LOVE IT!

[TomAng]

Just want to start by congratulating Serif on Publisher. I was brought up on Quark XPress, then used InDesign from its launch in 1994. Publisher has learnt from all their mistakes, uses hardware acceleration well and I LOVE IT! Have to get used to differences in language (positioning instead of baseline shift) but that's fine. I'm so happy to be able to dump Adobe's horrible subscription model and actually use something that's easier and more logical. So far, I've only produced 48-page booklets, and I don't know how it will handle big books. But I've always worked on 400 page books as spreads or small folios anyway.

Cheers to the developers!

[garrettm30]

Thanks for the positive perspective. It is good to hear those reminders of the positive aspects of Publisher.

Since this is still young software, I think by all accounts it is not yet everything it can be. We know that the developers are actively working to bring Publisher and its siblings to greater heights, both with new functionality and improved existing functionality. In the meantime, there are some rough spots in terms of bugs and "missing features" that cause us to do things the hard way sometimes. Those issues are pain points that come to our attention so much more readily than all of the things that work well and make for a smooth experience, such that we don't notice those good things as readily.

So in this forum where were are accustomed to reporting bugs and leaving feedback for things that can be improved, I appreciate posts such as yours, which remind us why we are interested in Publisher in the first place. It is a really great piece of software in many respects now, and it really shows great potential for the future.

[TomAng]

I used this forum as I couldn't find anywhere obvious to give you a pat on back. Of course, there are things you could do to make it even better. Here are some reqs:

• With panels such as 'Paragraph' that has a lot of options, it'd be good to have the scroll bar respond to mouse scroll to access items that are hidden. At present, we have to navigate to scroll bar, click and drag.
• In 'Help' you could say more about baseline shift: took me 30 minutes to figure out it's in 'Positioning and Transform' under the Character tab.
• Picture box: When I first used 'Replace image' in the toolbar, I expected the new image to drop into the same position and at same size as the original, but it doesn't. Please can we have this, or a choice: replace image 'as is', and replace image 'anew'. 'As is' is useful when you alter an image - say turn it to monochrome - so you save as and want to see what the new version looks like when in place.
• Please could we have 'save workspace'. Different jobs call for different panels to be up, separated etc. For example in InDesign I have one for typography-heavy work, another for books where all styles have been set up.
• Please could we have a story editor. This is really useful (a) if layout is at small magnification or font used is small you can edit text without having to change zoom level (b) if font is decorative or informal, it's easier to edit text with readable font like Times in a story editor (c) When editing text that links over to another page it's easier to see whole text in a single box, especially if the jump is more than one page e.g. over picture spread.

Cheers

Tom

[fde101]

On 4/10/2020 at 10:35 PM, TomAng said:

With panels such as 'Paragraph' that has a lot of options, it'd be good to have the scroll bar respond to mouse scroll to access items that are hidden. At present, we have to navigate to scroll bar, click and drag.

To give some history on this one, it originally did.  The problem is that the scroll wheel also adjusts values in numeric fields, and users were trying to scroll through the panel and changing values randomly along the way.

Instead of fixing the problem of the values changing while scrolling, the developers took the curious and highly questionable step of disabling the scroll wheel (or equivalent) completely for the panel.

In my opinion, they should either arrange for the values to change only if the field has focus, or require a modifier to be held down while scrolling the wheel - either way, scrolling the panel should not happen at the same time as changing the values.

This has already been discussed at length in another thread that is floating around the forums somewhere...

 

In fact, I believe all of these requests have already been made on other threads, separate from each other (as they should be - including multiple requests in one thread is a bad idea).

[TomAng]

Thanks for the back story.

I realise that feature requests may well be repeated elsewhere. I'm guessing developers will look at weight of numbers and set their priorities to match.

We'll see. Publisher is more than good enough for the money, it's better than InDesign CS6 in some respects, and I'm happy to pay for UI upgrades to make it even better.

[garrettm30]

On 4/14/2020 at 7:37 AM, fde101 said:

The problem is that the scroll wheel also adjusts values in numeric fields, and users were trying to scroll through the panel and changing values randomly along the way.

If given a choice between either one or the other feature, I would choose scrolling the studio rather than being able to scroll through values. It is an ingrained habit that seing a scroll bar invites the user to scroll to see more, and it is always a brief mental hiccup for me when it does not work. If I happen to be over an input field, I do end up changing the values even now.

However, there ought to be a way to achieve both. Perhaps scroll values only if the input has focus. Or with modifier key. Or disable value scrolling if in the middle of a panel scroll. Or just give the user the choice.

To me, scrolling a window by dragging the scrollbar seems so ’90s.

[fde101]

5 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

If given a choice between either one or the other feature, I would choose scrolling the studio rather than being able to scroll through values.

Agreed 100%.

 

5 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

However, there ought to be a way to achieve both. Perhaps scroll values only if the input has focus. Or with modifier key.

Yes, that is exactly what I said above...  and what was already discussed on the other thread...

[TomAng]

Agree. Agree!

By themselves none of these are deal breakers. And lucky ones with big screens can display long panels full size. But if there are no down-sides and it's not hard to code, let's have it, please!