[Preflight panel?]

Another vote for Preflight, please. Serif PagePlus had a very useful Preflight checker, which I used frequently.

[Importing book length text to APub]

Many thanks Dave. Those steps must be described somewhere in Help, but I did not find it. I'll try again. As a long-standing user of PP,  maybe I'm not looking hard enough in the new APub places for answers. Thanks for your patience.

[Importing book length text to APub]

I design books. I know that APub 1.7.1 has the facility to import text: we lobbied for a long time to get it included. With Page Plus, I could import a Word text of any length and Autofill would create new pages with text boxes for the entire text. I cannot work out how to get this from APub. The Help page says that I should use the Place command. I've tried every which way, including  first saving docx as rtf, but all all I get is the first page of the imported text. 

Am I wrong to expect that I can use APub to create books? I'm still using PPx9, but would dearly like to/will soon have to move on to APub. I'm prepared to wrestle with the software but maybe it is only intended for small projects such as short brochures?

All my books start with the authors' manuscript in Word. Editing follows, again in Word. Once I have a final text (and images to be later inserted either throughout the text or in separate plate sections) I need to import it to APub for layout, formatting etc. and exporting as PDF.  How can I get APub to do this?

[[Implemented] Publisher does not recognize WORD .docx files!]

Thanks fde101. I apologise and stand corrected. 

[[Implemented] Publisher does not recognize WORD .docx files!]

Thanks for your answer. Although I have the Beta, I'm still working with PagePlus because I edit, design and publish books. I need the certainty of PP and can't risk finding a problem with  APub way into a big project. However, I'm confident that APub will be excellent when it's launched. I guess it is difficult to accommodate every need. I started this thread (I think it was me) to express my hope that APub would, at the minimum, have the facility to handle doc/docx and this has, I believe, been taken up by the design team. There have been many useful comments on difficulties with Word and on workflow, and I've learned a lot.  Maybe we'll need to find our own work-arounds if the first version of APub is not absolutely perfect.

[[Implemented] Publisher does not recognize WORD .docx files!]

In PagePlus, that would be a task for WritePlus. Is that facility not available in Publisher?

[[Implemented] Publisher does not recognize WORD .docx files!]

I've also used Page Plus since the PPlus 5 days and have been delighted with every update and enhancement. I edit, design and publish books of every description and PPlus X9 does all I want in terms of input, processing, outputs, and fantastic Community support. I work with other designers, for whom InDesign is king, but they learned it in college: I never had time to do that, and the Adobe suite is, for me, well described by Stevekelly, above. 

However, Serif won't maintain X9 except as a legacy programme. I have great confidence in the Serif/Affinity developers and I accept their reasoning for a complete rework of their publishing software. I'm sure that Affinity Publisher will (after early problems) be a superb programme, but it needs at the very least to provide the facilities that we enjoy in X9, including .docx inputs, BookPlus, and ideally, eReader outputs. It's good to see that .docx input is now on the developers' list of requirements.

PPX9 wasn't very stable when first launched and I had to revert to PPX8 for 12-18 months. I guess the same thing will happen with APublisher. I'll examine the Beta releases, and will move across when the commercial release is stable enough not to loose a book. 

[[Implemented] Publisher does not recognize WORD .docx files!]

Many thanks. It's good to know that the developers are working on the .docx import. It's important (at least for me), but happy to use .rtf until the issue is resolved.

 

[Where is the Format Painter?]

Thanks Alain. It isn't that, but no matter. The format painter was a little tool with a paint roller as the icon. It was/is useful for quick one-off changes, but it can be done with pasting, as you say, or by styling.

[Where is the Format Painter?]

I have searched all over the user interface but cannot find the 'good ole' Format Painter. In PPX it sits in the standard toolbar and in Word it is in the Pasteboard tab. It's not a critical component but is quite a useful tool. Will it be absent in Affinity Publisher?

[[Implemented] Publisher does not recognize WORD .docx files!]

Just to say that importing Word documents is a must and matter of normal workflow. I publish books of all shapes. sizes, types. Having to convert doc/docx to PDF before importing is a big step backwards, notwithstanding ballardstudio's comments above. I'm sure he has a point, but for me, the PPX facility to Import Text File does what I need.