Granddaddy

Take look at Affinity Revolution's courses for Affinity Photo and other Affinity products. See for instance https://courses.affinityrevolution.com/p/affinity-photo-for-beginners https://courses.affinityrevolution.com/ They have many tutorials on YouTube that I have always found to be well made and clearly explained. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6xPJ4dx82vSjysPUyjlCsw/videos

For the sake of completeness, I note that the following site maintained a categorized list of Affinity Photo official tutorials even when Serif did not. http://www.miguelboto.com/affinity/photo/video-tutorials/ My other favorite sources that regularly publish Affinity Photo tutorials for the current and previous versions are the following: Affinity Revolution: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6xPJ4dx82vSjysPUyjlCsw/videos Bethany Acorn: (iPad, but easily adapted for desktop): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn2U6mE9Ku2OZJ8h2BnmLsw/videos Carl Surry: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC75vJ_K3zu_joo_BtCAWDKA/videos Hubert Van den Borre: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwr2JdESRUstTDpYbdHstlg/videos InAffinity: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOnLUmyPHr2rayOHVHWsHVw/videos KN Edits: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyRUxmLXKRWsM7Wg5snl7KQ/videos Olivio Sarikas: https://www.youtube.com/user/Multitude07/videos

There is a discussion of very slow PDF export in AFPub at https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/90388-publisher-pdf-file-size-and-export-time-questions/ No suggestions have been forthcoming as to why on my relatively fast machine it takes 8 minutes to export a PDF file while at Serif it takes 20 seconds.

I find it helpful to watch different tutorials. Here are some other sky replacement tutorials https://player.vimeo.com/video/131644949/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NERr2Jwd9MA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8cLkcHqp_k for iPad but easily translated to desktop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ4eBrJlx10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTfkCEHZNNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wjYsXomOs8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2WoJ2zd2ms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwuwvTC3a_8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPIfFQhXlKA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUQwCgU941I

@stokerg posted at https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/91904-file-size-again/&do=findComment&comment=487498 The referenced post is at https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/3649-file-size-changes/ Although it explained how files can grow as they are saved and then streamlined, it did not explain to me why AFPub files are so large when compared to the small amount of text they might contain.

There is a discussion of large afpub file sizes at https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/90388-publisher-pdf-file-size-and-export-time-questions/ I wonder if @stokerg and @Callum should exchange information on this issue.

OK. I don't have any idea what should be expected, it just seemed very, very large. I'd still like to know what AFPub adds to the text to make it so huge compared to the original text. I don't have enough experience with DTP software to speak further. R C-R above knows way more about what AFPub does than I do. I did just run a test with a 12 page Word document that has nothing on each page but the words Page x of xx. The Word 2000 document is 21 KB, which prints to PDF as 28 KB. Opening that PDF in AFPub and saving as afpub file increases the size to 40 KB. That's not an enormous difference. Perhaps sometime I'll make the Word file 60 times larger and see what happens to the exported PDF from AFPub. Another thread has just brought up enormous file sizes in AfPub and @stokerg has been replying. Perhaps @Callum and he should discuss this together. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/91257-publisher-slow-saves/ Still takes 8 minutes on what is a pretty high-end Dell XPS Tower Special Edition that is not quite two years old. I have been very satisfied with its speed in rendering Blu-ray discs. My export taking 24 times longer than yours seems unusual.

@Patrick Connor said "There is an Affinity Photo Desktop and Affinity Photo iPad channel on VimeoPro already I have no idea why there is not an equivalent for Designer, Designer iPad and Publisher, other than the time it takes to do. I will push for some consistency." For Affinity Photo I hope you will also push for some organization to the display of those tutorials. At this moment for Photo Desktop there are 7 pages with 9 tutorials each plus an 8th page with one tutorial. The pages are not numbered so there is no way to orient yourself within the random display. The videos are not in any discernible order so there is no efficient way to browse for something you might need. The date of posting is not shown so you cannot tell if any particular video is new or months old. The Search box is not very useful unless you know exactly what you are looking for. You are probably better off using some general web search engine to find Affinity Photo tutorials instead of going directly to the Affinity page on Vimeo. Also, there is no way to download the tutorials. The iPad page is worse as the moving ribbon of tutorials is grayed out in my Vivaldi browser and so barely readable and extremely difficult to browse. I wish Affinity had not hidden its old Photo tutorials when 1.7 was released. There were some 225 tutorials at that time. Surely they are not all considered outdated. I myself downloaded most of them when that was possible since I've learned never to depend on any company to keep useful information online. Fortunately at least one individual with his own web site prepared an organized list of the old Vimeo tutorials and that is still available. I greatly appreciate @Alfred's work in preparing an organized list of official Affinity Publisher tutorials.

Affinity Revolution is a good source for tutorials about Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer. They recently posted a 6 minute video review of Affinity Publisher asking if it can replace InDesign. You might find it useful as a partial overview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNkJpH-2ysY Affinity has not released a comprehensive set of tutorials about Publisher. They still haven't caught up issuing tutorials for AFPhoto 1.7, with only 52 AFPhoto tutorials on YouTube and 69 on their own website. Previously they had more than 225 AFPhoto tutorials for AFPhoto 1.6. They can still be found on Vimeo, but not from the official Affinity site. The company has been pretty lax lately when compared to what I found 1-1/2 years ago when I started using AFPhoto. We can hope they will soon have many more tutorials available again. And we can hope that more individuals will be issuing video tutorials. Several people have created hundreds of tutorials for AFPhoto.

Thanks for replying, Callum As shown above in my screen capture from Windows File Explorer, The afpub file size is almost unaffected by the small graphic included on page 1 of the original PDF. The enormous afpub file results just from the text. I just created a new blank document in AFPub using default settings. I created a Text frame on the first page and pasted into that text box the contents of Novel-ExtractedToNotepad.txt. I then saved that text as afpub. The resulting file is 165,382 KB. That's 54 times larger than the 3,085 KB plain text file I started with. It's clear that the small image in the original file is not causing the afpub file to be so large. It is simply that pasting a relatively small amount of plain text without any formatting into a text frame yields a monstrously huge afpub file. I'm just curious as to why that should be so. Why can't an afpub file be saved in a more efficient way when it contains so little textual data. If you provide a private upload location I'll upload Novel.pdf including the graphic on page 1 for you to play with. I cannot distribute this file to the public.

I thought this one would be easy, but still no reply after 5 days. Perhaps someone will have a go at it now that the surge of activity following the AFPub launch is over. I thought my Questions 1.) and 2.) would be easy and require no more of an answer than Yes or No, though my restatement of Question 1.) as Question 4.) might require a more complicated answer. I am interested in enormous Affinity file sizes because when some of us reported the ballooning sizes of afphoto files some changes were quickly made that yielded much smaller afphoto file sizes.

DOCX was introduced in 2007. For dinosaurs like me who are still using Word 2000, note that AFPub will NOT open DOC files from versions of Word before Word 2007. Such files will not appear in AFPub's File Open dialog. But if you rename the file to have a DOCX extension such files will appear. If you select the file to open it nothing at all will happen. You will not get even an error message like Invalid Format from AFPub. I have no particular complaint about any of this, I'm just including this for completeness in case others have files from older versions of Word that they might think about opening in AFPub. For those who don't have Word 2007 or later for converting old DOC files, one solution is to print them to PDF and then open them in AFPub. Younger folks might be surprised to learn how many older files older folks might want to open. Older files in abandoned formats are like old recordings on reel-to-reel tape, or maybe wire recordings for those who remember them. They are frustrating reminders that some things get lost to progress. I have documents I wrote with Grandview some 30 years ago that I wish I could open today. I loved using the Grandview outliner for writing long reports. Word's outlining was a shadow of what Grandview offered.

I got a chuckle while searching for DTP software reviews and found this statement at https://www.g2.com/categories/desktop-publishing To qualify for inclusion in the Desktop Publishing category, a product must: Provide templates for constructing layouts of publishable materials (e.g. newspapers, flyers) That was the very first requirement. DTP software lacking templates will not be reviewed. The review site uses an interesting interactive grid to display the relative merits of different DTP applications.

I know that LaTeX was used by mathematicians and computer science students because that's the market the markup language was developed for. I did not run into people using it in other disciplines. But I've been out of academe for more than 10 years so my information is way out of date. So I asked an active chemistry professor with 50 years experience at major state universities whether he uses LaTeX for his publications. He said he does not use LaTeX and neither do most of his colleagues. It is an option for American Chemical Society journals. As a reviewer he sees manuscripts in Word or PDF files. Of course he doesn't know what software was used to prepare the PDF files. My only point here is that Serif ought to look deeper into the academic market. Whatever software might be used for preparing documents for journal publication, it remains the case that there are myriad other publication outlets used by students and faculty for a variety of purposes. Several of my own publications went into the ERIC database of education related research documents. I prepared them with Word, but I could have done a better job with DTP software. Most universities now require theses and dissertations to be in electronic format, usually meaning PDF. This is a large market that should not be written off by marketing staff.

After step 3, after you installed the software using the Windows built-in Administrator account, and before proceeding to step 4, launch Publisher to see if it works under the built-in Administrator account. I would also create and save a document and then exit from Publisher, assuming it will allow you to get that far. Then launch it again. If that works then continue with step 4 and see if you can run Publisher from your personal account that is an administrator account. Remember error messages may have nothing to do with the problem at hand. Once an error throws the program into the error traps it may never encounter the actual cause of the error. It may then end up displaying a message that has nothing to do with the error that caused it to enter the error trap. I'm basing my suggestion on only three experiences I've had over two or three decades. It has been very rare considering the hundreds of programs I've installed on hundreds of machines (I was once in tech support for a medium-sized organization). Only three times did I have to use the built-in Administrator account to get a program up and running. Once I had it running under the built-in Administrator account I could run the programs from my personal Administrator account. These incidents stick in my mind because before they happened I did not even know that registry keys had their own permissions that could prevent those keys from being updated by accounts not authorized to do so. Some registry keys may get updated during installation and first launch, such as keys containing license information. After that the keys may be read from but never again have to be written to. You can read the details of my experience with Photoshop Elements 11 Organizer in 2013 (where my username is RedClayFarmer) at https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1162077 I also had to follow this procedure of running an installation and its first launch from the built-in Administrator account when installing The Master Genealogist Ver. 8.08 under Windows 10. That program was orphaned when the developer retired from the project, one of the dangers of using software from small companies. Then again, large companies abandon their software also. As I recall with TMG8, the problem had to do with the registration information not being written to the registry when even when using an administrator account. Only when the built-in Administrator account was used could TMG8 write the necessary information to save the registration information. After that it worked from any user account.