jrutled3

I think the same: Designers don't use Linux because there are no professional apps for this purpose there.
Affinity software would be revolutionary if it launched for at least some of the most popular distros, like Ubuntu or POPos!.

Affinity on Linux would be fantastic.

@wonderings, virtually, IMHO, the target would be the beneficiaries of graphics produced for media businesses that already use Linux for video, special effects, games etc.. How large would that be?

+127.000 views of this topic perhaps translates to +100.000 possible Affinity-Linux customers.
And 100.000 x $50 is very close to TonyB answer.

https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-brings-linux-certification-to-thinkpad-and-thinkstation-workstation-portfolio-easing-deployment-for-developers-data-scientists/

I second the suggestion of using HarfBuzz as your text-shaping engine. I know you all are probably well beyond that at this point, but I felt it was still worth mentioning in any event. It supports the full range of OpenType features as well as provides native right-to-left language and Oriental ligature support.
 
But as I just said elsewhere. . . Whether or not you use HarfBuzz, PagePlus proved that you guys have typography as a top-priority, and I trust that you will make it even better in your Affinity product range.

@Patrick Connor
Thank you for your honest reply.
Naturally, Serif would like for their product to be successful. But you can also imagine how desperate many people are for there to be an affordable alternative to the Adobe suite of apps and their onerous subscription pay model. This, in concert with Apple forcing migration to all 64-bit apps in the next 6-9 months, has many freelance designers and small creative agencies, who have been clinging to the last available perpetual license to the Adobe suite (CS6) for as long as possible, in a mild state of panic.
It may be more than Serif can deliver on within the year, but I, and I suspect many creatives, are desperately clinging to the hope that Serif will provide the escape route from having one's work and finances trapped by Adobe and their subscription model for "renting" tools. It's no mean feat, but means achieving feature parity with the Adobe suite, and breaking through Adobe's virtual monopoly enforced by an "industry standard" proprietary file format.
All of my hopes and best wishes are with Serif and their ability to pull this off.

We all hope that.
Ver 1.7 will not have this feature. Serif have not said what features will be in 1.8 or other updates to 1.X. I would rather not think about a "final version" ... that feels very far off for this fledgling product.

Footnote and endnote support is essential for a serious page layout application.
A lot of my work involves typesetting academic books (80,000 to 200,000 words). Importing notes from a native Word format or RTF file is essential. The lack of footnote/endnote support unfortunately is a deal-breaker for me and the AP beta is unusable for my post important projects.

+1 from me as well. I work for an academic publisher, which requires footnotes and/or endnotes. What would be amazing is the ability to import a .doc(x) file and it place the footnotes/endnotes just as InDesign does.

Visit any university library and you'll find that endnotes replaced footnotes long ago, perhaps in the 1950s. In the era before computers, endnotes were far easier to typeset. In todays world, their appearance at the bottom of a page is seen as clutter by most readers.
While this might be true up to a certain point for academic publications in the English-speaking world (and while there is a certain international convergence in recent years), there are also cultural differences. German academic publications are still heavily using footnotes for reference purposes as well as for comments and clarifications. And while footnotes might be perceived as clutter from a typographic point of view (it can be incredibly difficult to typeset certain sorts of academic texts in a visually pleasing way), they are much more practical for readers. Personally, I don’t like reading a book from two ends.

Footnotes/Endnotes are the only feature i'm really missing and we use them a lot... (one time we used around 1000 footnotes in a scientific book).
Hope you can implement it in a similar way like in InDesign, that it will be auto adjustet at the bottom of the page where the footnote is placed. Scribus is horrible with that...

+ 1 for this. So far as I can tell from a first test flight, the only important feature that would stop me from quitting Adobe CC would be missing foot and end notes. 

+1 to footnote/endnote feature!
I've only had a brief look at the Beta and I'm very impressed by it. During my short time with it so far, and what I've gleaned from the Tutorial videos, the footnote.endnote feature appeared to be the only major thing that would prevent me from using on projects that I currently use PagePlus for.
Allan

I think we have received all the feedback we need for PagePlus import. I will end this thread by saying that if we did produce an importer we would wait until Affinity Publisher supports enough features that the importer would be better than our current PDF import. Sorry but that's best we can say at this time.
 

These arguments seem to be becoming circular.
 
Let's be clear - Publisher is in its infancy.  As Patrick has said - we need to spend time putting in the core set of features that most people would expect.
 
The vast majority of Publisher users will not be ex-PagePlus users. Any time spent now on an importer is going to be of no value to them, and will be at the expense of features that everyone would use.
 
Since Publisher does not have the set of features supported by PagePlus, what would an importer give you right now?  50%, 40%, 30% of the features required to make an import meaningful?  So, we give you an importer now that transfers only the features we have. Are you going to be happy with the outcome, or are you then going to start asking for other features to be added that are required to import your old PagePlus document?  Where does it realistically end??  Most of the arguments being put forward for a specific importer over a PDF (or other) migration seem to rely on higher level features.
 
Right now you have a working solution - you can carry on using PagePlus to maintain your documents. That has not changed in any way due to the release of Publisher.  Anyone moving from Windows to Mac also is in no worse situation than they would have been if we had not released Publisher (so I don't see that as a valid argument either).   As Publisher matures, I would have expected users to author new content in it, supported by the features as they become available.

Patrick,
I agree with you. I experimented for some time with the method I suggested and it is simply impossible to get good results with that workaround. When I have a problem or something which doesn't work as expected, in whatever application, I always look for a way around the problem. At the end of the day, I have to make the job done.
My suggestion didn't work out and I admit that. Also for myself as also for Serif, a PagePlus importer/convertor is not on my list too. In this case, it seems a feedback loop we are in. People looking to their problem as if it is not solvable without importer/convertor. I am sure when they invest the same effort to find a workaround as the energy they waste by complaining here, somebody will come up with a way that works.
The first limitation on this moment is that Publisher doesn't have templates. A template is an empty framework of a publications on which you can built many other publications. I know it is not the same but lets say creating an empty Publisher document containing all the necessary styles and base objects could be a good start. Later when Publisher supports templates, we can convert that empty document into a template.
When I have long text, I always write that in a wordprocessor. Personally I am using Atlantis Wordprocessor for that which is an excellent tool for writing long texts. So when the framework of the book is completed, at least you can import the text and format it.
I know this all is a lot of work, but it has the advantage that your book or publication is completely ready for the future. Even if there was an PagePlus importer/convertor, still there should be quirks left over. Even when I import my docx documents from Atlantis to Jutoh, there are things which are not going well.
It is also said over and over again, that PagePlus will not stop working overnight. So if someone really wants to remain using PagePlus, keep with Windows 7 or the present Windows 10 and do not update. In this way, you can remain using PagePlus for years to come.
Chris

According to Simon Sinek in Start With Why, this is probably due to the heads of the company losing sight of their why (the company's vision, why it exists—if they ever had one to begin with) and leading their company to a "split." The split is when the why becomes more and more unclear, causing the company to focus more and more on what they do and (to a lesser or greater degree) how they do it.

This is a danger for all companies, even those founded by great visionaries. If the reason the company exists is not instilled into the company and passed on to successive generations, it will inevitably derail and devolve into typical corporate practices. This is why many companies with a healthy sense of who they are and why they exist often hire and promote from within.

It is my hope that more and more software companies (both big and small) would remember their why and then, ideally, use Scrum as their how.

Yes! The culture and environment make or break a team or organization. If it's not healthy, then no methodology will work well. They're tools to better the organization, not cures. I only referenced Scrum because I think it can be a great, effective tool (especially for software development) if implemented well. That's all.
Awesome! I've looked at Scrivener before, but never tried it because I'd been burned by so many other programs in the past, promising me the moon but delivering a disjointed turd.

But thank you for that insight! I'm gonna have to give it a shot now, for sure!

First off, I think your closing comment on Scrum is spot on. I saw it used in my organization, and we had the same experiences as the others here, and it all goes back to the cultural environment. Ours was not healthy nor happy, and they have jumped from one methodology to another in search of the illusive "thing that works". It is management using them as band-aids instead of doing a deep dive into what the real issues are. Does anybody here remember the really old days of STRADIS, with its shelf-long set of pretty binders? It makes me cringe to know how much money, effort and training was expended on it.
 
Regarding your comments about style guides and formatting conformance, there is a tool that actually does all of those things very well. It is called Scrivener, produced by a small shop called Literature and Latte, and it allows you to use whatever organization you want want when collecting your research and writing your drafts. then you compile your work into whatever format you n need, and whatever style guide you are following. Its genius is that the research and writing are completely divorced from the final output, giving you complete freedom while at the same time giving you the assurance that the final product will be properly formatted. Then you can drop it into an app like Publisher to do the post-production tweaking and cleanup. I have used it for years and absolutely LOVE it. I haven't used an infernal word processor for years now because of Scrivener. You can find it at https://www.literatureandlatte.com, and the trial is good for 30 days of actual use. Check it out.

I suppose then it would be about casting a new vision for the company to strive toward. Maybe turning their company from offering competitive alternatives towards pushing the boundaries of what their software can do, always striving to be better than the status quo. You're no longer concerned with being better than your competition (if you still have any), but with being better than you were before. Such a mindset will, ideally, prevent the company from stagnating and becoming lethargic. Instead, they will seek to innovate and, where necessary, renovate.

All these negative comments on Scrum are discouraging. Not because I think it doesn't work, but because the things being described are decidedly not how Scrum is supposed to be at all, and that such disastrous implementations of it are poisoning its reputation. If you have the bosses working against their team(s), then it isn't Scrum. If you have management not putting workers' happiness as one of their highest priorities, then it isn't Scrum. Self-organizing, self-managing teams and a healthy work environment are at the heart of what Scrum is supposed to be. If you have anything else, then it isn't Scrum (or it is but something has broken and needs to be addressed immediately).

But yes, back on track, one of my hopes and dreams for Affinity Publisher is that it will have footnote/endnote capabilities, and those will be feature-rich and flexible. The main manual styles I use when setting up academic papers, theses, and whatnot are the Chicago Manual of Style and the SBL Handook of Style. When using footnotes, in the text body the note is superscripted of course, but SBL calls for the note itself to be normal and followed by a period, as is demonstrated in this official supplement to the Handbook. When doing everything in a word processor, it's just frustrating and laborious, and a lot of times you have to do a lot of the nit-picky stuff manually each and every single time. And more to the point, word processors are just not the ideal tools for lengthy and involved academic works. They'll do if they must, but they're just not ideal. Some DTP programs already available offer more footnote/endnote functionality (like Scribus), but that's if they're stable and don't crash, and you're willing to be even more frustrated with that than you are with the word processor just trying to figure it all out (again, like Scribus). PagePlus has footnote capabilities and they're pretty straightforward. However, they're not as flexible and feature-rich as I feel they should be. For example: If the note is superscripted in the text body, then it's superscripted in the footnote as well. No ifs, ands, or buts (at least none that I've found yet). I just want something that is at least slightly more robust than that, but still intuitive and a pleasure to use (or, at the very least, not a pain in the ass).

When building the new product please include the ability to open or import legacy product files.   I don't want to recreate the hundreds of documents.

According to Simon Sinek in Start With Why, this is probably due to the heads of the company losing sight of their why (the company's vision, why it exists—if they ever had one to begin with) and leading their company to a "split." The split is when the why becomes more and more unclear, causing the company to focus more and more on what they do and (to a lesser or greater degree) how they do it.

This is a danger for all companies, even those founded by great visionaries. If the reason the company exists is not instilled into the company and passed on to successive generations, it will inevitably derail and devolve into typical corporate practices. This is why many companies with a healthy sense of who they are and why they exist often hire and promote from within.

It is my hope that more and more software companies (both big and small) would remember their why and then, ideally, use Scrum as their how.

It seems to me that there is a separate, and possibly larger issue here. The fact that this is apparently a small company, with a dedicated but limited staff, working very hard to get two high quality products to market. They have had to push the Affinity Publisher beta release. It seems very counter productive to do a survey on the present demand for a product you may not even be able to start planning for maybe 2 years. Not to mention committing now, to a Linux version, and then having to listen to people complain about how long it is taking to release it. Nothing kills a company faster than taking on more they they can handle. It's easy from the outside to say "What about this feature? Why haven't you added the ability to do such and such? It's been a year a still nothing! This shouldn't be that hard!". We don't know the difficulties the developers face. The issues they are trying to resolve and those unforeseen they will have to handle. Nothing is impossible for those who don't have to do it. Not long ago neither of these apps existed and they are being expected to live up to programs that have been enhanced and redefined for 20 years. And now they should also take on Windows and Linux versions because clearly they don't have a well thought out business plan and are just making decisions on the fly. Come on. Cut them some slack.