vwatson

Affinity has been far beyond fair in its pricing. I appreciate that tremendously. The only thing I was disappointed about was the new installer that used some mysterious, difficult to find installation folder, but apparently they're already addressing that. Thanks for great software!

I used the book feature in QuarkXpress, just not sure how it's implemented in Publisher. It should be a boost for creating long documents, although I was surprised how well Publisher handled my 238 page book all in one file. If we're allowed to post links here, this is the book I recently completed in Publisher. https://www.amazon.com/Following-Narrow-Path-Devotions-Horses/dp/1733391231

Just updated to the version 2 apps. Sadly, still no epub export in publisher, but there is a new Books panel. Not totally sure how that works yet, but that may be helpful for longer books. My recent one was 238 pages. AP handled it well in one document, but Books may make it even easier. Hopefully epub export will be coming to version 2 in the near future?? (eternal optimist) 🙃

QuarkXpress also exports an epub. I've tried it in the past, but find the operation confusing. Affinity Publisher is much more straightforward in terms of laying out a book.

I don't use online software either, but I kind of feel the same way about ebooks in general. It's not hard to copy the content out of one. I tried a variety of pdf to doc converters (desktop software) and finally used this one. https://www.talkhelper.com/pdf-converter/ I ended up using it to convert the pdf to html, but there was some clean up even after that.

I can't imagine creating or tweaking an epub without knowing html. The structure of the epub is based on html with css to style it. It's not really different than creating a web page. You might try an online pdf to epub converter. I don't know how well they work, but here is a free one. https://www.freeconvert.com/pdf-to-epub

Whew! Finished. I ended up using Calibre after all to edit and combine the html files rather than Sigil. I like Sigil's interface a bit better, but it crashed on me continually when I was spell checking the epub. (the pdf to html conversion left some hyphenated words and others combined without a space between.) I'm pretty comfortable with Calibre now and will stick to that. Perhaps as part of the upcoming new reveal from Affinity will be an epub export! 🤩

Yes, I had a pdf created from Affinity Publisher, so I tried a variety of pdf to doc converters to get the best word file I could come up with to import into calibre. None of which worked very well. I ended up converting the pdf to html (TalkHelper PDF Converter) and have been working from that, manually editing the html. Ideally, I suppose, you would use the text file or doc you imported into Publisher, but I made changes after laying it out in AP, so I couldn't use that original text file. My process is working, just slow. A click of a button to an epub would be nice. 🤩

I tried using Calibre. The code it produced was bloated and seemed strange to me. It works I guess, but as a web designer who is a purist about html code, I couldn't tolerate the code produced by Calibre. For example, it added a class to every single paragraph. There's no need for that. Style paragraphs as a whole in the css stylesheet, then only add classes where the style will differ from the base appearance. I'm hand coding each chapter of a recent book, (70 🙄) then I will fine tune and put it all together in Sigil. A good epub export in Publisher would be great.

I was tracking you until that last step. 😱😅

This seems like a common need. I just came across this as well and don't see a good/easy solution. I can enter the chapter number with text styling, but can't seem to get any vertical separation from the chapter title as they share the paragraph spacing. Any changes to that spacing moves both the number and title, not the space between them.

Yes. I like the suggestion to just stick at the last used crop settings. That's what my old photoshop version does. I'm using affinity photo more and more, but when I have to crop a bunch of photos to the same size, I pull up my old photoshop cs5! It's annoying to have to reset that over and over.

That seems like too much work to me? Plus I don't have a good pdf editor. I love the ease of using a book file and doing everything from within a single program.

So, you create a master document, then Add each chapter or section as a file? If you do that, will it continuously number the pages from all the files as it would with a book file?

I hope it's soon. I love the program and have a 200 page activity book I created with it, but the one-file approach is far too unwieldy for me to do that again. I much prefer the book-file approach with each chapter/section as a separate file. For now, Publisher is mainly sitting on the shelf, except for small projects. 🙁