louismac

Thanks. When I submitted my post, the options, View menu > Hide All Guides (and shortcut ctrl+W) were simply not available for reasons I can't explain (the same was true of Find in the Text menu, and the cmd-F shortcut). I had relaunched, and this had made no difference, but when I quit and relaunched again, and answered 'No' to 'Do you want to preserve an unopened document?' I found that the missing options were now present. Something a bit buggy there, but a good result. Thanks to all for helpful suggestions. Louismac

OK - quitting Publisher and relaunching seems to have solved the problem - I now have Find and Replace and Hide all Guides in the menus where they're supposed to be - no idea why that didn't work after previous relaunches (they really were not there, and i notice that some others had the same experience), but in any case it seems to be working now. In answewr to mac_heibu, yes I had checked the Preferences for shortcuts, which ppeared correctly set when things were not working, It seems to have been the relaunch (not reopening an unsaved file) that fixed things. So, even if something has been a bit buggy, things are definitely looking up. Thanks to all concerned. Louismac.

Incidentally, I am not lacking all keyboard shortcuts, only some. One feature I was keen to look into was Publisher's handling of character spacing – kerning, tracking, baseline shift (etc), and it is encouraging to find, in the character palette, the required controls much as one is familiar with them in ID or QXP. But character spacing can also be controlled in quite a handy way by Text > Spacing > Tighten/Loosen, and here the keyboard shortcuts (option + <- / -> ) work fine. It is a less fine control than the character palette offers, but very handy. Louismac

Thanks, Hawk. For some reason it is not there at all in my Text menu (Mac), where the first item is 'Show Character' and ⌘F has no effect (even though the preferences show that this is set). However, it is, as you say, there under View > Studio > Find and Replace, which is good. It does seem, however that there are certain features, menu options and keyboard shortcuts that some users are seeing while I'm not – another is the View > Hide All Guides option, which I don't have anywhere (and the recommended keyboard shortcut doesn't work there either. I'm wondering if this could be a Mac/Windows issue - a few lacunae in the Mac version. Just for interest you using the Mac or the Windows version? Louismac

Thanks Walt. That would be a perfect solution. I've had a look but can't find that view menu option on the Mac beta, andon my Mac keyboard neither cmd+shift+W nor ctrl+shift+W has any effect except an audible clonk. Maybe the Windows version is ahead of the Mac in this respect? Louismac

Where is the Find and Replace (text) function? Publisher help says there is one and that you find it under 'Find' in the Text menu. But I can't see it. Louismac

Toggling the visibility of margins, guides and frame edges is something that designers working by eye need do be able to do easily. Publisher has a keyboard shortcut for guides, but this doesn't affect the visibility of margins (in ID, the same shortcut toggles both simultaneously). To toggle the visibility of margins requires a separate operation involving manual selection in the View menu. This seems unduly cumbersome, so it would be good if there were a keyboard shortcut for this. Having for years had the visibility of margins and guides governed by the same ID keyboard shortcut, I have never myself encountered any reason for them to be treated separately; a margin is, after all, a kind of guide. As for frame edges, which admittedly are something else, their visibility in Publisher seems to be governed only by the hand tool, which Publisher unusually calls the 'View tool' (when this tool is selected, frame edges disappear ). This can be activated with the tool palette shortcut keystroke-H, and deactivated with another toolbox shortcut, such as Keystroke-T (one of the text tools) or Keystroke-V (the 'Move tool' - dark arrow). But if you happen to be keying in or editing text in a text frame, you obviously can't use these simple alphabetic keystrokes - unless you come out of your editorial operation first, they will just add a T or a V to your text content, and the ESC key seems not to get you out of this for some reason. The combination of an alphanumeric key with a modifier key would be a more convenient way of toggling frame edge visibility. Louismac

Thanks, Aammppaa, for those helpful pointers – I've just experimented briefly and I can see that your suggestions work, which is encouraging. Very pleasing to see that stack of unwanted styles vanish at a single command, and I can see that creating new paragraph stylesheets is pretty much like doing the same in InDesign or QXP, so I'm now happy on that score. The text autoflow you suggest does also work, so that's good, too, but I still think that having, in the New Document setup, the option of an auto frame within the defined margins – including asymmetric mirrored margins in a facing-pages document - is a good deal more convenient. It is really quite a fiddle to get the same result that just ticking a checkbox achieves in ID or QXP. Another thing I find unduly laborious is the matter of toggling the visibility of guides, margins and frame edges, but as this is a new topic, I'll put my thoughts in a separate post.

First, let me say that it is great, at last, to see the Publisher beta. From a first glance, it looks very promising, so my congratulations to all at Serif. There are of course, bound to be some bugs and issues, but this looks like an application I could eventually come to use as a staple of my daily work. Automatic text frame For me, as a long time user of both InDesign and QuarkXpress for the design and production of books, magazines, reports and other long, multi-page documents, the most immediately conspicuous omission (at least as far as I can see) is any way of defining an automatic text frame in the initial 'New document' set up, so that not only is a default text frame with required dimensions and margins included from the start on the initial master page, but also so that, with the help of a key stroke, a long text pasted into a text frame can acquire a predetermined paragraph style and will generate automatically the additional pages required to accommodate that text - and with the text frames already linked in a single flow. With a relatively small document, it is, admittedly, no great problem to define a text frame on a new master page, and then manually to link the pages. With a long document, however, the availability of a customisable automatic frame within page margins defined in the New Document setup, can save a lot of trouble. I don't mind too much having to set up a Master page with a text frame on it (though it is of course simpler if this can be created simply in the Document setup); the bigger UX issue is whether ongoing text flow can be established at that point, without the need constantly to link frames manually from spread to spread. Styles palette One thing I don't much like the look of is the congested 'Styles' palette - which appears to be already populated with a huge and confusing stack of options that I haven't asked for and don't want. This is worryingly reminiscent of is the dreadful nightmare of trying to handle styles in Microsoft Word - a recipe for certifiable insanity, and something that in my experience as both a designer and an editor, very few Word users ever attempt. Word has its merits for editing, but it is terrible for design, so Word-like features in software intended for design are a cause for caution and concern. Here, the merit of the InDesign and Quark approach is that there are no styles at all until I define styles that I actually want. That means I don't have to plough down through thousands of fathoms of options that are to me meaningless in order to locate the few that I need and have created or customised. I can have only the styles that I need, defined as I need them, in the sequence I want them, with keyboard short cuts, exactly as it suits me, in a lightweight, uncluttered palette. I hope very much that Publisher's developers will give more thought to this. The use of well-formulated stylesheets is abslolutely the key to efficient page layout in long and complex documents, and how long it takes to find the one I want in a palette (or even to confirm a keyboard shortcut I have assigned) can have a bigg effect on the speed of working. The present mess of styles is a serious minus for me, and it also seems contradictory when there is no predefined default master page. If that starts with a clean slate left to the user to define as the user needs, why not take the same approach with styles? louismac