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HOW CAN I EXPORT EPUB WITH AFFINITY PUBLISHER


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Exporting to epub is not a feature of any of the Affinity applications, yet.

(By the way, this question probably belongs in Affinity on Desktop Questions (Mac and Windows). The beta forums are only for discussing problems (that is, bugs) found when using the beta versions of the software.)

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
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If you install the free e-calibre it will change a PDF into Epub, MOBI or about anything else faster than it took me to type this

And it has a rudimentary editor to make small corrections if need be

Affinity Designer 2.2.2075 & beta 2.3.1.2212 Affinity Photo 2.2.2075  beta 2.3.1.2212Affinity Publisher  2.2.2075 & beta 2.3.1.2212

Windows 11 Pro Version    22H2
OS build    22621.1928
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Installed RAM    16.0 GB (15.7 GB usable)
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Convert PDF documents

PDF documents are one of the worst formats to convert from. They are a fixed page size and text placement format. Meaning, it is very difficult to determine where one paragraph ends and another begins. calibre will try to unwrap paragraphs using a configurable, Line Un-Wrapping Factor. This is a scale used to determine the length at which a line should be unwrapped. Valid values are a decimal between 0 and 1. The default is 0.45, just under the median line length. Lower this value to include more text in the unwrapping. Increase to include less. You can adjust this value in the conversion settings under PDF Input.

Also, they often have headers and footers as part of the document that will become included with the text. Use the Search and Replace panel to remove headers and footers to mitigate this issue. If the headers and footers are not removed from the text it can throw off the paragraph unwrapping. To learn how to use the header and footer removal options, read All about using regular expressions in calibre.

Some limitations of PDF input are:

  • Complex, multi-column, and image based documents are not supported.
  • Extraction of vector images and tables from within the document is also not supported.
  • Some PDFs use special glyphs to represent ll or ff or fi, etc. Conversion of these may or may not work depending on just how they are represented internally in the PDF.
  • Links and Tables of Contents are not supported
  • PDFs that use embedded non-unicode fonts to represent non-English characters will result in garbled output for those characters
  • Some PDFs are made up of photographs of the page with OCRed text behind them. In such cases calibre uses the OCRed text, which can be very different from what you see when you view the PDF file
  • PDFs that are used to display complex text, like right to left languages and math typesetting will not convert correctly

To re-iterate PDF is a really, really bad format to use as input. If you absolutely must use PDF, then be prepared for an output ranging anywhere from decent to unusable, depending on the input PDF.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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To re-iterate PDF is a really, really bad format to use as input. If you absolutely must use PDF, then be prepared for an output ranging anywhere from decent to unusable, depending on the input PDF.

Rats! Until I saw that I was considering downloading Calibre & giving it a try. 

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
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3 hours ago, R C-R said:

Rats! Until I saw that I was considering downloading Calibre & giving it a try. 

It's a nice app to convert different files to epubs, as a beginning before cleaning, parting, correcting the output. But it's better to convert another type of file with a structured content than PDF.
PDF means usually complex layouts and should be use as is or using specific web viewers that'll add extra and interesting features. (I'm talking of really produced PDF, not the ones resulting of scan that can be images, etc.)    

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On 4/29/2020 at 5:50 PM, Bad_Wolf said:

Hi Rick G,

An epub needs a reflowable layout. To my knowledge, when converting a PDF to epub, the layout remains fixed. Is this also true with the solution you suggested?

Thank you in advance.

Chris

 

I had success but install it and test it with materials that are relevant to you

Affinity Designer 2.2.2075 & beta 2.3.1.2212 Affinity Photo 2.2.2075  beta 2.3.1.2212Affinity Publisher  2.2.2075 & beta 2.3.1.2212

Windows 11 Pro Version    22H2
OS build    22621.1928
Processor    Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10700 CPU @ 2.90GHz   2.90 GHz
Installed RAM    16.0 GB (15.7 GB usable)
System type    64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

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On 4/29/2020 at 6:59 PM, v_kyr said:

To re-iterate PDF is a really, really bad format to use as input. If you absolutely must use PDF, then be prepared for an output ranging anywhere from decent to unusable, depending on the input PDF.

So the question would be then, how to convert from Affinity Publisher to any other format that let you convert easily to epub. Since PDF is the output of APub, and we need to convert to any ebook format, which is the best option? 

And for the developers: If there is not in the horizon the option to have the epub format from APub, then, it is possible to have any other document format like Word, RTF, TXT, HTML? 

Thanks

 

 

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Despite the fact that PDF-to-EPub isn't the overall best or foolprove conversion route for generating Epub files, Calibre is one of the best and feature richest apps in this EPUB tooling field I know of. - Related to Affinity Publisher, actually it's limited in wider output format generation (or publishing related import/export formats in general) capabilities. For sure it would benefit to have some more format options here in order to exchange data with other apps.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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2 hours ago, v_kyr said:

Despite the fact that PDF-to-EPub isn't the overall best or foolprove conversion route for generating Epub files, Calibre is one of the best and feature richest apps in this EPUB tooling field I know of. - Related to Affinity Publisher, actually it's limited in wider output format generation (or publishing related import/export formats in general) capabilities. For sure it would benefit to have some more format options here in order to exchange data with other apps.

Thanks, v_kyr, I'll try Calibre.

To have more output formats would benefit us a lot, since sometimes we need to share the document with others (editors, reviewers, authors...) who need to make changes or write comments, the same way you share a doc in a review mode in MS Word with the tracking changes option on.

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  • 2 months later...

Why not get AFPub to export to Apple Pages in a rudimentary way? There's not even an TXT / RTF / HTML export, which one could use as a base for EPUB creation in Pages. Right now, especially if you work with Sections in AFPub, you're pretty stuffed when it comes to extracting formatted text to use in other applications.

Just my 0,02.

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1 hour ago, Helmar said:

Why not get AFPub to export to Apple Pages in a rudimentary way?

If they're going to spend time developing a function, I'd rather it be a function that wasn't Mac-specific. Many of us are Windows users.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

If they're going to spend time developing a function, I'd rather it be a function that wasn't Mac-specific. Many of us are Windows users.

I feel for you. 🙂 I had the same affliction for over 20 years. ;-) Seriously, well sort-of, that's why there should at least be a plain text export, then a RTF export, perhaps even a DOCX, OTF, Pages export. Thus far it's only image format export, with the semi-exception of PDF.

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Cleanest way to get reflowable epub is to copy text to Word and save from there to some epub editor like Jutoh, Sigil, Pages, Vellum or Kindle Create. You can sure convert from PDF to epub but there will be so much to fix I doubt it is worth it. 

For fixed layout epub PDF may be ok starting point but I have no experience for that.

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Why would you use Affinity Publisher if you can use text editors that are more suited to the type of text required for export to ePub or that export directly to ePub, Mobi, Azw etc.

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  • 3 months later...

I mean, I understand your point and that is what I'll have to be reduced to doing. However, I've used Affinity Publisher to create shapes/graphics for my print book, and I would just like my eBook to match as closely as possible. 

I love Affinity Publisher, and I hope they will be able to support eBook formats soon.

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  • 3 months later...
On 11/2/2020 at 6:21 PM, D.R. said:

I mean, I understand your point and that is what I'll have to be reduced to doing. However, I've used Affinity Publisher to create shapes/graphics for my print book, and I would just like my eBook to match as closely as possible. 

I love Affinity Publisher, and I hope they will be able to support eBook formats soon.

D.R. - are you a Mac user and do you have Pages? Can you export your graphics for use in Pages?

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I am using Jutoh to create ebooks in epub and Kindle format. You can't have the same layout in an epub or Kindle ebook as in your printed publication. Also the size of your images is very important in epubs end Kindles. For an ebook read on an ereader, it needs to be reflowable. Even Microsoft Word does not a good job.

Maybe you should considering separating your text from the graphics and use the nuclear method to remove all styling. Then you can import that file into a dedicated epub/Kindle ebook creation tool like Jutoh. You create your character and paragraph styles (don't use direct formatting because it can cause unpredictable results) and reformat your book. I think this will give you the best results. However, this is a lot of work especially when you are planning for future releases or additions to your book.

On this moment, Affinity Publisher is not the right tool for creating ebooks other than PDF.

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If the book is image heavy maybe it should not be reflowable but fixed layout. 

4 hours ago, Bad_Wolf said:

You create your character and paragraph styles (don't use direct formatting because it can cause unpredictable results) and reformat your book.

Jutoh imports styles quite nicely from Word, but I am not at all sure it is possible to use them and override old formatting by adjusting style. I tried to this because I want to keep local italics and thus using clear all local formatting is no go. Have to study more..

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True, Jutoh does a fine job in importing from Word. However, you should lookout for "direct" formatting, which you easily can find when there is a "+" sign in the style name. I found out the hard way, that direct styles can cause a lot of havoc. Because in my books, it was caused when I formatted word of text in for example bold. I created a character style and then replaced those instances with that style. Nevertheless, it  took me a lot of time to correct.

That is the reason that I do all the formatting in Jutoh and just import the plain text without any formatting. I use some markers like "###" to mark chapters.

I find this an interesting conversation.

Chris

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  • 3 weeks later...

I'm honestly really disappointed with Affinity Publisher for this one reason. It's often top of the list as the best Adobe InDesign alternative but doesn't have half the export file options. I literally downloaded it for this reason and after doing all my work I find out epub isn't supported. I hope they make this in an update soon, because otherwise I really enjoy how the program functions. I simply have no use for it, however, if it doesn't have epub options. 

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  • 1 year later...
On 3/16/2021 at 6:02 AM, forestbabel said:

I'm honestly really disappointed with Affinity Publisher for this one reason. It's often top of the list as the best Adobe InDesign alternative but doesn't have half the export file options. I literally downloaded it for this reason and after doing all my work I find out epub isn't supported. I hope they make this in an update soon, because otherwise I really enjoy how the program functions. I simply have no use for it, however, if it doesn't have epub options. 

I second that. Affinity Publisher devs, please make this a priority. 🙏

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