Methodology for typesetting 300 p. book w. hundreds of photos

[BertilT]

I am working on a private hobby project to write a book with the following scenario:

1. Approx 300 pages, 20 chapters, 200 photos and pictures, 100 tables (very generic table layout)

2. Raw text and tables authored in Word. Photos/pictures managed separately. To be merged in DTP process.

3. I have fiddled around with InDesign CC2, but I cannot afford later ID subscriptions and therefore I want to avaluate Affinity Publisher (AP).

 

Anyone that have been in a similar situation and can suggest methodology?

 

[Move Along People]

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[BertilT]

I am playing with the trial since a couple of days as well as learning through tutorials and forums. But I find very little on managing books (in particular with lots of photos) and also not too much on where formatting of text is best done. That's why I asked a very general question on "methodology".

A couple of more specific statements:

1. As the layout with photos/pictures is completely left to DTP, I expect the text to float around substantially during the attempts to add illustrations. That brings me to the conclusion that this sandbox environment (in AP) has to be limited to the chapter level to start with. I guess that complexity of 20 pages is typically what you can manage during this stage. Thus I actually would need the "Book" concept as available in ID and discussed repeatedly in this forum. I don't expect that to be available soon in AP. Perhaps can the "Merge" functionality as described in beta 1.8 be a viable manual workaround. Experiences?

2. I am confused how PLACE of .docx files behaves. I feel that I always have a paragraph style (e g Normal, Heading1, Heading2, ...) associated to paragraphs in Word. But most often AP leaves PLACE'd paragraphs with "NoStyle", while sometimes a text style is assigned. What am I doing wrong?

3. Table formatting is, as far as I can tell, not kept when importing from Word, but content with formatting is. I believe that can be managed later in AP.

 

[Wosven]

19 hours ago, BertilT said:

1. As the layout with photos/pictures is completely left to DTP, I expect the text to float around substantially during the attempts to add illustrations.

You need to set this option if you want text to flow around your pictures, or you can pin them to the text (the icons at the right of the ones of Text wrap settings).

19 hours ago, BertilT said:

2. I am confused how PLACE of .docx files behaves. I feel that I always have a paragraph style (e g Normal, Heading1, Heading2, ...) associated to paragraphs in Word. But most often AP leaves PLACE'd paragraphs with "NoStyle", while sometimes a text style is assigned. What am I doing wrong?

If the styles are applied in the DOCX file, they'll be imported when you do File > Place > "selected docx file", and you'll have new styles with an increasing number in the name to distinguish it from the ones already in your document.

I used Libre Office, and the importation of RTF files was better — styles are as expected — than the import of DOCX (some previous paragraph style's setting "bleed" to the next paragraph: colour or font size).

If you copy-paste from documents to APub, the best result is with RTF files (at least when using Libre office, I don't have Words at home for testing).

It's better to import/paste all your text once, to avoid those dupplicated styles.

 

(Usually in this forum, AP means Affinity Photo, you can use APu or APub for Affinity Publisher).