meyer.wil

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

You should be looking into font creation software like FontForge or FonLab. It doesn't make any sense to add font functionality into a vector software and I don't know of any that does that.

Yeah running appwiz.cpl won't show you Photo 2, since it's a Windows Store app now.


Little by little by agonizingly little MS is moving functionality off Control Panel and into Settings. They're just never getting there entirely.
The C:\Program Files\WindowsApps folder is owned by TrustedInstaller and (not surprisingly) doesn't grant regular users much in the way of access:

Once in the application folder (..\SerifEuropeLtd.AffinityPhoto2_2.0.0.1640_x64__3cqzy0nppv2rt on my system) I can move around but getting there via Explorer isn't possible without modifying parent folder permissions. I used Task Manager | Details view, selected photo.exe, right-clicked and chose "Open File Location" to take a look. I could change the parent folder security but TBH it's been long enough (but not long enough, if you know what I mean) since I've messed with Windows folder rights that I'd have to research what not to do, to avoid issues. And I don't feel like doing that.  🙃  Give me Linux filesystem permissions any day...
I guess the decision to install as a Windows Store App was made for auto-update purposes (I'll be charitable and not say it was made to further get in bed with MS), but I wish it had installed into the standard location. Would've been much easier to manage.

This is a stupid move by the developers. I own my PC, it is not a phone or a tablet and I want to control what goes on the PC and where it goes. I didn't spend time setting up partitions and drivers for fun. I have a particular drive for programs and that is where they go or they don't get installed - end of!
Version 2 is now uninstalled and I will never buy another Serif product until they fix this. The reason I went to Affinity suite in the first place was because Adobe ruined photoshop by their subscription/online nonsense.

No, version 2 of the Affinity suite will be a one off purchase (perpetual license) and will not be sold as a subscription service (monthly or otherwise)

What impacts adoption rate most is obviously the size of user base (so potential market), but also the ready availability of tutorials, USEFUL tools and obviously quality digital assets being available free and/or paid. So make more of those things...

Wouldn't you know it! –  As soon as someone from Serif says, "We are not commenting on specific features", people start asking Serif to comment on specific features! 😁

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.

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.

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.

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. 🙂

just to keep this topic alive, still need footnotes/endnotes, still waiting....
go serif!

Exactly. I don't want to scout for footnotes somewhere else in the book, particularly, where there are many of them.
Obviously, with a very few notes in the document placing them at the back of the chapter or at the end the book is acceptable and oftentimes desirable.
And I agree with Peter. We need greater flexibility than in indesign.

I'll add my vote for footnote and endnote support.
> Hope you can implement it in a similar way like in InDesign, . . .
Please, Affinity, whatever you do, don't look at InDesign's notes. Footnotes are at the document level in InDesign, they should be at the level of the story. That way each story can have its own numbering style and start number. It should also be possible (as it isn't in InDesign), to set the first footnote in a text as an uncued note. And users should be able to define their own sequence and appearance of note symbols (asterisk, pilcrow, dagger, double dagger, paragraph symbol, etc.).
> Visit any university library and you'll find that endnotes replaced footnotes long ago, perhaps in the 1950s.
Complete nonsense. Academic publishers prefer footnotes.
> In the era before computers, endnotes were far easier to typeset.
That's why notes were set as endnotes at some stage. Endnotes hung on for non-academic texts and in texts published by penny-pinching publishers, but nowadays footnotes are preferred by many. Footnotes are still more labour-intensive than endnotes, but the difference in effort is not nearly as big as it used to be.
> In today's world, their appearance at the bottom of a page is seen as clutter by most readers. 
In my experience, readers just get annoyed by having to go to the end of the book (or worse, to the end of the chapter in multi-authored volumes). 

Maybe we should think a little outside the box, or rather, outside the frame, as it were. What if we thought in terms of grids and areas instead of text frames? I imagine there could be a new structural (“logical”) layer in a Publisher document for complex book typography that would define semantically tagged layout areas where the application would dynamically place (linked) text frames according to rules we define. Have a look at the following diagram.

In developing a layout template for a book, we would not start with defining primary and secondary text frames for our contents, but we would start with defining semantically tagged layout areas that come with certain rule sets (A). These areas could be of different types. We could define, for instance, shared spaces for body text and footnote text frames in a more or less traditional sense (A, solid turquoise rectangles). On a layout spread (B), at the beginning of a story, we would initially be presented with a text frame there, and the application would dynamically create body text and footnote text frames according to the contents we would paste or import into this initial frame (B, turquoise rectangle frames).
But there could also be tagged areas that are of a different type, but semantically or functionally linked to other frames, such as the solid pink areas indicated in the diagram on level (A). By defining these areas, we could tell the application
“See, we want to have our side notes placed here. Whenever there is an anchor of a certain type in our body text frame, create a text frame in the side notes area, and add the side note text which is the target of this anchor to this frame.” Or we could set a different rule. We could tell the application
“See, we want to collect all our side notes in one text frame at the bottom of the page. So when there is an anchor of a certain type in our body text frame, create a single text frame of variable height, aligned to the bottom of the pink area, and add the side note text which is the target of this anchor to this frame. In case there already is such a text frame, simply add the note text to it.” Let me emphasize that I do not think of the tagged areas in (A) – or of the entire “layer” (A), for that matter – as objects in the current sense of the word “layer.” Like a text frame or a vector shape is currently thought of as a “layer” in a document. The word “layer” has a merely structural (“logical”) meaning here. Sure, there would be a UI for drawing tagged areas of the envisioned kind, but this UI would be much like an UI for drawing a complex grid or creating a set of guidelines.
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.

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.

I can't take credit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment

I would second that. The observed behavior was certainly not what I would have expected. The Principle of Least Astonishment has been violated.