affinity publisher HOW TO: Book editing in Affinity Publisher

[Helmar]

Hi,

this is a 12min video how I am blasting through the styling of a book in Affinity Publisher. I want to show you how easy it is to even edit mulit-hundred pages long books. I never thought it would be such a "blast" until I did it - as you can see in the video.

My suggestion if you come from Indesign or if you start with just plain text.

• Set up your text styles first. Use the first chapter for it until you are happy - unless you already have a ready-made layout.
• Assign keyboard shortcuts where necessary.
• Set up your master pages, too. Don't apply them yet.
• Use a "running page" master page as your first page, because if you auto-add new pages (Shift-Option-Cmd Click), it will take the current master page as a template.
• Apply your special master pages for new chapters etc only after your text is formatted properly and flowing beautifully. Otherwise it will mess up your page layout.
• Apply sections last, too.

So if you are afraid of throwing a 300-odd page book at Affinity Publisher, fear no more! If you do your homework (see above) first, the final formatting is a piece of cake.

Cheers,

Helmar

[Note: This is a not a polished video. It's just to share my joy of editing in AFP compared to InDesign. ]

[Seneca]

To make the formatting of QA's even faster you could prepare your styles to have the Next Sale added to it. Once that's done you could select the whole QA section and simply apply the style then Next Styles in one go.

Another tool I use quite a lot in formatting text is GREP.

[Helmar]

7 minutes ago, Seneca said:

To make the formatting of QA's even faster you could prepare your styles to have the Next Style added to it. Once that's done you could select the whole QA section and simply apply the style then Next Styles in one go.

 Absolutely. In fact, I already had it set up that way, but that only works if you add new text. If the text is already there, it won't do. But yes, that is a real time-saver.  Now if they could only link Text Styles with Master Pages, and I'd be the happiest chappy on the planet .🙂

[Seneca]

Master Pages linked to text styles is something that I would also like to see added to publisher.

I and others have suggested that feature a very long time ago so hopefully if you also add your voice to it the developers might take notice.

[Helmar]

2 hours ago, Seneca said:

Master Pages linked to text styles is something that I would also like to see added to publisher.

I and others have suggested that feature a very long time ago so hopefully if you also add your voice to it the developers might take notice.

Another thing that irks me: is there a way to automatically prevent what in German is called "Hurenkind" (thanks, Joachim L.) "Hurensohn" (Son of Bitch), which are single words on the very last line of the paragraph? I find it cumbersome to scan the entire book for possible "hanging" words. Currently I am ajusting the leading so that the word either moves onto the previous line, or another word moves onto the last line. Any ideas?

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Helmar said:

Another thing that irks me: is there a way to automatically prevent what in German is called "Hurensohn" (Son of Bitch), which are single words on the very last line of the paragraph?

I think you want the widow control option in the Flow section of your Paragraph Text Style:

[Joachim_L]

This is not the same. Here widowed last lines are the ones in another column or on another page. Helmar wants to have at least two words in the last line of the paragraph.

[Helmar]

46 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I think you want the widow control option in the Flow section of your Paragraph Text Style:

Thanks, Walt. That only applies to the flow between frames, so that you don't have a widowed last line as the first line on a new page. My concern is single words on the last line of the paragraph, anywhere within the frame.

[Joachim_L]

2 hours ago, Helmar said:

Hurensohn

@Helmar Shouldn't it be called "Hurenkind"? I know Hurenkind and Schusterjunge which are widows and orphans in English. But you want something else I think. Right now this does seem to be possible with APu.

Interestingly the same Wikipedia article has different explanations.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurenkind_und_Schusterjunge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans

[Helmar]

7 minutes ago, Joachim_L said:

@Helmar Shouldn't it be called "Hurenkind"? I know Hurenkind and Schusterjunge which are widows and orphans in English. But you want something else I think. Right now this does seem to be possible with APu.

Interestingly the same Wikipedia article has different explanations.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurenkind_und_Schusterjunge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans

Oh, sh!t, you're right. Hurenkind ist richtig.

[Lefteyeshooter]

On 3/17/2020 at 12:02 PM, Helmar said:

Hi,

this is a 12min video how I am blasting through the styling of a book in Affinity Publisher. I want to show you how easy it is to even edit mulit-hundred pages long books. I never thought it would be such a "blast" until I did it - as you can see in the video.

My suggestion if you come from Indesign or if you start with just plain text.

• Set up your text styles first. Use the first chapter for it until you are happy - unless you already have a ready-made layout.
• Assign keyboard shortcuts where necessary.
• Set up your master pages, too. Don't apply them yet.
• Use a "running page" master page as your first page, because if you auto-add new pages (Shift-Option-Cmd Click), it will take the current master page as a template.
• Apply your special master pages for new chapters etc only after your text is formatted properly and flowing beautifully. Otherwise it will mess up your page layout.
• Apply sections last, too.

So if you are afraid of throwing a 300-odd page book at Affinity Publisher, fear no more! If you do your homework (see above) first, the final formatting is a piece of cake.

Cheers,

Helmar

[Note: This is a not a polished video. It's just to share my joy of editing in AFP compared to InDesign. ]

Screen_Recording_2020-03-17_at_11_58_43.mov 771.63 MB · 50 downloads

As I'm waiting for this download to happen, I just want to point out that there is a very easy online tool available to do this kind of video. It is free and even has a Chrome and Firefox extension: Loom

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/loom-for-chrome/liecbddmkiiihnedobmlmillhodjkdmb

I've been using Affinity Photo for two years with great satisfaction. I used it recently to create covers of my ebooks with great satisfaction and after very frustrating experience of getting my paperback version formatted correctly, I decided to invest Publisher as well.

Thanks for this tutorial, btw!

[VectorWhiz]

Skilled editing. I once placed (some 80 pages of) text in docx format from Libre Office and Publisher crashed. Did it again after exporting the text as txt, but it crashed again. It puzzled me. What is your machine configuration (CPU / RAM)? Recently I created a image rich (84 page) document inside Publisher and it would open sometimes, but freeze most of the time. Strange thing is that it would sometimes open and allow me to edit the document and other times not. CPU and memory use were going through the roof, when applying normal functions such as scrolling through the pages, switching to master pages and exporting to pdf, as well as power consumption. Interesting book, by the way.

[Helmar]

On 7/9/2020 at 1:46 PM, VectorWhiz said:

What is your machine configuration (CPU / RAM)

MacBook Pro 2017, 16gig RAM, 500Gig SSD, i5 2,3Gig Dual Core.

Book interesting? Oh yess! 🙂