[Installation on Windows 11 crashes]

I have been running Affinity suite on a Lenovo X13 series 1 for several months, and this problem commenced about a week ago. I have ensured that drivers are up to date, reinstalled Publisher de novo, and run a repair on Windows. I also ran the .NET repair tool and updated .NET, and turned off Open CL as well. Nothing helped.

Alongside the problem with the apps turning off suddenly after about 1-2 minutes, if I try opening two documents, I can't switch between them.

I think that, for me it's a problem with some aspect of a Windows update but, as I hadn't run Affinity apps for a couple of weeks, I can't pinpoint exactly where the issue arose.

My Event Logs are the same as Otto's - .NET Runtime error eventID 1026

[Export Publisher text to other applications]

Word/ Writer are the two I rarely use. Thanks for pointing out that it works there. I see it also works in PagePlus 9

It doesn't work in Notepad, InDesign 5.5, Thunderbird, Mail for Windows 10, Facebook notes, Quora or, indeed, in this comment field.

[Export Publisher text to other applications]

I produce paper-based newsletters, articles and talks which I need to repost to other applications and web pages. I have done this for a long time using Adobe InDesign with very few problems. I also very occasionally want to republish a document in InDesign, mainly if a printer won't accept a PDF or an APUB file. Most of these files would be of 1500 - 3000 words.

Because other programs handle the relationship between text and graphics very differently, I think it would be accepted that any graphics to transfer into a new application will need to be placed manually.

The way Affinity Publisher creates paragraph breaks is a considerable nuisance when repurposing any document of more than a couple of hundred words. Many applications ignore the paragraph break (LF/CR) symbol entirely, so that 3000 words are turned into one long paragraph, or the symbol is read as a non-searchable "graphic" as shown: 
. Either way, the only export solution is a lengthy re-edit of the exported file. It is quite a nuisance!

The solutions seem to me to be either that a more standard method of creating an LF/CR be adopted in Publisher, or that some exporting filter be created, perhaps as a plug-in, which will detect the Publisher symbol and replace it with a standard LF/CR character within a text or RTF file. 

 

[Tighter suite integration for updates]

If the Affinity apps are all designed to integrate seamlessly, why don't they integrate the updates as well?

It's messy, trying to open Photo, for example, only to find out that the integration is lost because you haven't updated it yet, so you have go off and find the separate update page and do Photo and then find the other update page for Designer and update that as well.

At the very least -- and I doubt that the programming would be too onerous -- when you get an update reminder for Publisher, it could ask if you want to update the other two and provide links.

[Word and Character Count Tool]

InDesign has a word count function which I use pretty frequently. It gives a word count within a frame or it counts words in a selected passage. As far as I am aware, it doesn't give the word count in an entire document. It should be possible at least to emulate what InDesign has offered since the beginning and PageMaker before it.

Examples of how I use word count include:

• Preparing documents for reading or verbal presentation where it helps me keep tabs on timing
• Copying quotations etc. from external sources into newsletters where space may be tight (and I have been able to count the approximate space using dummy text)
• Transferring material between my own publications and republishers' publications where the available target space is limited.

If I have to work out the word count from more than one frame, most computers come with a calculator, so the difficulties are not as great as some envisage.

Understandably, some users of a DTP program don't use it in these ways, but it is clear that some of us do.

 

[Word and Character Count Tool]

I occasionally produce documents where word count is important -- for example, I might write an article for a local publication which someone else wishes to publish on line as long as I can keep it within a specified word count.

I recently also asked someone else to write a brief piece for a newsletter where the space was limited. To give my writer an approximate word count, I had to copy the text from an earlier issue into Word and use the word count  from there.

InDesign has a built-in "Info" tool which is far more convenient.

[Placed photos flipped the wrong way]

I had the same issue in the PC version, though I haven't tested it lately. When I placed a particular image it displayed the right side up and I didn't recheck it before printing.

Of course, I got 25 copies of a document showing someone cleverly poised on the underside of a near-horizontal ladder. The image had rotated itself, possibly when I saved the document.

[Yet another App Icon comment...]

I looked at the new icon and thought, "That makes sense."

I understand that there is some attraction in having consistency of shape, and this is lost to an extent in the new icon. However, it is a triangle/ A-shaped device, only, this time, overlaid on a corner cropped rectangle. So there is some consistency.

On the other hand, the Photo icon centres a representation of a camera iris on the triangle, which is appropriate for a photography program, while the Designer icon emphasises lines and filled shapes to make up the triangle -- again, fitting for a vector program. I took it that the rectangle represented a piece of paper, curled over in the way paper is often iconically represented, with the Affinity A/triangle overlaid on the "page" as text is on a page. Again, the triangle identifies Affinity, and both colour and detail indicate the individual program.

I can accept that.

EDIT:
After writing this, I found the new icons for Photo and Designer on the Publisher task bar, as I came here while the new version was installing. I hope that this doesn't indicate that the new icons are going to spread to the other two programs themselves, though I suppose it does. That doesn't make sense to me! All you would have to go on for quick identification of the program, if that were the case, would be the colour.

There should be redundancy in  icon information, particularly as we see so many icons!

[A4 double sided landscape page printing error]

Great! I tested with one document, and it has worked! Very good -- thanks to everyone involved.

[A4 double sided landscape page printing error]

I created an A4 page in landscape mode, with text on both sides, and tried to print to a Canon MG 6300 series inkjet printer.

Despite trying several times to make it print double sided, flipping from the left side of the page, it persisted in printing it flipped from the top. As a consequence, the back is inverted relative to the front.

As the majority of my files are created to this flipped A4 design, this printing behaviour is a significant drawback to use of Publisher.

[Copy between Publisher and other programs]

I set up a publication in Publisher and copied and pasted the contents of an Indesign publication into it. I was impressed. Not only the text, but also the formatting copied across almost perfectly. 

Then I used the Publisher document as a template and created a new publication. Good, but not perfect. I think the issue was that Publisher, unlike InDesign, sets up a range of default paragraph styles, and got muddled when it tried to import an InDesign style which had the same name as one of it's own defaults. Tolerable, though a trifle irritating at midnight with a job half done.

When I produce a DTP document, I quite often have to transfer the content to a web page (incuding a Facebook Notes page). Normally I just copy and paste.

It doesn't work with Publisher. At least, not to an acceptable standard. Any lengthy text entered into Publisher is effectively unusable in any other application. This is a serious limitation.

[Typography]

"Add the value of the gutter next to the number of columns in the toolbar.
Ability to divide the page structure into columns."

I fully concur! It took me ages, including several attempts at the manual, to find a way to set gutter width, and I am not sure I could repeat the trick.

I produce a lot of A5 documents by printing four pages two up on each side of a landscape A4 page. In InDesign, I set up a two column page with 12.7 mm margins and a 25.4 mm gutter, and lay everything else on top of that. 5 minutes to set up, at the most. Doing it any other way involves too much calculating -- time I could use doing something more productive. Then I have to put the guides in by eye -- a potential source of errors. There is no display of the exact position I have dragged the guides to, and no indicator of when each guide is the same distance from the centre. Little details like that make a program so much more usable.

I have to add that, so far, I have found the manual unintuitive and difficult to navigate.

 

[How to Get Full Screen Preview in Publisher]

Full screen mode for preview for all Affinity programs

I agree that Publisher and probably the other two programs could benefit from what Adobe describes as Presentation mode. I am a regular InDesign user, and appreciate the Preview mode, which allows me to pick up errors before printing, and quickly correct them: it is identical to Toggle UI in Publisher.

In Adobe's Presentation mode, a full screen uneditable image is displayed. In fact, I prefer using this to using PowerPoint because of the greater degree of layout control available. Using a remote control, I can easily scroll through the pages to illustrate a talk. Also, if I want to produce a graphic incorporating something I have laid out in InDesign, the full screen image provides the best resolution my computer is capable of, so it is easily copied as a screen grab and inserted into the new location.