Tams

Something I've come to really like in Microsoft Publisher is the scratch area, where you can temporarily dump assets. Affinity Publisher doesn't appear to have this. Yes, there are other ways to move assets between pages, but I find them more cumbersome and more detached from the publication I'm working on. On another note, being able to one click on a page preview to go to a page, rather than double click would be nice.

MS Publisher is great for quick and easy projects. It quickly becomes bogged down if you have lots of images though. It doesn't flow very well with adjusting images though, as you need to remove each image, edit it elsewhere, and then add it back in. Affinity has the "personas" to make it flow much better. I still use MS Publisher as it's text support (especially for non-Romance languages) is great. A lot of it's great features come from it sharing a base with the other Office programmes. My main gripe with it though, is that while Microsoft still support it, they have added almost nothing to it in years. With Office 2019 being basically a sum up of the changes to Office 365, Microsoft only mentioned Publisher as a "it also includes this" thing. I get the feeling they don't see it as a serious publishing programme and consider it 'done' now. To be fair, as a casual programme it is fine and actually quite feature rich.

Is layout support using languages other than romance languages sooner or later in the development timetable? I've only really tested Japanese, but it's very basic at the moment as far as I can tell. Even Microsoft Publisher (!) can automatically detected and align Japanese characters, as well as enclose them if desired. So, right-to-left support would be a fantastic start. Anyway, the beta is a great start! Keep it up!