InDesigner new to Publisher with a few ??

[elipsett]

I'm looking into Affinity Publisher as an alternative to InDesign (MacOS 10.15), and have been experimenting with both new docs and imported idml docs. 
I have a few newbie questions and yes, I have tried searching here and using the FAQs, but haven't found what I'm looking for. Which is not to say it isn't there, of course...

1. I am running a Japanese-native system. I've set the UI to English (since we have English-speaking staff), and the menu is now in English. When I select Help, however, menu items are displayed in English but Help Topics entries (and resulting Help Topic screens) are still in Japanese. I have tried relaunching.

2. I can set the measurements for a new document when I create it, but is there any way to change the measurement used on the fly, while working on a document?  

3. The Find function appears to be very weak. Am I missing something or this really all we can search for? InDesign offers styles, fonts, special characters, RegEx, etc.

4. Apparently indb book files are not currently supported. Are there any plans to offer something similar?

5. Apparently export to ePub is not supported. Are there any plans to offer something similar?

I suspect I'll come up with more questions later as I do more layout work, but that's a start... 

Thank you for your time. 
Edward Lipsett
kukrodahan.com

[stokerg]

Hi @elipsett,

For the Help file, i believe we use the system language and if you see this thread R C-R has posted a 'workaround' to get the help file in English.

2 hours ago, elipsett said:

2. I can set the measurements for a new document when I create it, but is there any way to change the measurement used on the fly, while working on a document?  

 

You can this via the Document Setup menu or if you have the Rulers enabled you should see the unit of measurement at the start of the ruler, if you right click here you can select a new unit.

2 hours ago, elipsett said:

3. The Find function appears to be very weak. Am I missing something or this really all we can search for? InDesign offers styles, fonts, special characters, RegEx, etc.

 

This link explains a bit more about the Find options.  We do also supped Regular Expressions.

2 hours ago, elipsett said:

4. Apparently indb book files are not currently supported. Are there any plans to offer something similar?

 

Not that i'm aware of at the moment.

2 hours ago, elipsett said:

5. Apparently export to ePub is not supported. Are there any plans to offer something similar?

This comes up a lot but i'm not aware of any specific plans for this, however due to the amount of requests we get, i suspect it will come in a future update   

[elipsett]

Thank you; a most complete response. 
It's much easier to use now that a few things have been fixed based on your answer.

We have a lot of books done in InDesign as indb files based on multiple indd files. 
We make books with multiple indd files for several reasons: 
- Easier to re-order book sections (for example, short stories in a collection)
- Individual file sizes are smaller and less likely to get large enough to cause data-handling problems even with color photos on every page
- It's easier to repair a corrupted file when it represents only a dozen pages of a book, instead of the entire book being lost. 

I would really, really like Publisher to support a similar approach to combining multiple Publisher files into a single item, as other people have suggested elsewhere in these fora.
 
Edward