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meyer.wil

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Posts posted by meyer.wil

  1. On 9/24/2023 at 8:49 AM, MikeTO said:

    Managing the online help for Affinity would be a difficult task because there are so many overlapping features in the three applications. if you make a change to character formatting, you have to change the help page for the three apps multiplied by eight languages for a total of 24 pages. And that's if it's only mentioned on one page. If it's mentioned on three pages then that would be 72 pages to update. It's so much easier to write a manual for a single app in a single language. I can add as many examples and screenshots as I like.

    My comment was not specific to Serif, nor to Affinity help files, but to the challenges in assembling non-linear help files. A technical book is a major undertaking, but easier to manage than help files. Easier, at least, to assess coverage. There are good, common sense approaches to attempting to manage coverage in help, but those I have seen are simply disciplines, and depend on the use of separate tools, usually search tools, for their success.

    I will continue to assert that the quality of documentation has deteriorated in the industry at large, since printed manuals ceased to be produced. Most help files are designed for reference use, not for learning. To that degree, Affinity help is better than many I have seen.

  2. 1 hour ago, NathanC said:

    Hi @meyer.wil,

    Do you currently have a pen tablet which isn't responding to the pressure controller in Designer/Photo? While the help guide (https://affinity.help/photo2/English.lproj/pages/Extras/penTablet.html) does reference that Affinity doesn't officially support non-wacom tablets, that doesn't necessarily mean that other tablets won't work/respond to pressure. For example, testing the pressure on a Huion Q620M works as expected with force pressure turned on.

    I do. It is an XP-Pen product, with the latest driver installed. Works fine with Krita, which doesn't specify support for my model, but does list other XP-Pen products. With Affinity Designer 2.2, it does not respond to pressure.

  3. On 12/13/2022 at 9:35 PM, deeds said:

    100% Agreed!

    There's another (implicit) benefit of PDF Manuals... providing one forces the software maker to think about and articulate their product's features in a linear and complete manner. This, quite surely, benefits everyone; including the software maker, as it will more easily reveal workflow problems and excess user interactions for any and all operations.

    It is a sad reality, too, that the non-linear composition of help files all but guarantees skimpy exposition and poor coverage. 

  4. I am quite new to using Affinity Photo, sorry if this is something which should be obvious.

    I have a photo of a drawing with hand drawn lines on paper. The paper also has ruled lines on it. I want to separate the hand drawn lines and move them to a layer.

    The contrast in the image is poor, but using auto contrast lifts background noise too much. Frequency separation seems promising, but I have not yet found anything which will isolate the lines I want without a large amount of tedious work.

    Thanks,

  5. 3 hours ago, PaoloT said:

    The new icon is fine for me. But just out of curiosity: what about color blind users?

    Paolo

     

    There are varieties of color blindness. And though I am sure there are color blind users of Publisher, I cannot but wonder how effective they could be in working with Designer or Photo, and without regard to icon colors.

    There are work areas in which not all can be capable, despite current fashion.

  6. On 6/22/2022 at 12:13 AM, fde101 said:

    Good choice.  (LaTeX)

    Yes, from the perspective of book and layout, and being able to focus more on the writing than on the formatting.

     

    That said, publishing on certain services is a <cough> challenge. When a service specifies that they accept PDF, that is only the beginning of a specification. If they really mean PDF/X-1a, then they should plainly state that. If a file is uploaded which is no to that standard, telling the producer that it has "interior corruption" is not a useful response. I lost a month trying to guess the real issue, or even to get an actual technical response.

  7. On 5/25/2022 at 10:29 AM, PaoloT said:

    I'm recurrently tempted by LaTeX. But then, every book I see made with it smells of school textbook. So, I end up declining.

    Paolo

     

    I just published a 480 page technical book using LaTeX, and the kaobook template. It was not without challenges, but once I learned the way to handle things, I was able to obtain a very nice result. And it does not look like a textbook. Early on, that was a common complaint, as the handling of styles is intended to make spontaneous alterations difficult, in the interest of a coherent design. You need to visit ctan.org, and also search for templates. There is also abundant peer support available.

    I would really like to use Affinity Publisher, but I need footnotes, and in this book I also used marginnotes.

  8. On 2/7/2022 at 1:45 PM, HenrikM said:

    Yes, Affinity Publisher is definitely lacking in book publishing features. The lack of footnotes, endnotes, and cross-references, are the worst omissions, but the more I work with the software, the more problems I find.

    Still, I do not know of any reasonably priced alternative. I do not want to rent Adobe products, and that makes Affinity Publisher the only game in town.

    On the other hand, with a bit of luck, Serif is working on fixing the current shortcomings. I hope they do it before I finish my book. 🙂

    Slow as I have been on my own book, I could not wait. Won't rent Adobe, so have been using LaTeX. I've learned more of its internals than I wanted, but the results are very pleasing to me. And yes, I would prefer to use AP, but I need the features of ID, so I had few options.

  9. 12 hours ago, A_B_C said:

    Though this is slightly off-topic, it is already possible by using the Pinning options. 😀

    Though it looks useful, on my machine the dragging of a pin seems not to work. When I click the pin, it immediately is inserted at the top left corner of the text frame to which it links. When I click on the placed pin, I do not see the circle that would indicate the drag is enabled. Could this interact with some other settings? This is under Windows 10, though I would be surprised to learn that it works on Mac and not in Windows....

  10. 35 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

    You can do them manually. That is, insert superscripted numbers in the body text and have another place where you put all of the endnotes at the end of the story. I do not know of a more efficient way to do it at the moment.

    As workarounds go, that one would send me to another tool. There would have to be at least some sort of built-in scripting to make that approach even marginally tolerable with more than a handful of footnotes.

  11. On 4/8/2020 at 3:59 AM, A_B_C said:

    Have a look at the following diagram.

    Two-Layers.png.41b5af17da2866506031fc7aeb0349c6.png

    <snip>

    All in all, I think the current idea would very much reflect the actual way in which typographers develop the layout structure of a complex publication. There are always structural questions to answer. “What kinds of content do we have?” – “Will there be footnotes or endnotes?” – “Do we need margin notes?” – “What about images and illustrations?” – “How can we organise our spreads, depending on the contents we have to care for?” – and so on. The more technical questions, for instance, the question concerning the best layer structure for the document, will almost always come later.

    Excellent image! A tool with the power of Affinity Publisher needs to support sidenotes, footnotes, and endnotes. Tools are in place for TOC and index, but bibliography appears to be a thing which must be built by hand. Without strong support for all of these, AP will serve well for brochures and flyers, but less well for long format academic and technical documents.

    To simplify the concept, it seems to me that we would need to:

    • define the note(s), which would be placed in text boxes
    • Set an anchor point and link the note to that anchor

    From the user's perspective, it should be a matter of editing in place, but the linkage obviously is needed to support relocating the note when text earlier in the document is inserted of deleted, such that the document must be reflowed. This is comparable to what I have seen in online videos where an image is placed, and the image is not linked to the text, so it remains on the page where it is placed. That is opposite to what is needed here. So to reframe the question, is there in Affinity Publisher a way to link images to text so that if text is inserted above, the image remains near the text it illustrates? I think the answer at present is no, but I would be happy to learn otherwise.

  12. Have been working on a document of about 50 pages. Suddenly, when I try to save, it will not write to disk, but crashes altogether.

    When I open the project file, it advises of an issue with a resource previously added. I open Resource Manager, and do a Locate, and it crashes.

    My project file is about 1.7MB, and I have over 6TB free on the drive. Running Windows 10 and Publisher 1.7.2.471

    Was able to save a PDF and convert that online to docx, so I have not yet lost my content. But I don't have a lot of time or patience to battle this.

  13. 15 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

    As Haakoo said, you can drag/drop an RTF file onto a text frame, or File > Place it.

    So far, this is the only alternative which works. But it means pasting to an editor, to save to a file, so slightly less than my current workflow, in that I now have a paragraph style that works, thanks to your instructions above. I can live with the paste and save steps; the more important issue is that I can now accomplish -- and therefore alter -- the style in Publisher.

  14. Just now, walt.farrell said:

    My confusion, I think, came from your desire to have a paragraph style that will set the font, and size, and indent level, but leave the color, weight, etc. alone.

    Mine comes from needing to use MS Word as intermediary, which I certainly do not wish to do.

    If/when I can learn of a viewer which will let me diagnose the issue, I can surely create a defect report, or work with the maintainer of the Delphi plug-in, to be sure who owns the issue.

  15. 2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

    Thanks. It seems odd that you would get formatted text pasting to Word, but plain text pasting to Publisher. (It is not surprising that you get plain text pasting to Notepad or to Notepad++, as those are plain text editors and do not have the concept of italic or bold; but Publisher does, and if the formatting information is on the clipboard it should be used by Publisher.)

    Yes, and all the more curious that the metadata pasted to Word shows formatted text, but the same clipboard data pasted to Publisher does not. And then, the formatted text in Word copied and pasted to Publisher is fine.

    2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

    What is the development environment you're copying from?

    From Delphi, using a plug-in which copies formatted to the clipboard.

    2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

    And, I guess I'm still a bit confused. If you're planning to paste initially into Publisher, and if when you paste initially into Publisher you get plain text, where will the colors, weights, etc. come from that you don't want to disturb?

    Something about your intended workflow is still not making sense to me. Sorry.

    It should be simple. Obviously, the clipboard content produces what I expect when pasted to Word. Or, for that matter, to PowerPoint.

    The intended workflow is: Copy from Delphi, Paste to Publisher. But at present, it seems that I must use Word to apply any and all formatting I need, and then paste to Publisher, and leave it alone.

    At a guess, the observed behavior suggests that Publisher is overlooking something in pasting from the clipboard.

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