Chrysogonus

I am also having this problem – and yes, such an option is precisely what is needed. If one needs a simple workaround, I have found that it works to open the PDF in Inkscape and use the option for Poppler/Cairo import (even if the preview, which uses the internal import, is broken). One can then save the result as an SVG and open it elsewhere. It would be brilliant if the Affinity team could implement this!

Margin kerning (i.e. protrusion) is there already: see the Optical Alignment section under the Character palette. It's very easy to configure as part of a style on a per-character level. Its approach is much better than the way InDesign handles this. Expansion is not yet available; but that is not surprising, since it really need a paragraph-based composition engine to be of much advantage (which I hope will be coming soon).

With the beta of Publisher out, I can't seem to find this functionality anywhere. Am I missing it, or is it still to come?

I really like the Guides Manager – the ability to specify them by percentages is great. I'd definitely like to see something with equivalent functionality to the Create Guides dialogue box in InDesign as well, which allows one to easily block out an entire page into rows and columns and specify a gutter.

The PDF import functionality is absolutely splendid. A minor bug: text in PDFs will sometimes import with large amounts of negative tracking in random places. For example, create a document in InDesign with some text using old-style proportional figures or small caps (e.g. with Arno Pro). When Publisher imports the resulting PDF, the styling is lost, and the tracking is set to –100% or more. I doubt whether there is a solution to the first problem, but presumably the latter problem can be remedied. This situation could also be improved by providing an easy method to make global changes to the text styling (I suggested in the feature requests area that it creates styles based on the imported text).

Actually, this already exists! There is an 'Optical Alignment' section in the Character palette.

The PDF import function is simply magical – it's amazing to be able to take PDFs of things I created years ago and have them turn into something reasonably workable. It would be even more useful if Publisher could automatically create styles based on fonts, text size, and so forth. Even if it didn't pick up everything, it would be great to have a starting point for editing heading styles and so forth.

This would certainly be neat, but there are already a number of programs available that support this well – e.g. Overleaf v2 is coming out on 4 September, Scrivener can do reference management, and Pandoc has a great bibliography system. Leave Affinity Publisher to do your typesetting once everything is written.

I'd love to see Affinity Publisher support tagged and accessible PDFs from the ground up, ideally with full support for PDF/UA. Many institutions and government bodies require this for public documents, and making it part of the program's logic could be a major selling point. I am not convinced that the way in which InDesign implements this in is the best way of going about it; it tends to create a lot of extra work that most people don't bother with. Instead, it should be possible to use this structural information to make document creation more efficient and improve a print/Web workflow.

LaTeX and InDesign can both create a PDF with bookmarks, based on the headings structure or other styles. (InDesign has a nice 'Table of Contents' function for managing this.) This greatly improves PDF usability.

There are a number of requests here for InDesign/Word DOCX/IDML/Markdown import as well as EPUB export, but nothing really looking at the big picture of how this should fit within a workflow of producing content for web and in print. Most of these seem to imply replicating InDesign's functionality – but these features could be much better implemented. In my experience, InDesign's text import and EPUB export are both rather grim. The Word import function doesn't import styles in a particularly useful manner, often taking far too much from the source document that then needs to be cleaned out. I use Pandoc instead to convert DOCX to Markdown and clean up the file with a text editor. I can then export to HTML or EPUB for a Web version, and ICML for a nicely typeset print version with InDesign. Rather than have Affinity Publisher become bloated with Web features that become quickly outdated and don't work properly in the first place, as InDesign has, I would like to see it focus on professional typesetting for print while integrating with other applications to enable technology-independent content creation.

Like everyone else, I am absolutely thrilled about the beta, and can't wait to see how it develops. One of the key reasons to use LaTeX or InDesign over Microsoft Word is their superior type composition. While Word simply dumps in text as it occurs, without regard to spacing or line breaks, these other programs look at an entire paragraph to remove rivers of type, reduce the need for hyphenation, and so forth, just as human type compositors do. In TeX, this is the Knuth-Plass Line Breaking Algorithm; InDesign has the Adobe Paragraph Composer (which it uses by default, but also has an option to turn this off with a single-line composer). Implementing this in Affinity Publisher would make it far easier to produce professionally typeset documents.

I think we're talking about what InDesign refers to as Optical Margin Alignment (also achievable with the microtype package in LaTeX) – that is a key desideratum for me.

It would be wonderful if there were an option to post-process SVG export with SVGO. Running an SVG from Affinity Designer through this typically reduces the file size by about a quarter. In the meantime, ImageOptim added support for SVGCleaner in its most recent update. It also has SVGO as an option – but it must be specifically enabled in the preferences, and you need to install Node.js for it to work (which can be done easily with Homebrew).

For those of us stuck with using ANSI paper sizes, InDesign has a number of additional page size presets that are extremely useful for making booklets. In particular, it would be great to have half-size versions of letter, legal, and ledger paper (i.e. 5.5 × 8.5 in and so forth).