Ania

What about having frames as styles? That way changing the frame-style (including dimensions and placement on a page) all frames of that style would change.

Is Publisher intended for laying out long structured documents? Reports, novels, textbooks and the like. If so, it would seem there must be some easy way to manipulate hundreds of frames at a time. I favour the master page approach. Master page text frames populate frames on content pages. Change the master, change all dependent frames on content pages. But that feature isn't in the beta, is it?

Lindblad, think of Affinity Publisher as a replacement for Affinity Designer. Designer with pages. That’s not being unfair, but rather to underscore the utility of Designer, now extended over pages. Designer and Publisher compete with each other, not with QXP or InDesign.

BrianC, as a Mac user, I am jealous. FrameMaker was a gem. I am no so much looking for the Indesign-killer as the a new FrameMaker-for-Mac.

AP is a tool suited to laying out text and images in unstructured format for print. Understanding that, the beta makes more sense and feels more complete (at least to me). Content or layout? Layout. Think Affinity Designer with pages. As for content creation, +1 for Scrivener. Structured or unstructured? Unstructured. Master page text frames do not populate content pages (as in FrameMaker). It will be good for a magazine, or brochure. Not for long structured text (e.g., textbook, manual). Print or screen? Print. No ePub or HTML export or interactivity among elements. Lacks slug and bleed, but still more so for print. I was hoping for something that could handle magazine and textbook, print and screen. It can't and that's expecting too much.

Perhaps my expectations were too high in hoping for a Mac app with which to create long structured documents. Master page text frames that populate the content pages. Happy memories of FrameMaker.

Your point is well taken that text frames on a master page are not live on the actual page. What's the point of a master page then?

Imagine the ease of use if the scripting language were high-level, like Hypertalk of happy memory. If not, then +1 for Javascript.