Rabari

I recently took on a 400+ page book project that required sidenotes (notes in the margins, as opposed to footnotes or endnotes). Imagine the relief when I discovered that Publisher V2 does automatic sidenotes (and also converts seamlessly between all three flavours if needed). If I remember correctly the competition only achieves sidenotes with cumbersome anchored frames or other workarounds.
Also in the "final nails" category: Running Headers. Big thanks!
Also an UI besting of the competition: I always separate out all my panels to my second screen, and in Publisher they remember their position in the Studio setup. If I return to the competition after my screens go to sleep the panel layout is all jumbled up, and has to be manually recreated (choosing the saved panel layout doesn't rectify the situation).
Now if only Tables in Publisher could span several pages… If we could insert them I text frames…

I recently took on a 400+ page book project that required sidenotes (notes in the margins, as opposed to footnotes or endnotes). Imagine the relief when I discovered that Publisher V2 does automatic sidenotes (and also converts seamlessly between all three flavours if needed). If I remember correctly the competition only achieves sidenotes with cumbersome anchored frames or other workarounds.
Also in the "final nails" category: Running Headers. Big thanks!
Also an UI besting of the competition: I always separate out all my panels to my second screen, and in Publisher they remember their position in the Studio setup. If I return to the competition after my screens go to sleep the panel layout is all jumbled up, and has to be manually recreated (choosing the saved panel layout doesn't rectify the situation).
Now if only Tables in Publisher could span several pages… If we could insert them I text frames…

Files provides now. MacOS 13.4.1
R
 

And you can use the channels mixer adjustment to create the same preview in Designer and Publisher.
If you want to check for total ink limits, this can be achieved by combining adjustment layers:
channel mixer adjustment which adds all color channels into one channel, but divided by 4 to keep it in the 0 to 1 range. Use K channel for example now you can use the histogram, and check if any pixels are above you select limit / 4 to simplify this, use a second channel mixer, set offset for K to (400 - ink limit)/4 add a levels adjustment, set white level to 0. now you get a black/ white coloring showing areas below or above the total ink limit. it is possible to do all steps in one single procedural texture filter, with one input variable „total ink“. If interested, i can create a full tutorial and provide the adjustments as assets.
PS:
see tutorial
 

I prefer to use light UI on macOS and I must say that version 2 has lots of serious issues with this option. It looks like nobody bothered to test it.
Different UI brightness right after setting light UI and after swithing to different app and back. Too dark background of selected buttons – bad contrast with icon. Too dark backgrond of all buttons actually. Hard to distinguish between normal state, pressed and disabled. Select boxes have dark background, they look like disabled. (Input boxes are white) All icons on buttons are flat with very low contrast. (Icons in dark mode are much more colorful with 3D effect.) Overall it is so bad that it forces me to use dark UI instead. Version 1 of Affinity products do much better job in UI usability.

I guess a reward for existing users would have been a nice gesture, but really, at the price they're offering for 3 solid apps, this never entered my mind. It's amazing value imo, especially when you consider the alternative, it doesn't compare. There's a lot to be happy about, amazing apps, great price, no subscription, no requirement to upgrade, that's enough reward for me.

I fear Serif indeed forgot all that ever growing market of tik-tokers in need of endnotes and an equation editor.
Paolo
 

Limited search as suggested above, is a must.

Opening and viewing the Publisher file in Photo, and using the Channels window actually works! Could we please get a Channels window in Publisher?

Beta 1.10.2.1167 opened the file without problems. 

Interesting: When I chose "Customize Toolbar" the toolbar suddenly slided in from "above" and "left" of my second monitor. So it WAS there,  just off-screen. 
The solution was to toggle the resolution of the second monitor - this moved the toolbar to my main monitor. Problem solved.

On mac it might depend in what view you click, e.g. Finder, Dock, Launcher.
To me the OPT key causes other apps getting hidden while the launching app's windows become the only visible – whereas clicking a dock icon of an open app hides this app.
To get the additional window with the app reset options on app launch I need to CTRL-click the app icon in a finder window + choose 'Open' + still pressing the CTRL key.
CTRL-Click  –>     –> 'Open' + CTRL-Click –>
   

I often got the missing toolbar back on screen by choosing "Customize Toolbar…". It forces the missing UI item to reappear by its additional options window which sticks to the toolbar. This enables you to move bar + window.
Once setup use menu View > "Studio Presets" to save your setting to recall it if needed.

I logged this with out developers to see what we can do.  

The ability to Automatically convert tabbed text to tables would be a real time-saver.
(This would also go a long way, before Publisher has a robust word processing file importer. Right now, copying an pasting a table from Word to Publisher results in tabbed text) .
 

I've said this before, but it's worth repeating: 
It's of course very nice that Affinity can fix files that go corrupt. But in a professional setting, a file should never, ever become unopenable in the first place. With hard deadlines, and angry, paying customers waiting, or printers waiting for materials, these kinds of mistakes cost not only money, but reputations. 
I really, really like Publisher, and i'ts now my main layout app in my own, small graphics company, where I'm going totally ”Adobe-free”. But back at my "real" day-to-day work we still use InDesign. You can say a lot about InDesign or Adobe's subscription model, but Adobe seems to have got at least something right. In all my years, ever since using the first InDesign version, I haven't even once encountered an ID file which could not be opened. Sure, a crash could make the last few edits disappear. But nothing more.
I hope a lot of serious development resources at Affinity goes towards making the file format rock solid. It simply has to be. (and then of course II'm hoping for footnotes, but that's another story).

Thanks for the responses!
When I experiment with converting to different CMYK profiles, I now see that the text color jumps around to all kinds of different "rich blacks". Coming from another (Adobe) philosophy, I guess this is one of those Afffinity things to consider going forwards. Of course I normally want all text to default to 100 % K, regardless of any chosen (or changed) color profile.
 
I cannot upload the original file. But I attach something similar. I first thought that a svg logo was the only problem, as I turned out it actually was in rgb space. I then made an eps version, and made sure it was exported from a greyscale document in Designer, and sure enough it reports as greyscale in Publishers Resource Manager. But it still is seen on all plates. I'm tearing my hair out now. The greyscale tiff however (from Affinity Photo), for some reason (thank heaven), is only seen on the black plate, as it should. TIFF will be my workaround this evening.
BTW, found a nice online separations viewer for at least individual pages, like covers.
https://www.pdftron.com/webviewer/demo/color-separation/
 
testafpub.pdf

Gabe, I think APubs color handling may feel for users as a bug especially when they are used to the way InDesign handles colors different on export. In particular there it is not necessary to export as PDF/X to make sure gray and black stay in 1 channel only. Also colors in images are treated different to user assigned colors or swatches. The attached PDF is exported from ID as PDF 1.7 (not X), with no color conversion ticked and no profile embedded – but appears to handle image color spaces and color swatches correctly if the watching profile changes.
indd image colors v1.7.pdf
Exported with this setup:

It appears ID is using a way to transfer the info about initial colors and profiles which APub doesn't use. ID doesn't need the Output Intent for this and therefore also works for non X versions of the exported PDF.

This is such a necessity.  Nothing worse than tweaking a font and getting to the end of a publication just to see the 'One or more text frames have overflowing text' . Which one. WHICH ONE?? Otherwise really needs obvious indicators if this is the case, same with missing image links.

Publisher looks very promising, and I really would like to use it, especially since i moved to Catalina, and ID CS6 won't open anymore.
But save files should never become corrupt. Never, ever. No matter what.
Let me repeat that. Never. Not for programs like Publisher, which often are used for ”mission critical” work – with tight and immovable deadlines.
I've used Publisher now for a couple of fairly large projects (tabloid size, 20 pages, with the usual assortment of linked raster and vector images of different formats and color systems), and I regret to tell you I find myself back in PageMaker days, when a whole day of work could disappear in a puff of smoke because of strange, hard to reproduce crashes and subsequent corrupt, unopenable save files. Now, after saving a lot of "known last good state" files, and after I fiddle around with saving linked images in another format, or clicking different things in the Metal/One GL acceleration settings, or changing around options in the pdf export settings, I do manage to (barely) get my Publisher jobs to the finish line…
You can say a lot about Adobe and InDesign, but ever since I started using  ID 2.0 waaay back in 2002, I have never come across a situation where an ID save file would be corrupt and unopenable, or for that matter that the app would crash when doing normal stuff like moving around in the document, or exporting a pdf. This one Adobe really nailed.
Strangely, some problems, sometimes, seem to resolve when I restart the machine. Are th eproblems then mainly memory corruption issues? Running out of memory? Or something to do with the GPU acceleration? Or a combination? I can't pin it down.
Regardless, robustness of the app and the save file should now be of the utmost, highest priority for the Publisher developers, even at the expense of new shiny features (though i of course eagerly await footnotes…)
Rant over.
MacMIni late 2014, 16 GB, MacOS 10.15.1
Publisher 1.7.3

Right now, holding Alt+RMB+LMB lets you drag and resize the brush on the fly, which is a feature Photoshop also has. Except in Photoshop it's just hold Alt+RMB, which currently does nothing in Affinity Photo. Please change this shortcut to this for all the tools that let you change brush sizes. Not only is it easier to do, it standardizes for those who still use both PS and AF.
On top of that, Photoshop has a shortcut in brush mode, clicking RMB brings up a list of brushes. Convenient, and eliminates the need to always have the brushes toolbox open.

I' guess you haven't tried CMYK as document color space because you don't need CMY at all in your PDF and therefore wanted to limit the color space for the complete document from the beginning? 
Note that you can export from a CMYK document with CMYK objects as K only by using on export a true CMYK grayscale profile only, as f.i. in my screenshot above below "D50", or (haven't tried), the "Black & White" profile on top of the pulldown list.
 

You'll see soon enough.

Regarding the roadmap, anyone want to bet that footnotes will be on that list?

+1 … of course … 
And the option of converting footnotes to endnotes and vice versa. And the option of using a different number of columns for footnotes than for the main text. And the option of positioning footnote frames freely on a spread. And …

I made a Swedish hyphenation dictionary from the Open source files at Libre Office, but it's getting tedious to install them in the actual application package every time the beta expires and there's a new version available. Couldn't the language dictionaries be stored somewhere outside the app package? For instance in a /Documents/Affinity/Dictionaries/ folder.
I attach the Swedish hyphenation dictionary folder for anyone who wants to use it when trying out Publisher.
sv-SE.zip