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Hey everybody, As an hobby I write and publish material for TTRPGs, working mostly on my own. I usually prepare my publications using the Adobe suit, or sometimes Latex — which I use a lot, but mostly for other stuff — but some time ago I decided to give Affinity a chance, and bought Photo, Designer and Publisher. The suit would be perfect for my workflow: I do digital paintings and vector graphics and I like to be able to use them easily in my text editor of choice. What I have seen since of the softwares is really great. I especially love the consistency and integration between the three softwares. I would like to move my workflow from the Adobe suit to the Affinity one. However, there are some features that I use a lot in InDesign that aren't implemented in Publisher and that I wasn't able to replace with consistent and comfortable features of Publisher. I think that as a whole the three softwares still cannot replace my workflow — jet — even if they are amazing. I would like to suggest here some of the features that I would like to see implemented, that I believe would be a great improvement — at least for how I work. Copywriting persona: The ability to work on text passages in isolation is of the utmost importance in my opinion. If I am working on a complex layout I need to be able to work on the text alone, and only on it. It would also be useful to be able to control the single passages of text, like if they were layers; import and export them, work on the single sections and move them around. This, imho, would improve significantly the ease of use of the software. Link text and md files: As an addition to the previous point. I often write my texts outside the program I use to layout, and I would love to be able to import the text as a resource, keep working on it, and have the changes done in Publisher also in the original file. I work a lot using markdown, which I usually then have to convert to paragraph styles semi-manually, and support for it would be a great feature. "Nested Styles" and GREP styles: Here I am using the Adobe names for it, but I use this feature all the time. I use them to create dynamic paragraph styles — that, I will admit , are more relevant in my field of publishing. I especially use them to give specific character styles to some parts of text, either using specific separators/end characters, or searching for specific bits/tags. It is very handy to be able to control and change them and apply them to all the text automatically. "Object Styles": I think this is another feature I miss a lot in Publisher. The ability to assign settings to an object, be it a text frame, picture, table etc. and update them for all assigned objects. I use it a lot for pictures wrapped with text, because I am not going to know right away how much space in between I want. I may change my mind while working and having to go back to every single picture is a nightmare. Sure, Styles in Affinity sort-of do the trick, but they are not linked to the objects and it is not possible to modify them directly. I think it would be great to be able to do so. Having a collection of all setting related to an object. It would also be great to be able to treat them as text styles, and have base styles, and styles based on that. This are my thoughts right now on the suite. I still think I am going to try and work more with Affinity, because there are many many things to love. I have worked a bit with Designer, and found it very good. I like Photo for digital painting but I wouldn't mind paying extra for a dedicated "Affinity Painter" if it were to push out better features than PS for digital drawing. I decided to buy the softwares even if I may not use them as my main tools because I saw potential in them, and wanted to support this developing company. I can't wait to see were the next updates will lead them.

Hey all, Long time lurker til the last few weeks when I reinstalled the Publisher beta to check up on it - I understand that AFP is predominantly a page layout focussed system (and after reading all the ePub threads I see that's a bug-bear for many people and I suspect "Affinity Writer" might be a good direction/bridge but let's avoid that for now). I see that we can link/embed images so we can update the visual assets independently of the layout, but I've not seen anything similar for textual assets - which when writing more book/manual type content would be rather useful. Coming from the tech world (software developer primarily) what I'd love to see is something like the following (that may be doable with simple scripting if/when that comes available): Write my main content in a .txt file, or .md Markdown file - which is becoming a de facto markup format in the developer world Processor app/script that takes the markdown, and converts that to a AFP source - mapping the relevant heading 1/2/3, bullet point, body, code styles to AFP styles before including that in an initial text frame. Content appears in AFP rendered, with styles applied This would allow me update the .md files independent of page layout, using an editing environment more suited to writing content, running the document thru Grammarly/ProWritingAid. I guess this could all come under a "Writing" persona. Is this is a crazy idea, or something worth thinking about?