Leslie Richelle

Got it. Very reassuring—I'll be using the right stuff in the right way. Thank you, gentlemen.

I was under the impression that each chapter of a book would be a separate document; BookPlus was needed to "tie" all those docs together, the way InDesign does with its Book utility. Not so? I can do everything—150 + pages, dozen chapters—using section formatting and master pages, and PP won't choke on it?

Wow, while I wasn't looking this topic took off! Two more contributions: 1) The main reason I'm getting away from Adobe (like most here) is not so much the price (extortion) but the fact that the software is bloated, redundant, confused and confusing, and Adobe seemingly has no interest in fixing it (remember PageMaker in the 90s? Version 4 had all the same issues, so the coders rebuilt it from scratch and version 5 was great; hence Affinity's appeal for me). 2) InDesign's book feature does do a good job tying together separate stories as chapters, including page numbering, index, etc.: If I don't use BookPlus, how do I do that in PagePlus X9?

Oops. That's what I get for relying on the documentation—not a whisper about ligatures. My thanks for the help.

I just discovered, to my chagrin, that PagePlus X9 doesn't support ligatures, those special characters which, in Open Type fonts, "stand in" for certain letter combinations, usually those involving 'f'. See the png below for an example. Now, I know that only old-school has-beens like me care about such things, and I also know that there's nothing to be done about (legacy) PagePlus. But InDesign does it with elan, and it would behoove the Affinity team to at least consider doing it in Publisher. It's a nice touch that veritably screams professionalism.

Got it. The KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid! Thanks for the advice.

Seems BookPlus gets "bad press" (sorry!) All images in subfolder and linked: check; makes good sense. Use images sized right (meaning don't place giant pngs and then size them down?): check. Don't copy/paste images: hadn't thought of that, but: check. Thanks for the tips. I am encouraged.

I saw that. Then had a senior moment and forgot it. Thanks, shall check into it.

Thank you, Alfred. Like you, I'm running Windows 10 on an i3. Budget approximately negative .0000000000000000001% GDP that little island nation in South Pacific that doesn't show on maps. Do you think PagePlus X9 can handle a dozen-chapter book with lots of graphics?

Thank you, John. I have PagePlus X9, but don't know if it can be imposed upon to do a book. Says it can do, but I'm still not sure. What do you think?

At the risk of starting a flame war: My Adobe subscription expires in May (hooray!) and I intend to a) not renew it, and ii) complete the transition to Affinity. I already have Designer and Photo and am learning how to use them, BUT...Publisher may not be ready for Prime Time in May. No aspersion intended to the team—coding for page layout must be inherently more complex than for vector or bitmap manipulation—and we should appreciate the team's dedication to producing a quality product, not their adherence to a schedule. So my question is: what are people using in the "not-InDesign" category while they wait for Publisher?

I started out with CorelDraw 4 (disaster!) Well, actually a CompuGraphic MCS 10 (and before that an EditWriter) but I prefer to not dwell on those. Draw finally turned into something usable but buggy about v. 7, but still not suitable for page layout.It remains better for sign design (with CoCut as a backend) but can't compete with Illustrator for heavy-weight graphics. But Adobe has gotten so bloated and kludgy, like PageMaker 4 in the early 90s; PageMaker rebuilt it from the core out in version 5, which is what Adobe should do with ALL their stuff, but won't. The point of all this is (aside from establishing my creds) is that it's always been a hassle "translating" past work into new software—imagine my backlog of sign work trying to jump from Draw to Illustrator!—and I agree with you that it would be so nice if Publisher would import InDesign. But since Affinity has already made clear that it won't import PagePlus files, requiring the user to export to PDF and then import, I wouldn't get my hopes up. Also, my trial of Design showed me that importing Illustrator files was not 100% reliable, to say the least. So, wonderful as Publisher promises to be, we're going to have our work cut out for us making the transition from whatever we were using before.