AaronShep

I can give you one. When you import IDML, no one expects the conversion to be perfect. But that would not be as true of export. So, it would require a more rigorous treatment, and that would be especially difficult without Adobe's cooperation. It's not like there's a huge market for such conversion, to justify such an effort. That's not to say I don't want to see this. In fact, the inability to export from Publisher to IDML has been sufficient reason for me to stick with InDesign CS6.

The converter mentioned is for Microsoft Publisher, not Affinity Publisher.

I agree it's not ideal, and it does concern me. But it's still more than Publisher allows. As for those other formats, try laying out commercial publications in any of them. I don't do this as a hobby.

Bruce, InDesign exports to IDML, which Publisher can them import. I would like to be able to make the return trip, however imperfectly.

Thanks for pointing out the JPEG compression option! Are there Publisher output features not available in InDesign? No conversion between apps is ever perfect. You can run into feature differences even between versions of InDesign. So, you'd have to omit such features or approximate them, as long as you document it properly. I remember Microsoft producing long documents about the discrepancies you'd get from importing documents from other apps, like WordPerfect, into Word.

Publisher's lack of export to IDML is the main thing that prevents me from using it. There's no way I'm going to lock my book designs into a totally proprietary file format. (The other thing that stops me is the lack of a JPEG compression option on export to PDF, making the app impractical for graphics-heavy books.)

You've done fantastic work on this software, so it's painful to see that basic typography is inadequate. You desperately need a more sophisticated justification engine, and you need it right from the start, so that later versions of the software don't change line breaks and pagination. Have you considered porting the TeX justification engine, which is Open Source? I've heard that's basically what Adobe did with InDesign, though I'm not sure I believe it. Also, hyphenation is not working properly on the Mac in version 1.7.0.58. Using your default hyphenation settings -- the same as used in your tutorial -- hardly anything gets hyphenated, unlike what the tutorial shows. As things look now, I would be very happy to work with this software, but only for projects with left-aligned text, no justication. Which is sadly limiting.