Tyson of the Northwest

I have imported a PDF and want to match the layout in my new project. So I go into spread setup and change the "Show in Units" from Points to Inches for all spreads. If I have to I can do all the math with the points and document resolution. But the documents I am moving over to Affinity Publisher are fairly complex.

Same, I am already using pandoc to convert my markdown files to docx, epub, and pdf for digital publishing. To be able to pull my markdown into a publisher file and have it auto apply my body, heading, bullet, numbered, emphasis, and strong styles to the text would be amazing. Especially if it was able to generate and fill tables from markdown and insert the linked pictures.

I have set up the styles in publisher. I would prefer not going through 100+pages clearing the styles brought over from the source files and then resetting them to the Publisher styles. I would like to set a paragraph as Heading 1 in the source file and then when it hits Publisher automatically apply Publisher's Heading 1 style.

We mostly work in markdown and google drive for content creation and exclusively use Styles for formatting. How should we be marking up our styles so that when we bring the text into Publisher it applies the Publisher styles to the corresponding content. So Body, Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, Emphasis, Strong, etc. instead of holding onto the Style formatting of the source content?

There is a merge limit in that there is no way to merge content into the publication. I am designing decks of cards, the contents of each card is in a spreadsheet, so far there is not a way to give Affinity Publisher my spreadsheet and have it generate a page for each row. So now I am merging it in MS Publisher, exporting it as a PDF, then importing it into Affinity Publisher. At least until our programmer puts together a script to generate the PDF from the spreadsheet. At this point my workflow is: Create the template in MS Publisher Merge the spreadsheet Export the PDF Import the PDF into Affinity Publisher Page settings/dpi/etc. Design the Master Page Set style for each text box in each card Proof each card As opposed to the inDesign workflow of: Design the master page Design the merge template with style set for each text box in the template once Give inDesign the spreadsheet Proof each card. The longer term solution looks like it will be replace parts 1-3 with a custom coded script to generate the PDF according to a programmed template. Which will take a bit more time to set up, but should simplify the process, but won't speed it up much because of step 7 & 8.

So I have a document that just has the master pages, I am not seeing a way to import the contents of the PDF into the document. I have tried dragging the file to the Pages sidebar and nothing happens. Am I blind or just not seeing the import option?

To get around the merge limits, I have exported my merge to a PDF, then imported it into Publisher. Now I need to to copy the Master Pages into this new document. Is there a way to copy master pages between files?

Since Publisher currently does not support merging I was wondering what sort of options we would have for a workaround? Is there any documentation of the format of afpub? I was thinking I could potentially write a tool to generate a file that would walk a data source, create elements, size them and place them on pages, then apply the appropriate master page to the page. From there I could open it in Publisher and modify it appropriately. Alternatively is there (or will there be) api or plugin support where we could develop such a plugin independently? I am developing a Card game and being able to merge from my content source database (or csv export) would make this a perfect product.