ToOldForThis

I agree with JPSports that, at this point (Beta 238), APub has the makings of a great program. Neither InDesign, nor PP, started out feature rich, but they were pretty much on par with the other DTP's of the day. The APub team has a huge job ahead of them trying to get APub where it needs to be. To use a car analogy, it's hard to convince someone to buy a VW Beetle, or Toyota Carolla, when they are already driving Lamborginis and Ferraris! Granted, I've been working with PP for years, and I used InDesign as well--still prefer PP over InDesign--and find it difficult to do things in APub. As was mentioned, workflow is quite different, but this is to be expected of any new product. To be successful, APub will need to offer most of the now-essential features found in the other products. I have to credit Serif with creating an excellent APhoto, certainly good enough to move me away from Photoshop, but it took a couple of years and release 1.6 to get there. It's a catch-22 for Apub--the longer you wait to release, the more features the competition adds to their products to pull even farther ahead. That said, APub needs some very important features that have already been mentioned and voted on in droves before it releases, if it wants us to move from PP or InDesign. I love PP, and I would like to love its replacement--APub.

Just tried with Beta 238 on Windows 8.1 with no problems. A new project was created with a single page.

I've been playing around with Beta 238, and noticed something strange--or at least strange to me. When I click on Preview Mode, all the lines disappear, just as expected, and I get what should be how the page will ultimately look. Ah, but one little thing...if there is a text frame which is overflowing, that is the frame cannot contain all the text in it, the frame borders disappear, as expected, but the overflow is not hidden, but still showing on the page. If I am using Preview Mode to check how things will look, everything looks fine, and I might not notice that a text frame is actually overflowing. It would seem to me that using Preview Mode should automatically flip display overflow text off. You can recreate this with any text frame. Just fill it with real text (not filler, because it will autoshrink), then change the size of the text frame so that it can no longer contain the whole text. Then click Preview Mode. The overflow text is still showing.

Just for fun, I took @Seneca's post, copied the whole thing to clipboard, then pasted it on a blank page in my test document. The paste created a new text frame with lots of space between the lines--kind of expected, but everything text was in the text frame. Since my Options are set to show the overflow of a text frame, many lines of text appeared to be "outside" of the text frame. Resizing the text frame changes that. Doing a Select All (CTRL + A) in the text frame selected everyting inside and outside the frame boundaries to show that it all belonged to the same frame. Showing the overflow lets me see at a glance if I need to add another text frame to link to the first, or to make changes to the framatting of everything in the frame.

The Help window is different since the fix. On my system, the search box is at the very top of the window. For a while, I thought it was gone too!

Help in Beta 238 appears to be working fine on my Windows 8.1 machine.

I've been playing with tables in PagePlus X9. I agree that you can split tables by using the Flow Down, and then place the spawned table on another page, you can do this several times to obtain a table that spans several pages, but the table does not autoflow. If you add a row in the first page of the table, it will make the table longer, it won't flow the remaining rows to the spawned tables. You need to do that yourself by readjusting the first table page length, then the second, and so on to the last spawned table. So, you want to get your table right the first time. That said, it offers much more than the rudimentary table available in APub right now. which does not provide any means of splitting or linking. Hopefully that will come soon. The developers are adding new bits and pieces with each beta release.

I am not sure about InDesign, but linked tables are not available in PagePlus either. They are not considered text, so they do not fit into a text frame. For presenting a table of information that may span pages, you could create multi-column text frames which can be linked. You can then adjust spacing as desired for column size and row size. Cell borders can be fudged with paragraph borders. Not as effective as linked tables, but it works.

Just installed Beta 227 and I'm pleased to report that the spurious error message does not appear anymore.

I checked the embedded vs linking topic in APub Help, which is quoted above. So, obviously, the original plan was to have a real link without embedding--just like all the other layout software out there. Could be it's just not implemented fully yet.

Don't know about the problems, but I for one am glad to see editable content in text and picture frames from master pages. Tried it and it works well for me. I did create a new master page and applied it to a page with no master applied yet. Thanks for the new feature! Now, if you could just add image frames or in-place images that can be anchored to text to allow reflow--you've got a real winner and a contender against the "big guys"!

After installing Beta 221, i used what appears to be a new help system. I searched for Pictures, clicked on that, then clicked on the topic Placing Content. When I did, I received an error--as shown in the attached screen shot. I was able to reproduce this. Clicking Yes did display the correct topic.

I tried this out in Beta 206 with some interesting results. First, I selected a page of a long test project (page 117), and changed the text frame to have two columns. Since I use mostly indented first line, I changed a selection of paragraphs in the columns to remove the indent. Next, I selected from the beginning of a paragraph, and after from the beginning of a line within the paragraph. In both cases, I had no problems in selecting all the text from the beginning to the end, including the first character. I was able to do this using both a pen tablet and a mouse. I could also select from end to beginning. The only problem is to make sure the cursor is inside the text box, otherwise you can easily grab the text frame. Now, the interesting thing I found was that after splitting the text frame into two columns, the text would not highlight as I selected it. Once I let go, the selection is highlighted. I tried this in a text frame that had no column divisions to see if it was column-related, but click-and-drag did not highlight the text there either. I closed APub and re-opened it. After I did, click-and-drag worked fine again. BTW, the document I was using is 6" x 9" format with facing pages on a 1920 x 1080 monitor with the default zoom to view the full spread at 102.5%. I did not set the zoom to any other level.

Here is something I just noticed. I had a document open in APub when I tried out the font issue in another post. I also opened LibreOffice and PagePlus X9 with APub still open. It was after that the picture frames were not working. I closed and opened APub, and now the picture frames seem to work just fine. At first I thought it was my Huion pen tablet that was causing the problem, but the mouse was doing it too. It's only after a close and re-open that picture frames started working again. Weird!

I just tried adding a picture frame to a blank APub page in Beta 206. First, I couldn't see the frame being drawn, so I had no idea of where it was on the page and its size while creating it. Then, once it was drawn, I could find no way of changing the size of the frame by dragging its handles. The only thing that worked was the Transform panel. It was no different when I dropped an image into the frame, and I found I could not move or zoom the image in the frame either--even with the image selected. As I recall, this used to work fine in previous beta versions. I did this with both rectangular and oval frames with the same results.

For what it's worth, I use Alegraya Sans a lot, and I have no fewer than 14 types available including: Thin, Thin Italic, Light, Light Italic, Regular, Italic, Medium, Medium Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, Extra Bold, Extra Bold Italic, Black, and Black Italic. All these show up on the drop down and text appears correctly in APub. In LibreOffice, they appear as different fonts. They show up as separate fonts in PagePlus X9 as well. As I recall, Adobe InDesign showed them the same as in APub.

I tried this again this morning. I WAS able to get studio panels to dock in an existing column on either side. Although this worked fine today, for whatever reason, it was not behaving like this when I created the topic. Trust me, I tried all sorts of ways to dock those panels. I'll keep an eye on them to see if the non-docking repeats itself. Thanks, Walt, for your reply.

This is something I haven't tried before, so I don't know if it was present in previous beta versions. When I add a Studio Panel, it is placed in a default location. According to the documentation, I should be able to move the pane somewhere else. As long as I move a panel to an existing panel group, that's fine. What I tried was to pull a panel group from a column--the one on the right. It was now a floating panel group. When I tried to place it back in the same column, there was no way it would dock. It would either dock to create a new column to the left, or a really big column on the far right over everything else. I tried every which way I could think to dock the panel group back into the same column--but nothing worked. Finally, the only way I managed this was to reset the studio, which moved all panels to their default locations--including the three panel groups on the right. I should be able to slip new panels into any column. If manually placing a panel or panel group into a column that already contains a panel or panel group is not possible, it should be well indicated in the documentation, but relocating panels should be simple and obvious.

For what it's worth, I had problems with creating PDF files if I was using a proprietary font that required a license to use, or where the license was restricted. Sometimes the license can not be found, even when it's there. Can't remember how I did this, but I was able to list all the fonts installed in Windows showing whether or not it was proprietary. Once I stopped using these fonts, I had no more problems.

It takes me 4 seconds now, but was closer to 6 or 7 in the previous betas. Doesn't sound like much, until you find yourself going back and forth often.

Attached is the APub document and a JPEG of my system specs. I saved the document again today, but the Date Modified did not change--strange! Test Document 1.afpub

I also agree. Because [No Style] is actually a complex style, basing anything on it can result in some frustration when creating a new style--a bunch of "gotchas" since the new style's behaviour is not what is expected. [No Style] cannot be changed or deleted, and all base styles begin with [No Style]. Either we need to have an editable [No Style], or a [None] as suggested by Wosven.

I have been recreating a novel previously layed out in PagePlus. I am copying and pasting and re-editing from PP to APub. The project contains about 200 pages, 6 master pages. With the Pages and Layers tabs docked in the same area on the right be default, I found it quick to switch from Pages to Layers, but very slow moving from Layers to Pages. It seems to take a long time for APub to rescan all the pages and repositiion to the current page. This became so tiresome, that I moved the Layers tab to dock with Assets, Text Styles, Character, Paragraph tabs on the right side of the window. This has been the case in all the Beta versions I have worked with.

APub generic Paste does what PagePlus calls a Paste in Place, which copies the pasted items to the same place on a new spread. PP's generic Paste pastes the copied objects in the centre of a spread. APub might want to generically paste to the centre of the page, and allow a Paste in Place, which can be very useful. I use Paste in Place often, but this can be a problem when pasting several objects on a page already containing several objects, when it can be difficult to see where the copied objects are.

Chris, I tried this again this morning. APub opened offering an unsaved file from the crash, which I declined--instead opening the original file. I selected the empty text box, changed the language to English UK, and typed in some text along with text that should be auto-corrected. The text style was [No Style]. All the changes took place EXCEPT for double-dash that should have changed to an em-dash. Just to be sure I got it right, I edited the Auto-Correct preferences to ensure that a double-dash converted to em-dash. I also added a triple-dash to convert to an en-dash for good measure. I went back to the text box to add more text. This is when I noticed a strange situation: if the auto-correct text is NOT PRECEDED AND FOLLOWED BY A SPACE, the auto-correct does not work. For example " (a)," does not change to "@" but " (a) " does. It's the same for em-dash and en-dash: "text--text" will not change the double-dash to an em-dash (although it does here) but " -- " does. Same for en-dash. Since both em-dash and en-dash are usually used as a connector butted up against a word on either side, it would never change. No crash this morning, BTW. I also noticed that when I changed the text style to Body Novel (one of my own), no auto-correct took place. I had to go back to the Base Novel group text style to change the language there to English UK from [No Change]. Since both the paragraph style [No Style] and character style [No Style] cannot be changed, should they not be using the default language set in preferences? Similarly, if a new style is created, should it not be automatically set to the default language unless specifically changed? Otherwise, it can be very confusing for the user, as in my case.