Simon K

Optical kerning is great, and a good discussion here. I'd like to go back to the another of the ideas suggested in the original post here: font management.
I'd like to be able to group fonts. As a minimum, I'd like all the fonts of a family to be grouped and appear as a single item in the font menu, with a sub-menu perhaps for the variants of that font (regular, italic, bold, small caps, etc etc). That would massively simplify what is a very cluttered part of the AP interface right now.
The idea of having user-defined font groups is a nice one, but perhaps that's too much to expect. Pinning particular font families, or having the most recently used or the most popular at the top would also be nice. This could be just for this AP file, or for all AP usage, or indeed for all files (if that info were available) -- I'm thinking about howmacOS presents Finder and file info, with a list of the current folder and a list of recent folders, and this info is shared across all apps. I accept that this info is perhaps just not globally available for fonts. These are nice-to-haves. But basic font family grouping (and hiding of individual fonts into a sub-menu) is a Should-have feature, in my view.

Ive been editing Liturgical Texts for as long as I remember and one issues that has not be solved adequately (that I know of) is sense lines.
Let me explain what I mean. Liturgical texts are usually paragraphs that have been split into independent lines for better legibility. One can also think of poetry here, which liturgical texts are really part of.
Example follows:

 
When this text needs to go into 2 columns it needs to look like this:

As you can see longer lines need to wrap underneath the top lines to emphasise the fact that this is just a continuation of the previous line. This is what's called sense line.
However, it seems to me that it's really wrong to divide this text into separate paragraphs by inserting paragraph returns after each line. This text is really one paragraph that was divided into lines for better legibility. In fact, there is no full stop after each line. What you get is a comma and the next lines starts with a small letter. This is horrible when one spell-checks this text because each line gets flagged as error. (In some cases/programs can instruct spell-checker to ignore that).
What should be really possible is to have each line separated by a soft returns to emphasise the fact that all these lines are part of one paragraph. And indeed this is possible today:

Problem arises when one wants to fit this text into 2 columns:

As is clearly seen from he picture above the sense lines have been lost. There is no way of representing these lines as sense lines when soft returns are used as end of lines.
Indeed, one can say that this is precicely how soft returns should work.
What I would love to see though is to have an option to instruct Publisher to treat soft returns as paragraph returns.
What should be possible is to have this:

To me this picture communicates very clearly that we are dealing with paragraphs and that these paragraph still obey sense line rules.
I wonder how other members of this community have been dealing with this and whether it's worthwhile for the Affinity Team to take this on. Or is this just an edge case that's not worth the bother.
I would love to have  Treat soft returns as paragraph returns tick mark option when defining styles in Publisher to remedy this.
That would really be awesome and would solve one of the few outstanding issues in publishing I've had for years. 

Ah yes, it's easy to spot heavy users of InDesign like myself. We absolutely love ID's GREP abilities, keeping in mind that doesn't just mean sophisticated text replacements. It also includes the ability deal with paragraph and text styles as well as an app's other formatting features, searching and replacing those too. The book drafts I work with run to hundreds of pages and, being scientific in nature, make heavy use of italics. I need the ability to import Word documents, retaining all the italic formatting that doesn't use the italic text style. I then need to be able to change those hundreds of italic fonts into an italic text style. With ID's GREP that's easy. I search for italic fonts and replace them with an italic style. Only then can I begin to do the layout in earnest. 
GREP has other marvelous time-saving advantages. Science texts often come to me with hyphens for page ranges that need to become N-dashes. Looking for every hyphen in a book would be a pain. GREP allows me to search only for hyphens that are bordered on both sides by numbers.

I'm sorry you are disappointed. We're aware we have a great deal to do to address various constituencies. For this initial release we decided to coast on the export formats that Designer already had, especially PDF, and instead focus on other elements of DTP. This is because we felt that PDF was enough for at least some people to get some useful work done. Although the Affinity range is very successful, it doesn't make economic sense for us to keep developing Publisher in secret until it can be all things to all people. Instead we wanted to get it to the point where at least a few users would pay us for it, and then release it so they could do so. This means the first release probably won't satisfy three-quarters of the people who downloaded the beta. However, we do intend to continue developing it over the next many years. We are in it for the long haul - we developed the Plus range for over 25 years. Every new release will handle more use-cases, bring in another constituency of users and hopefully make us more money. It's going to be an exciting journey. Meanwhile I can only ask that you don't write us off altogether now, and instead check back in a year, or two years, or five years, and see whether we handle your requirements then.
PS. I probably should add that we really appreciate all the feedback we're getting, positive and negative. It's fantastic to see how much interest our new product has garnered. It's much better than being ignored!