Hi,
I've been playing with your beta and it looks very promising. As a long time user of TeX, InDesign, and QuarkXPress I'm really interested what you have created.
Grids: I would like to have a grid setup on page spreads which can use the origin point between the two pages (this is already possible) but begins the grid on the zero point defined. At the moment it begins just on the left side. It is useless then because most document formats are in millimeters but grids are in points (normally). E.g. setup up a doc with 170 × 240 mm page size and facing pages. Define a grid with 12pt horizontally and vertically. Put the zero point in the top middle of the spread. Then define the inner margin to be 36 pt. Now you can see that the grid -- because it is put in from the left the grid and the text frame do not align properly.
I would like to have a "preview" view where all grids, baseline grids, spelling underlines etc.pp. are gone and I can see the spread with text and images as it will look like when printed.
One of the most important thing when seriously working with typesetting is the ability to import Word files with styles applied (I must say I like the way InDesign offers even a style mapping). When using your RTF-import it will not respect footnotes (they are just put in as "normal" paragraph text).
For long documents a powerful xref (and book management) possibility would be very helpful.
That's for now my first impressions.
Best regards,
Ulrich
Two features which are great in QXP (and not available in ID) are custom tables for letter spacing and kerning of a given font. This is very useful because some fonts (even pro) have very bad kerning tables (or missing ones). Letter spacing tables are useful for tweaking fonts depending on their size used. Think of footnote text of a font that does not have an optical size for small sizes. Custom kerning tables are most useful when you have to use a font whose kerning is bad. For example, in a recent project, I had to use Plantin MT Pro as a body copy. When using italics I got a lot of issues with bad kerning (e.g. typical Va, Wa etc. but also f<space>T, f<space>W etc.). And to kern manually in a 464 pages book would kill you. BTW it would be great to have this feature not only for a given font (say MinionPro-Regular) but also for a defined size. For example, this would open up the possibility to define a style for a footnote style with correct expanded letter spacing combined with correct kerning tables for best reading experience. Please consider this for Affinity Publisher!