Affinity Publishing - footnotes and page imposition

[michaelwg]

Dear Affinity, I have been involved in photography and photographic publishing (for as long as I do not with to remember). I initially used Quark and then In Design. Because I work intensively for short periods of time I do not wish to use any longer the Adobe subscription system. There are two features which I would find very attractive and that would be to incorporate editable footnote / endnote facilities and perhaps, (for the moment asking quite a lot) a page imposition system which Quark do as a clunky, seriously expensive add on. They were and still remain an arrogant organisation only interested in serving larger publishing organisations and from some from my colleagues I have been informed "that the Leopard has not changed its spots".

 

michaelwg

[Dave Harris]

Hi, michaelwg. Those things would come under the remit of Affinity Publisher, but not in the first release, so not for a long while.

[Hokusai]

michaelwg,

 

Hello and welcome to the forums! I can relate to your need for page imposition in Affinity Publisher but I would be surprised if it was a feature in Publisher. Even in Quark Xpress and InDesign, you can only do very basic page imposition and it isn't really useful unless you buy a 3rd party solution. You are right, page imposition software is expensive and very clunky but in fairness to Quark and Adobe, the imposition software isn't made by them but by a 3rd party and so they (Quark and Adobe) have nothing to do with the prices that are charged for the page imposition plugins. It would be great if Affinity were able to include the ability to do complex page imposition in Affinity but I'm guessing that it is something that only benefits commercial printers (more of a niche market). It would be great if it were offered though, and it is something that might attract people to Affinity Publisher. Footnotes on the other hand are a real possibility. I know that many people hang on to Adobe Framemaker because of the way it handles footnotes as well as how it works with long documents. Many users say that Framemaker works much better with long documents than InDesign but I personally have no experience with Framemaker and so I don't know but that is something that I often hear from Framemaker users. 

 

You are right, Quark did develop into a horrible company. Their customer service was atrocious and their prices were high. I hated the fact that they had "special" versions for customers who didn't use English, which were of course more expensive and couldn't be opened by other versions of Xpress. This changed later on but it didn't do much to make customers like them. In  2011 Quark was bought by an equity firm and it has been under new management since then. I don't know if they have changed their ways or not but the last time I dealt with them, a few years ago, they seemed much better. They seemed like they realized that they were losing customers like mad to InDesign and they seemed like they were trying to improve. I loved Quark Xpress  3.3, a truly great product at the time but they got lazy and the development of Xpress was too slow and unimpressive after that. It is funny how Adobe is repeating some of the very same mistakes that Quark made. At least Quark isn't forcing users to use rent their software and they have also been allowing users to upgrade from any previous version to their latest version (although that was most likely only a temporary promotion). I'm looking forward to Affinity Publisher because I feel that both Quark and Adobe have lost their "beginner's mind" and they are both out of touch with what customers want and need (as well as think). Affinity has some great and very innovative ideas and I'm excited to see what they can bring to the layout area. 

 

Hokusai