[What to use until Publisher?]

23 minutes ago, Alfred said:

 

The primary cause of PP choking is a project file which has grown too big. You can avoid this by linking resources such as images (especially large images) instead of allowing them to be embedded in the document. Such a document will load more quickly and be less prone to corruption.

 

54 minutes ago, MikeW said:

If you use BookPlus, then yes, it uses separate publications. They don't need to be specifically single chapters.

I've done 200+ page catalogs and a few table art books in PP. Always in a single file. The catalogs have had 10 and more master pages (one for each section).

I also don't use the book feature in ID or QXP, either.

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

[What to use until Publisher?]

52 minutes ago, Alfred said:

 

Page numbering in PPX9 is very flexible. By default the numbers in a document will continue from the previous chapter, but you can override that to restart numbering completely or to start a new section with your choice of numbering. The latter includes choosing between Arabic numerals and uppercase or lowercase Roman numerals (so that, for example, you could use lowercase Roman numerals for the front matter, Arabic numerals for the main body of the book and uppercase Roman numerals for the appendix).

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?

[What to use until Publisher?]

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?

[Publisher and ligatures]

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

My thanks for the help.

[Publisher and ligatures]

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.

[What to use until Publisher?]

1 hour ago, Alfred said:

 

I would forget it again if I were you, Leslie! BookPlus dates back to the days when computers were less powerful and had megabytes rather than gigabytes of RAM. It's useful for collaborative projects such as the Affinity Workbooks, but its benefits are outweighed by its drawbacks for simple books created on a modern PC.

 

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

[What to use until Publisher?]

3 hours ago, MikeW said:

If at all possible, don't use BookPlus. 

Do place all images in a subfolder. Do link to those images.

Do use images of an appropriate size for their purpose. One of the major failings I have seen in some user's publications is using far larger pixel dimensions than necessary.

Don't copy/paste images or choose to embed them.

PP is quite capable to do the work. 

 

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.

[What to use until Publisher?]

1 hour ago, Paul Martin said:

I haven't tried it myself, but PagePlus X9 has an add-on called bookplus which appears to do the job.

I doubt if you'll find cheaper or better.

 

Paul

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

[What to use until Publisher?]

2 hours ago, Alfred said:

 

Publisher will not be ready for prime time in May. It might not even be ready for its first public beta in June or July, and the retail release is unlikely to be available for several months after that.

 

The possible alternatives depend on your platform, your needs and your budget.

 

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?

[What to use until Publisher?]

2 hours ago, John Rostron said:

I use PagePlus (on Windows only) which works fine for my small-scale needs.

John

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?

[What to use until Publisher?]

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?

[Affinity Publisher - Sneak Preview]

On 3/1/2018 at 4:25 PM, nwhit said:

While noticing today's new upgrades for AP and AD, I stumbled across this news and the video. Sounds great! 

 

While I oftentimes hate to admit it, I started out on PageMaker 1.0 with the then brand new LaserWriter ($6k+) and Mac SE. I not only used virtually all early DTP/graphics software and new iterations for many of my companies (including a media production company), I also taught the software during its several-year rollout. Also evangelized and set-up numerous ad agencies, media producers, newspapers, printers and university "commercial art" departments in the "new" electronic publishing and graphics methods and equipment/software. Over the years, I used and taught most of the popular software packages. Some good, many terrible. I came from the "manual" world, so understood what was really needed for day-to-day production versus flashy features.

 

My 2¢ on the new A-Publisher is that I hope it can correctly open recent InDesign documents (we've stayed pre-cloud). While I saw one poster who wondered why anyone wanted to open an old document, the reality of media production has been and still is the ability to use the thousands of client files we store to either update materials, specifications, pics, etc., or to use an old publication/document as the basis for a totally "new" design -- but a "new" design that uses much of the old design as its basis. Just how it is for commercial design/publication work. And clients most often aren't willing to simply abandon otherwise good publications. Many just don't spend money for total from-scrartch redo's. Thus recycling is critical to a normal workflow.

 

If accurate import of InDesign (notice that I didn't ask for import of PageMaker docs????  ;-D ) is not available or working well, it would terribly slow down the adoption of this new software. Just can't spend client's money rebuilding hundreds and hundreds of previously created work.

 

There are many other "base" features that are important in DTP, but I assume Affinity has studied ID for quite some time. But it doesn't hurt to verify with people who make their living with this software every day for many, many years what are "nice to have" versus "critical". Could mean the difference between rapid adoption versus a multi-year roll-out. 

 

I'll keep my eyes and ears open to see how this all shapes up. Very encouraging. While our staff still occasionally curse and swear at things that can't be done in AP and AD, overall have been very pleased. So that bodes well 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.