: zooming and panning documents in all Affinity products is very fast: just use a mouse with middle mouse button and scroll wheel. Much more effective than any buttons. I am always frustrated with Adobe products than none of those allow panning the view with the middle mouse button, and force the user to press and hold down the space bar, which is very inefficient.
Also, I use keyboard shortcuts for most commonly and often used commands in any software, which thoroughly speeds up workflow in any application. Much faster than any GUI. CTRL-S (win) or COMMAND-S (mac): save done. Faster than moving the mouse to a save button, and it works in any application with a save function. A save button just takes up unnecessary space and clutters the view in my opinion. Same for undoing things: ctrl-Z, done.
Having said this, I do agree with both you and @Fixx that Affinity Publisher and Photo in particular have a number of basic workflow issues at this point. These do indeed stunt the workflow, and I hope the kinks will be ironed out by version 2. I mean, I recall the first couple of versions of InDesign, which had some very rough edges as well. As it is said: Rome wasn't built in a day.

Before you'll be able to pull off stuff like that it will take at least one year of intense learning and experience, if not more. Especially if you've never done anything related to 3d work before and have to learn the terminology. Creating good looking 3d art from scratch is hard to learn.
(but super fun!)

Related to pixel art in Photo, the lack of an indexed colour mode is severely hampering the options for pixel artists. Then again, I'd never recommend a general image editor for pixel art creation - not with Pro Motion NG on the market. There's just no comparison. Get the right tool for the job.
I'd rather have Affinity Photo focus on improving the photo editing and compositing functionality instead of new pixel art features. I just don't see the point when specialist tools exist - Affinity Photo can't hope to match Pro Motion NG in this respect.

In competing page layout software it is possible to right-mouse click an image (vector or bitmap) and open that asset in an external editor of the user's choice. InDesign, for example, offers this option, and I often make use of it.
I looked and looked, and it seems Publisher lacks this rather basic functionality. I understand that Photo will become part of Publisher as a Persona, but that still will not solve this issue, since not everyone will be interested in purchasing Photo and/or Designer, and may prefer to edit their assets in other software.
My request would be then: please add a simple "Edit With..." option to allow Publisher users to open any asset in any custom editor of their own choice.
 

It serves up most of the Internet? It runs every Android based phone and hardware, dominating the the smart phone market? It runs Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. It drives a huge amount of hardware (including those large Tesla car displays, Kindles, Kobos, drones, and much more) and most of the internet of things (fridges, thermostats, etcetera)? Heck, it's the only OS running on the entire planet Mars (Mars Rover) and it runs the systems on ISS. It runs China's Social Credit System, controlling many aspects of their population's lives from 2020 onward.
Self-driving cars will be running on Linux when they hit the main consumer market.
Linux dominates in the world throughout, with the exception of graphic design and production and a number of other minor areas such as consumer and office desktops/notebooks where mainly Windows and some Macs are in use. Macs and iOS serve as terminals through which consumers connect to a by and large Linux world with a measure of Windows. Otherwise it is Linux, Linux, Linux. A lot of embedded Linux too.
Linux will probably drive all the upcoming technology and artificial intelligence that will replace much manual labour and related jobs: on farms, in shopping (already happening with all those automated check-outs), in transportation at large (including automated transport ships, planes and drones), sex bots, the servicing and support industry (chatbots), and so on, and so forth. Most office jobs will disappear, replaced by AIs running on some kind of Linux derived OS and software.
Linux drives by far most of the IT world as we know it. And it will only become MORE. Linux will replace most humans' low level jobs, probably - it's already happening. Big brother runs and loves Linux.
Linux: welcome to humankind's future. And the future is now.
Or perhaps your question's scope is to be limited to the prepress print industry only and partly to print graphic design? Well, disregard the previous lines of text in that case.
 
[Written with a hefty dose of sarcasm and irony. Or is it?]

In competing page layout software it is possible to right-mouse click an image (vector or bitmap) and open that asset in an external editor of the user's choice. InDesign, for example, offers this option, and I often make use of it.
I looked and looked, and it seems Publisher lacks this rather basic functionality. I understand that Photo will become part of Publisher as a Persona, but that still will not solve this issue, since not everyone will be interested in purchasing Photo and/or Designer, and may prefer to edit their assets in other software.
My request would be then: please add a simple "Edit With..." option to allow Publisher users to open any asset in any custom editor of their own choice.
 

Yep, I don't know.....  In every package I've handled in my life, linked images are a life savior when you are creating things like board/card games, and many  types of publications or general designs, where an image is reused in the design (one design even calling many linked images) a lot, and you want to independently edit that image, have it always up to date without needing to re-embed it... But it's maybe just my usual workflows. In the other side, being able to embed is often important, too...

In competing page layout software it is possible to right-mouse click an image (vector or bitmap) and open that asset in an external editor of the user's choice. InDesign, for example, offers this option, and I often make use of it.
I looked and looked, and it seems Publisher lacks this rather basic functionality. I understand that Photo will become part of Publisher as a Persona, but that still will not solve this issue, since not everyone will be interested in purchasing Photo and/or Designer, and may prefer to edit their assets in other software.
My request would be then: please add a simple "Edit With..." option to allow Publisher users to open any asset in any custom editor of their own choice.
 

While I applaud the inclusion of a live non-destructive procedural texture filter, asking your users to write mathematical formulas "sort-of" hampers creativity and texture exploration while designing. It's not a very conductive approach to quick experimentation, and the way controls are implemented is kinda clunky as well.
I remember asking the Photoshop devs to integrate some kind of procedural texture generator, and they never did (aside from the terrible uncontrollable clouds filter and a few simple noise generators).
This is understandably a rough first version of the procedural texture generator, of course (I hope, at least). The Affinity dev team could take their cue from other applications how to take this to the next user friendliness level:
Filter Forge uses a nodal system.

This is, in my opinion, the most flexible and usable visual approach, although perhaps not the most intuitive one for designers.
PhotoLine uses a more traditional dialog approach, and applies these as a texture fill with full visual control over placement with a nice fill widget to control transformation. The advantage of having these as a regular fill option is that procedural textures also become available in layer effects, for example.



Substance Designer also opts for the nodal approach:

Substance Designer does a quite nice job making this rather intuitive and relatively easy to use (in my opinion).
Another example of nodal based procedural texture generation is Neo Textures:

I would love to see Affinity's procedural texture filter to have simple node-based controls. I really think it is the best way to go, in combination with the level of control that PhotoLine has to control these textures with an on-canvas control widget. Perhaps separate the colour controls from the texture controls as well? Not sure. And allow the procedural textures to be used as a Fill too.
The Affinity dev team probably wanted to get something working, and might be expecting the community to come up with new presets. Which is a half-way solution in my opinion. I regularly open FilterForges node editor to make some additions and adjustments to existing filters, and I expect that presets will only satisfy a subset of user cases.
As its stands, you can't really expect the average designer to dive into math to experiment visually with the new procedural texture filter. It's not very intuitive or open to visual experimentation in its current state, and is in dire need of GUI exposure. Even G'MIC's procedural patters expose all the controls and only provide a list of pre-made patterns, and I think that is preferable, with its built-in limits in regards to presets, to a math editor.
To cut a long story short, I hope the Affinity devs will be exposing the internal math to some kind of GUI controls, without the need for typing math expressions, and to open this up for quick visual experimentation and creative control. Because its creative potential is there.

For comparison's sake, the new v4.2 preview of Krita introduces a nice small slider in the layers panel to control the thumbnail size on the fly in a seamless fashion. While the user had no control over thumbnail size in the pre-4.2 versions, a useful option exists: when the user hovers over a layer, a larger version is displayed in a pop-up, which also lists that layer's properties.

I really do hope layer thumbnails in Affinity will have a similar 'zoom' function at some point. It has been discussed in another thread that Affinity's layer panel is hampered with other usability issues, and (in my opinion) is crying out for a 'make-over'.
That check box is a usability abomination (sorry). It's been discussed in that other thread (can't find it right now).

Honestly there is many software already available freeware and commercial which deals in the one or other way with this, that I wonder why it should be that urgent to have then some more or less sort of halfhearted implementation here.
Also IMO there are actually much more important and relevant things to work on, like all the bug fixes (MacOS, Windows, iOS) filed in by various people and the extension of restrictions of already long time available functionality. Would be fine to have first a stable, well working and performing actual base, before diving into other things.

Hey Medical Officer Bones,
Thanks for the suggestions. I have to agree with some of what you have said. I don't know what direction we plan on taking this feature but I can pass the feedback on for you.
I'll also move this thread to feature requests so other users can add their input.

As far as I am aware none of the Affinity products work well with 1bit bitmap files. For example, 1bit high resolution tiff files @1200ppi do not render properly at their original resolution when output as a PDF. Affinity Photo does not even support 1bit bitmap files.
1bit bitmap support is just not there yet in either Photo or Publisher. We will have to wait and see, but I have an inkling that this situation will not be resolved before version 2.0, or perhaps even later than that.

While I applaud the inclusion of a live non-destructive procedural texture filter, asking your users to write mathematical formulas "sort-of" hampers creativity and texture exploration while designing. It's not a very conductive approach to quick experimentation, and the way controls are implemented is kinda clunky as well.
I remember asking the Photoshop devs to integrate some kind of procedural texture generator, and they never did (aside from the terrible uncontrollable clouds filter and a few simple noise generators).
This is understandably a rough first version of the procedural texture generator, of course (I hope, at least). The Affinity dev team could take their cue from other applications how to take this to the next user friendliness level:
Filter Forge uses a nodal system.

This is, in my opinion, the most flexible and usable visual approach, although perhaps not the most intuitive one for designers.
PhotoLine uses a more traditional dialog approach, and applies these as a texture fill with full visual control over placement with a nice fill widget to control transformation. The advantage of having these as a regular fill option is that procedural textures also become available in layer effects, for example.



Substance Designer also opts for the nodal approach:

Substance Designer does a quite nice job making this rather intuitive and relatively easy to use (in my opinion).
Another example of nodal based procedural texture generation is Neo Textures:

I would love to see Affinity's procedural texture filter to have simple node-based controls. I really think it is the best way to go, in combination with the level of control that PhotoLine has to control these textures with an on-canvas control widget. Perhaps separate the colour controls from the texture controls as well? Not sure. And allow the procedural textures to be used as a Fill too.
The Affinity dev team probably wanted to get something working, and might be expecting the community to come up with new presets. Which is a half-way solution in my opinion. I regularly open FilterForges node editor to make some additions and adjustments to existing filters, and I expect that presets will only satisfy a subset of user cases.
As its stands, you can't really expect the average designer to dive into math to experiment visually with the new procedural texture filter. It's not very intuitive or open to visual experimentation in its current state, and is in dire need of GUI exposure. Even G'MIC's procedural patters expose all the controls and only provide a list of pre-made patterns, and I think that is preferable, with its built-in limits in regards to presets, to a math editor.
To cut a long story short, I hope the Affinity devs will be exposing the internal math to some kind of GUI controls, without the need for typing math expressions, and to open this up for quick visual experimentation and creative control. Because its creative potential is there.

While I applaud the inclusion of a live non-destructive procedural texture filter, asking your users to write mathematical formulas "sort-of" hampers creativity and texture exploration while designing. It's not a very conductive approach to quick experimentation, and the way controls are implemented is kinda clunky as well.
I remember asking the Photoshop devs to integrate some kind of procedural texture generator, and they never did (aside from the terrible uncontrollable clouds filter and a few simple noise generators).
This is understandably a rough first version of the procedural texture generator, of course (I hope, at least). The Affinity dev team could take their cue from other applications how to take this to the next user friendliness level:
Filter Forge uses a nodal system.

This is, in my opinion, the most flexible and usable visual approach, although perhaps not the most intuitive one for designers.
PhotoLine uses a more traditional dialog approach, and applies these as a texture fill with full visual control over placement with a nice fill widget to control transformation. The advantage of having these as a regular fill option is that procedural textures also become available in layer effects, for example.



Substance Designer also opts for the nodal approach:

Substance Designer does a quite nice job making this rather intuitive and relatively easy to use (in my opinion).
Another example of nodal based procedural texture generation is Neo Textures:

I would love to see Affinity's procedural texture filter to have simple node-based controls. I really think it is the best way to go, in combination with the level of control that PhotoLine has to control these textures with an on-canvas control widget. Perhaps separate the colour controls from the texture controls as well? Not sure. And allow the procedural textures to be used as a Fill too.
The Affinity dev team probably wanted to get something working, and might be expecting the community to come up with new presets. Which is a half-way solution in my opinion. I regularly open FilterForges node editor to make some additions and adjustments to existing filters, and I expect that presets will only satisfy a subset of user cases.
As its stands, you can't really expect the average designer to dive into math to experiment visually with the new procedural texture filter. It's not very intuitive or open to visual experimentation in its current state, and is in dire need of GUI exposure. Even G'MIC's procedural patters expose all the controls and only provide a list of pre-made patterns, and I think that is preferable, with its built-in limits in regards to presets, to a math editor.
To cut a long story short, I hope the Affinity devs will be exposing the internal math to some kind of GUI controls, without the need for typing math expressions, and to open this up for quick visual experimentation and creative control. Because its creative potential is there.

While I applaud the inclusion of a live non-destructive procedural texture filter, asking your users to write mathematical formulas "sort-of" hampers creativity and texture exploration while designing. It's not a very conductive approach to quick experimentation, and the way controls are implemented is kinda clunky as well.
I remember asking the Photoshop devs to integrate some kind of procedural texture generator, and they never did (aside from the terrible uncontrollable clouds filter and a few simple noise generators).
This is understandably a rough first version of the procedural texture generator, of course (I hope, at least). The Affinity dev team could take their cue from other applications how to take this to the next user friendliness level:
Filter Forge uses a nodal system.

This is, in my opinion, the most flexible and usable visual approach, although perhaps not the most intuitive one for designers.
PhotoLine uses a more traditional dialog approach, and applies these as a texture fill with full visual control over placement with a nice fill widget to control transformation. The advantage of having these as a regular fill option is that procedural textures also become available in layer effects, for example.



Substance Designer also opts for the nodal approach:

Substance Designer does a quite nice job making this rather intuitive and relatively easy to use (in my opinion).
Another example of nodal based procedural texture generation is Neo Textures:

I would love to see Affinity's procedural texture filter to have simple node-based controls. I really think it is the best way to go, in combination with the level of control that PhotoLine has to control these textures with an on-canvas control widget. Perhaps separate the colour controls from the texture controls as well? Not sure. And allow the procedural textures to be used as a Fill too.
The Affinity dev team probably wanted to get something working, and might be expecting the community to come up with new presets. Which is a half-way solution in my opinion. I regularly open FilterForges node editor to make some additions and adjustments to existing filters, and I expect that presets will only satisfy a subset of user cases.
As its stands, you can't really expect the average designer to dive into math to experiment visually with the new procedural texture filter. It's not very intuitive or open to visual experimentation in its current state, and is in dire need of GUI exposure. Even G'MIC's procedural patters expose all the controls and only provide a list of pre-made patterns, and I think that is preferable, with its built-in limits in regards to presets, to a math editor.
To cut a long story short, I hope the Affinity devs will be exposing the internal math to some kind of GUI controls, without the need for typing math expressions, and to open this up for quick visual experimentation and creative control. Because its creative potential is there.

Jutoh doesn't support fixed epub and only a tiny subset of epub 3. Instead of Jutoh, Sigil is comparable and completely free for flowing epub ebooks.
https://sigil-ebook.com/
Although I understand the technical reasons why the Publisher developers decided to forego html and epub export, the fact remains that without this option Publisher will be unable to compete with the current crop of DTP layout software.
Which is why I hope scripting and a decent plugin API/GUI will be at the top of the list: this will empower users to build their own solutions. Because export to a fixed html page (which fixed epub 3 basically is) isn't that hard to develop, to be honest. Pretty much direct conversion from frame containers to absolutely positioned div elements, with content converted to bitmap and svg files.

The lack of a custom layer thumbnail size has been discussed to death before. It is only one of several GUI interaction design issues related to the Layer panel.
Here is what happens with longer layer labels:

As anyone can see, this is a less than desirable situation, and things will only get worse when a custom layer thumbnail size is introduced in the Affinity range. And I agree with your @hifred observation that a checkbox is the wrong indicator for layer visibility. 
There are a number of other design problems, and I again agree the entire panel should be scrapped, and rethought. For example, changing the blending range, changing the opacity, or coverage map: none of these are indicated in any way in the layer panel to show the user that a specific layer happens to have other settings applied to. Layers cannot be tagged with a colour either, nor is a search option provided to filter layers. And it is not possible to drag-select like in Photoshop.
But in this respect Photoshop is lacking as well. With both apps the user must select a layer first before it becomes clear which opacity and blend mode settings are applied. The only application that I know of that does include this information for each layer is PhotoLine, and that works very, very well. Looking at a layer comp in the layer panel immediately tells you how things work. I wish other image editors would allow for this, or at least include an option.
Anyway, the way the layer visibility controls are handled in Affinity reminds me of how a programmer would solve it. But it is only one of a whole list of layer panel issues and limitations. I do hope the developers are working to solve and improve these, but I was hoping to see some much-need improvements in the beta of Affinity Publisher, and noticed how little has changed.  Publisher is presumably the v1.7 version of the Affinity range? If so, we may be disappointed when V1.7 is released.
 

Agreed, masks are still quite quirky. I have to admit that as much as I love the software, I was quite surprised back when Photo went from Beta to Release without addressing these.
The Dodge/Burn tools seem to do nothing (or rather, happily operates on the blank RGB data, leaving Alpha alone), the brush tool ignores blend modes, adding adjustments with a mask selected doesn't add them to the mask automatically and requires dragging them into the right place manually and selecting Alpha from the drop-down manually (both things take extra clicks and are almost impossible to discover for a new user/Photoshop convert without research), while some filters work because they affect both RGB and Alpha (eg. Motion Blur), others simply seemingly do nothing since there is no RGB data to operate on instead of treating Alpha like RGB like in Photoshop, layers/adjustments nested into Mask layers sometimes seem to not be displayed in the layers panel (might be a display limit for nesting depth), and even though there can be multiple masks affecting one layer, there is no way to combine them in Pathfinder-type operations since the layers panel only offers the regular layer blend modes that are useless in a mask context. The Photo team also has unfortunately copied Photoshop's nonsensical 1990ies limitation that features like Color Range selection are destructive commands outputting a selection and HSL qualifiers are limited to the HSL dialog box instead of working like non-destructive adjustment layers that can be used as mask layers for any type of layer or adjustment (or in case of the latter at least allowing them to be used to generate selections).
But while I hope we'll see some workflow, feature and usability improvements in these areas in the future, for now, the most essential features are there at least. And while they're far from intuitive, they are at least usable and have the potential to be really powerful. Already, we can do things that are impossible in Photoshop, such as applying non-destructive adjustments to masks, using multiple masks on a single layer and so on.
By the way, in addition to any Channel Mixer workarounds, Grayscale layers can be converted to masks by selecting Layer > Rasterize to Mask, and the reverse can be done by selecting a Mask layer, right-clicking the "Mask Alpha" channel in the Channels studio panel and selecting "Create Grayscale Layer".

Well I can't tell if the Affinity product line will ever have arrowheads added to line segments and the like. - But until then I would suggest instead to use some other software which does deal with those. AFAI recall a bunch of diagramming software like Visio, LibreOffice Draw (freeware) and even Powerpoint or Keynote etc. do support such things in the one or other way.

True, it looks clunky, but at least it is functional and is very understandable. Affinity Photo's layer stack doesn't really look much better, though. And is not as readable. Compare the layer stack below, and I think that's pretty clunky looking as well as completely unreadable. I have no idea what is going on in that list. I certainly hope v1.7 will introduce a thumbnail size setting.
But you are correct that adding all layer parameters in the layer stack creates its own set of issues. So what do we go for? Form over function, or function over form? Or a good balance between the two? Myself I would prefer these things to be optional in a layer stack preference tab. It really depends on the complexity of the project.
Perhaps a bit more like Krita's layer stack (the newest beta release has a seamless thumbnail size slider) where the user is able to quickly hover over layers and an overlay is displayed (see the right screenshot)? It almost looks like a hybrid between Affinity Photo and PhotoLine.
Designing a good looking and easy to use/understand layer stack is quite a user experience design task. Perhaps a completely new and novel approach is required.

True, it looks clunky, but at least it is functional and is very understandable. Affinity Photo's layer stack doesn't really look much better, though. And is not as readable. Compare the layer stack below, and I think that's pretty clunky looking as well as completely unreadable. I have no idea what is going on in that list. I certainly hope v1.7 will introduce a thumbnail size setting.
But you are correct that adding all layer parameters in the layer stack creates its own set of issues. So what do we go for? Form over function, or function over form? Or a good balance between the two? Myself I would prefer these things to be optional in a layer stack preference tab. It really depends on the complexity of the project.
Perhaps a bit more like Krita's layer stack (the newest beta release has a seamless thumbnail size slider) where the user is able to quickly hover over layers and an overlay is displayed (see the right screenshot)? It almost looks like a hybrid between Affinity Photo and PhotoLine.
Designing a good looking and easy to use/understand layer stack is quite a user experience design task. Perhaps a completely new and novel approach is required.